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Credition, the Process of Belief

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Encyclopedia of Sciences and Religions

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Process of believing

The term “credition” is a neologism, which is conceived in analogy to emotion and cognition and denotes the process of believing as it appears in religious as well as in nonreligious contexts (Angel et al. 2006). In common understanding believing is mainly related to religion. That is the case especially in the Western – and partly the Slavic and Middle Eastern – sphere, where the notion of religion is usually associated with the so-called Abrahamitic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). In the Western tradition, an explicit or implicit focus on the concept of religion frequently has prevailed since earlier philosophical debates. For instance, scholars have reflected the relation between religion and science (Gutting 1983; Brooke 1991), between belief and knowledge (Polkinghorne 1998), or between “fides et ratio” (Plantinga and Woltersdorff 1983; Helm 1999). Philosophers of religion have come to make a distinction between faith and belief...

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Correspondence to Hans-Ferdinand Angel .

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Angel, HF. (2013). Credition, the Process of Belief. In: Runehov, A.L.C., Oviedo, L. (eds) Encyclopedia of Sciences and Religions. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-8265-8_1565

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