Faith Reason And Imagination Analysis

Faith, reason, and imagination are three words that on the surface have a different meaning than they do when you delve deeper in thought and begin to look at them philosophically. Before this class, I had not spent much time thinking on the connotative meaning of these three words, rather I merely looked at the denotative meaning. Through this class, I have been exposed to the writing of Augustine, Kant, James, and Kafka, among others, who have influenced my personal definitions of faith, reason, and imagination. These authors not only explored how their own ideas of these words played into the human life, but the authors fostered in me a new understanding of how thought, intelligence, and perspective play a role in each individual person’s …show more content…
What I have realized, though, through this course is that you do not need God or any supreme being to have faith. Before, I could not propose a definition of faith without mentioning God, but now I have changed my definition to where it no longer includes Christianity. One cannot be a Christian without faith, but you can have faith without Christianity. Anyone can have faith, regardless of who they identify themselves as. At the beginning of this course, if I had to choose one word to define faith, it would have been God. Upon completion of the assigned readings, I would now define faith in one word as trust. Building off Augustine’s words in “Concerning Faith in Things Not Seen”, faith is what is unseen and unheard. Faith is more complex and cannot be defined by religion or opinion alone. I agree with Augustine and his theories on Christianity. One particular thought of Augustine’s that shaped my definition of faith the most was that we trust in the minds of other men who we have deemed friends, yet we cannot see the will of man. This to me is the definition of faith. As humans, we portray faith every day, in every aspect of our lives. The mind and intellect are not merely a culmination of an outwardly expressed religion, an ill-tempered manner, or love and …show more content…
Pragmatism was my favorite topic discussed this semester and it prompted me to have a new take on imagination. Previously, Augustine defines truth as the intangible and what one cannot see. This plays into the definition of imagination that one so often thinks of. James raises the question, though, that if truth can also be defined as absolute idea or an existing reality, could imagination also be defined as a concrete and tangible idea rather than simply abstraction. I believe that faith begins in infancy when the child learns trust, creating the capacity for the child to believe. Believing then promotes the child to form their own imagination from the circumstances and environment given to them by their caretakers. By combining the ideas of Pragmatism and the ideas of Augustine, I now define imagination as the incorporation of what is seen with what is unseen. Imagination is taking the tangible and using it to define for yourself what the intangible things are in your life. This can include your religion, your thoughts and ideas, your faith, or your reason, or all of the