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Is belief in God when faced with a lack of evidence improper? Evidentialism answers yes. According to Evidentialism, it is impermissible to believe any proposition lacking adequate evidence. Presenting a direct challenge to Evidentialism are pragmatic arguments for theism, which are designed to support belief in the absence of adequate evidence. Interestingly, although overlooked by philosophers, there is a version of Evidentialism compatible with a principled use of pragmatic arguments. In addition to Evidentialism, several moral objections to Pascal's Wager are surveyed and found flawed.

One might argue that the absence of strong evidence in support of theism is itself strong evidence in support of atheism. This is what is known as the argument from Divine Hiddenness. A Pascalian has adequate resources to refute this argument and the strict Evidentialism on which it is erected.

This chapter returns to James’s pragmatist philosophy of religion, with special emphasis on its connections with his moral philosophy and the ethical grounding of metaphysics available in Jamesian pragmatism and pragmatic pluralism. It is particularly important, given the main concerns of the book, to determine what exactly we should mean by “pluralism” (or “pragmatic pluralism”); James’s version of pluralism is therefore revisited in detail. The chapter suggests that Jamesian pluralism can be used--in its plural meanings--as a (meta-)context within which different approaches to the philosophy of religion, especially to the issue of God’s reality, can be non-reductively evaluated. Thus, it is a context intended to operate against narrow-mindedness and dogmatism, tying the different approaches together in a shared effort to understand humanly natural search for religiously relevant meaning. Pluralism and the pragmatic method are, it is argued, intimately connected with each other, especially in James. Indeed, pluralism itself can be defended by showing how to effectively apply the pragmatic method to key debates in the philosophy of religion, such as the one between evidentialism and fideism as well as the one between realism and antirealism, beyond which the Jamesian pragmatist seeks to move.

A local skepticism can be articulated along four dimensions—a class of propositions, an epistemic property, a collection of subjects, and a modality. This chapter defends one such local scepticism—that the Hypertime Hypothesis is an epistemic possibility: more specifically, that human persons cannot come to know the negation of the Hypertime Hypothesis by way of their perception, introspection, understanding, imagination, memory, a priori intuition, natural light of reason, faculty of commonsense, logic, science, or metaphysics. Historical and contemporary responses to a variety of skeptical scenarios abound and can be adapted to combat skepticism about the Hypertime Hypothesis, including Closure Denial, Reidian and Moorean replies, Semantic Externalism, Inference to the Best Explanation, Evidentialism, and Process Reliabilism. However, the chapter aims to show that, even if one concedes that these responses work against the local skepticisms they were originally introduced to oppose, they are not successful in this new context.

The formal structure of a theory of rationality presented in Chapter Two has implications for the topic of rational disagreement. Mollificationists argue that disagreement tends to require a change in view toward agreement. This chapter argues against Mollificationism. Sometimes the appropriate attitude is to defer to another’s opinion, while other times it is appropriate to oppose or to compromise. The formal structure shows how to accommodate these points, involving an acknowledge of the epistemic significance of reflective ascent.

This chapter further explains and defends this view of epistemic rationality, termed Perspectivalism. The name derives from a fundamental platitude in the theory of rationality, to the effect that what is rational is a function of one’s total perspective on the world. It is then argued that Perspectivalism leads to Optionalism. Optionalism is the view that there are rarely if ever any obligations regarding what to believe.

Experientialism is compared and contrasted with Evidentialism, Reliabilism, and Evidentialist Reliabilism. The generality problem for Reliabilism is discussed, as well as the issue of how to measure reliability. A probabilistic understanding of reliability is put forward. In particular, reliability is understood in terms of evidential probabilities, not physical probabilities. An extension to credences is explored. Experientialism is non-Evidentialist insofar as it does not take experience to be evidence, and is non-Reliabilist insofar as it appeals to a normatively loaded notion of evidential probability.