In this article, I consider the cases of religious Moorean propositions of the form ‘d, but I don't believe that d’ and ‘d, but I believe that ~d’, where d is a religious dogma, proposition, or part of a creed. I argue that such propositions can be genuinely and rationally asserted and that this fact poses a problem for traditional analysis of religious assertion as an expression of faith and of religious faith as entailing belief. In the article, I explore the possibility of undermining these commonly held assumptions and argue that the assertability of religious Moorean propositions can be justified by an account of faith as an intention to form religious beliefs. In the end, I also consider the consequences of such a stance, especially concerning the debate on the ethics of religious belief and doxastic voluntarism.

We introduce two concepts—social certainty and social doubt—that help to articulate a variety of experiences of the social world, such as shyness, self-consciousness, culture shock, and anxiety. Following Carel's (2013) analysis of bodily doubt, which explores how a person's tacit confidence in the workings of their body can be disrupted and undermined in illness, we consider how an individual's faith in themselves as a social agent, too, can be compromised or lost, thus altering their experience of what is afforded by the social environment. We highlight how a loss of bodily or social certainty can be shaped and sustained by the environments in which one finds oneself. As such, we show how certain individuals might be more vulnerable to experiences of bodily and social doubt than others.

People with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) tend to distrust their memory, perception, and other cognitive functions, and many OCD symptoms can be traced to diminished confidence in one's cognitive processes. For example, poor confidence in recall accuracy can cause doubt about one's memory and motivate repeated checking. At the same time, people with OCD also display performance deficits in a variety of cognitive tasks, so their reduced confidence must be evaluated in relation to their actual performance. To that end, we conducted an exhaustive review and meta-analysis of studies in which OCD participants and non-clinical control participants performed cognitive tasks and reported their confidence in their performance. Our search resulted in 19 studies that met criteria for inclusion in the quantitative analysis, with all studies addressing either memory or perception. We found that both performance and reported confidence were lower in OCD than in control participants. Importantly, however, confidence was more impaired than performance in participants with OCD. These findings suggest that people with OCD are less confident in their memory and perception than they should be, indicating a genuine under-confidence in this population. We discuss potential mechanisms that might account for this finding and suggest avenues for further research into under-confidence and related meta-cognitive characteristics of OCD.

‘Faith’ (pistis) is a key term in early Christianity. It not only describes the self-understanding of an individual Christ-follower, but also operates as the social marker of the Christ-groups. Rather than adding to the renaissance of studies on faith in recent years, this article seeks to illuminate what faith is by focusing on the phenomenon of doubt, broadly understood. After some linguistic reflections, the article identifies six basic types of doubt in early Christian writings and then compiles eighteen coping strategies and patterns of resilience reflected in the most prominent texts. The article is not an attempt at systematizing early Christian reflections on doubt but is rather a cornucopia of insights into how the first Christian theologians talked about doubt, dealt with it, and tried to overcome it.

Permissivism is the view that there are evidential situations that rationally permit more than one attitude toward a proposition. In this paper, I argue for Intrapersonal Belief Permissivism (IaBP): that there are evidential situations in which a single agent can rationally adopt more than one belief-attitude toward a proposition. I give two positive arguments for IaBP; the first involves epistemic supererogation and the second involves doubt. Then, I show how these arguments give intrapersonal permissivists a distinct response to the toggling objection. I conclude that IaBP is a view that philosophers should take seriously.

The canon law dictum that ‘dubius in fide infidelis est’ offers a seemingly definitive statement on the place of doubt and uncertainty in medieval Catholicism. Yet where Catholic teaching was open to question, doubt was inseparable from faith, not merely as its obverse but as part of the process of achieving faithfulness – the trajectory outlined by Abelard in the twelfth century. The challenge for the Church was not that doubters lacked faith, but that having tested their doubts they might end up with the wrong faith: doubt preceded assurance, one way or the other. That problem is addressed in this essay by a broad examination of the ties between faith and doubt across the late Middle Ages (from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries), arguing that uncertainty and doubt were almost unavoidable in medieval Catholicism. As the starting points in a process which could lead to heresy and despair, they also had a positive role in developing and securing orthodox faith.

This essay uses T. E. Lawrence's characterization of doubt as ‘our modern crown of thorns’, as an entrée into thinking through the coincidence of doubt and faith in the four canonical gospels. However much each of the gospels may wish to induce faith, it leaves its readers with the distinct impression that doubt, understood differently in each, cannot be fully dispelled. The gospels thereby testify to a lively, ancient appreciation for the irrepressibility of doubt. This essay then turns to the problem of scepticism in modern philosophy. In his work on Ludwig Wittgenstein, the American philosopher Stanley Cavell suggests that scepticism is a ‘condition’ of knowledge, both in the sense of something from which we suffer as if from a chronic illness, and in the sense of that which makes knowledge possible at all. The reader is invited to think of the dialectics of doubt and faith in a similar way, of doubt as the very condition of faith.

Doubt and unbelief were central to the ways in which ministers and theologians in post-Reformation England thought and wrote about religion. Far from signalling spiritual failure, grappling with unbelief could be an important stage in developing the faith and religious understanding of the individual believer while establishing a role for physicality and the senses. Nicholas Bownde's The vnbeleefe of S. Thomas the Apostle, laid open for the comfort of all that desire to beleeue (1608) suggests that unbelief was relational and that belief required not only an acknowledgement of doubt but also extensive exploration of what doubtful and unbelieving experiences involved and how they were to be overcome. Bownde's work demonstrates that this ongoing spiritual conversation could make use of important scriptural examples such as the ‘Doubting Thomas’ episode in order to elucidate intimate theological problems for contemporary believers. This process suggests that early modern religion can only be properly understood with close reference to the role of doubt, unbelief and spiritual uncertainty in religious discourse because belief itself was predicated on the logical possibility of unbelief.

This essay focuses on the figure of John the Baptist in prison and the question he sent his disciples to ask Christ: was he ‘the one who is to come’ (Matthew 11: 2–3)? Having observed how the Fathers strove to distance John from the perils of doubt in their readings of this passage, it traces the way their arguments were picked up by twelfth- and thirteenth-century biblical exegetes and then by authors of anti-heretical dispute texts in urban Italy, where the Baptist was a popular patron saint. So as to give force to their own counter-arguments, learned polemicists, clerical and lay, made much of heretics’ hostility to John, powerfully ventriloquizing a doubting, sceptical standpoint. One counter-argument was to assign any doubts to John's disciples, for whose benefit he therefore sent to ask for confirmation of the means of Christ's return, neatly moving doubt from questions of faith to epistemology. Such ideas may have seeped beyond the bounds of a university-trained elite, as is perhaps visible in a fourteenth-century fresco representing John in prison engaging with anxious disciples. But place, audience and genre determined where doubt was energetically debated and where it was more usually avoided, as in sermons for the laity on the feast of a popular saint.