This chapter addresses two distinct, if often conflated, claims. The first is that the theology of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan undermined Christian orthodoxy and perhaps even theism itself. The second is that this was an intention of the text, which required Hobbes to engage in rhetorical techniques that amounted to a form of esoteric writing. The chapter argues that certainty on these assertions is unattainable, but that the balance of evidence favors affirmation of both. Both the allegation that Hobbes was a self-aware heretic or atheist, and the allegation that he wrote duplicitously, were contemporary charges that have never disappeared. The former allegation (heresy or atheism) predated Leviathan in fact, while the latter (esoteric writing) only seriously attached itself to Hobbes’s masterwork and his subsequent defenses of it. Focusing on Leviathan, the chapter contextualizes these allegations as they moved through generations of commentary and then into modern scholarship. It constitutes a report on the state of the debate from the perspective of a committed participant.

Continuing the aletheistic tradition, Anselm’s most innovative writing, the Proslogion, adopts the form of Augustine’s Confessions, namely an overheard address to God, but he makes progress on the question of divine reference by deploying, in dialogue with the point of view of the atheist, a linguistic deferred ostension of God as that than which nothing greater can be thought. One and the same formula picks God out, establishes his reality, and guides our continued reflection.

Much of Pascal’s philosophy, though applicable to a variety of problems and issues we face today, is couched in religious terms that, even for religious believers today, may not resonate. This chapter explores some possibilities of developing some key Pascalian ideas – the limits of reason and experience, the ambiguity of the world, the heart, our sometimes-misplaced desires, and the wager – in secular terms. One possibility that emerges as particularly fruitful is to replace Pascal’s “God” with William James’s “religious belief” that the good will ultimately triumph, and that it is important and beneficial for us to believe it.

This interpretive chapter attends to an often overlooked feature of the Dialogues: the tone of its repeated disputes. It asks what is the meaning of the tone and probes its value. To do so, it begins with a consideration of character in a dual-sense: the moral character of these disputes between literary characters. It argues that critical engagement with characterization via the lens of literary theory reveals that it is a category mistake to reduce the voice of a fictional character (e.g., Philo) to that of a real person (e.g., Hume). It further contends that if we think of each fictional character as merely a solitary component of a larger narrative flow we are more likely to focus on the basic action that is internal to the narrative, that is: disagreement, rather than who the character speaks for. Finally, it claims that the virtuous disagreement between interlocutors here rehearses an ethics of responsiveness that can be viewed as pointing towards a moral element. Hume’s dramatic sensibilities obscure the ethical temperament of the disagreements yet their posture reflects a gestural phenomenon of responsiveness (per Elise Springer) that might come close to expressing Hume’s ideal form of religion.

In this chapter, I consider the Dialogues as a text that formulates and criticises a particular argument for design (‘the argument for design’). After presenting the relevant material from the Dialogues, I consider the strengths and weaknesses of the formulation of the argument that is the object of Hume’s criticisms, and set out what I take to be the full range of criticisms that Hume makes of it. I then assess the strength of these criticisms, paying particular attention to writers – for example Paley, Reid, Dawkins, and Hawthorne and Isaacs – who have claimed that Hume’s objections to ‘the argument for design’ are weak or ineffectual. Next, I consider the originality of Hume’s critique of ‘the argument for design’; I argue that, on the evidence that I have considered, Hume deserves most of the credit for the objections to ‘the argument for design’ in the Dialogues. I conclude with some brief remarks about the relative importance of the success of the criticisms of ‘the argument for design’ to the overall project of the Dialogues.

There are significant ambiguities in how “atheism” is to be understood or interpreted. Having considered these, we turn to Hume’s arguments and assess to what extent his views in the Dialogues should be interpreted in these terms. While it is evident that Hume opposed “superstition” and that he was, in this sense, plainly an irreligious thinker, this does not settle the question of his “atheism”. Although Hume has been read by some as an theist of a minimal kind, and by others as a sceptic or agnostic, both these accounts are rejected. Hume was, it is argued, a “hard sceptical atheist”, by which we understand him to take the view that we have probable (non-dogmatic) grounds for denying the theist hypothesis in all its forms. His “speculative atheism” is accompanied by a “practical atheism” which, while firmly opposed “superstition”, is willing to ally itself with both sceptics and those theists (or deists) who share Hume’s opposition to “superstition”.

Hume’s Dialogues contains one of the most efficient and rhetorically effective – and consequently influential statements of the problem (or problems) of evil in literature. In the last three parts of the Dialogues, we can see much of the shape of the contemporary debate on the problem, in its various aspects. But, familiar though the main lines of that debate might be, Hume’s presentation of the issues in dramatic form throws up some less familiar angles, as well as posing a question concerning his own views on religion. This chapter will follow the course of the discussion as it unfolds, taking points more or less in the order in which they arise, but organised around the various problems of evil. It ends with a brief consideration of the wider consequences of the discussion.

At the start of Hume’s Dialogues Philo feigns to agree with Demea that he believes that God exists, and both Philo and Demea claim that we cannot come to have knowledge of the nature of God. In §1, however, I turn to Cleanthes’ ‘Newtonian Theism’ in which science is seen as serving theology, with a central role played by the argument from design. We can infer ‘that the Author of nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man’ (D 2.5). §2 turns to the various critiques of this argument put forward by Philo and we find that his alliance with Demea is a ruse. Philo rejects the theism of both Cleanthes and Demea. §3 focuses on part 12 of the Dialogues where Philo appears to take a more conciliatory line towards belief in God. Various interpreters take Philo to be committed to a thin form of deism or theism. I reject such interpretations and argue that part 12 does not diverge from the atheistic message of the Dialogues.

Unlike any other ancient author, the philosopher and priest of Apollo at Delphi discussed all aspects of religious tradition, praxis, and even personal piety. He talks about religion more or less in all parts of his oeuvre, either in connection with philosophy, history, music and the household, or with myths, symbols, and rituals. He deals with personal religion both as a historian and from the perspective of the experiences of personal life – as a biographer of illustrious Greeks and Romans, as a priest and initiate, and as a husband and father. Several of the speakers in his dialogues talk about religious matters on a personal level, and the author also expresses his views on the importance of religion for the individual in his own voice in works such as On Isis and Osiris, That Epicurus Actually Makes a Pleasant Life Impossible, or the Consolation to His Wife. Once the religious perspective is recognized not only as a general trait of Plutarch’s thought, but also as an aspect of his philosophy as an ars vitae, it becomes visible across the whole of his oeuvre.

Given that we know little about deviations from ritual norms in most cities of Greece, I limit myself to Athens and concentrate on the later fifth century so that we can acquire an idea of the possibilities but also of the religious Handlungsspielraum within a given chronotope. I begin with the individual responsible for the cave of Vari who was clearly an anomaly in terms of the intensity of his religious worship. I then proceed with some private cults and practices that were frowned upon, continue with individuals who were seen, rightly or wrongly, as actually transgressing civic norms, and end with some final considerations, in which I return to the problem of the relationship between personal religion and polis religion. I conclude that it seems that personal religion was still very much part of polis religion at large.

This chapter explores an often-overlooked religious group in the United States: those who are not affiliated with religion. The chapter discusses the quantitative and qualitative challenges in measuring religious “nones” and considers historical patterns of stigma and prejudice against the religiously unaffiliated. The number of secular Americans is growing and they need a seat at the table of civil religion.