ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I explore the difference between what I’ll call full-blown atheists, for whom religiosity is no part of their lives, and merely doxastic atheists, who are in some meaningful sense religious but whose beliefs about the supernatural are the same as those of full-blown atheists. An obvious starting point is the idea of religious practice, but this is not plausibly understood apart from issues of what the practitioner’s attitudes are, in virtue of which their practice is a part of genuine religiosity and not merely counterfeit, as the full-blown atheists’ would be if they were to engage in superficially similar practices. The place to look for clues as to the difference between the full-blown and the merely doxastic atheist is, I argue, in the nature of non-doxastic faith. It is this which the full-blown atheist lacks but the merely doxastic atheist has. In an attempt to find a quite general characterisation of nondoxastic attitudes which would suffice for religiosity, which seems preferable to a piecemeal one, I reject some recent proposals about the nature of nondoxastic faith as inadequate and propose a schematic alternative which allows us to capture the attitudes of the doxastic believer and the merely doxastic atheist in a unified way, whilst excluding the full-blown atheist. I then defend my suggestion against an important objection (to the effect that merely nondoxastic faith is not plausibly sufficient for any kind of full-blown religiosity), and I make some suggestions about where to draw the line between nondoxastic faith and merely taking an idea seriously for the sake of intellectual curiosity, an issue which naturally arises given the nature of my proposal, which is in the spirit of Peter Lipton’s ‘immersion’ characterisation of faith.
