Is there a fundamental tension between faith and rationality?

The general question of whether there is a fundamental tension between religious conviction and rationality is explored. Several accounts of the epistemology of religious belief are considered and how they might bear on the question of whether religious belief can ever be rational (and, relatedly, whether it matters if it can’t be). The proposals examined include classical views like evidentialism, which places a high threshold on rational religious belief, and fideism, which argues that religious belief shouldn’t be rationally evaluated at all. Several intermediate proposals are also set out, all of which have been important in contemporary work on the epistemology of religious belief, including reformed epistemology, quasi-fideism, and exemplar accounts.