 In Cicero’s account, Carneades’ purpose in so arguing is said to have been ‘not to abolish the gods–what could become a philosopher less–but to convict the Stoics of having explained nothing clearly about the gods’ (N.D 44). Scholars who follow the lead of this remark take Carneades’ intentions to have been narrowly dialectical–to draw unwelcome consequences from the commitments of his specifically Stoic opponents, consequences that for all the argument tells us follow only Stoic assumptions (see Couissin, 1941). But though the Stoics may be vulnerable to Carneades’ sorites arguments, the understanding of the divine on which the arguments depend is hardly peculiar to them. In Cicero the arguments are presented by the character Cotta, a priest in the Roman religion, who speaks the words describing Carneades’ intentions just cited. Cicero’s decision to make Cotta the spokesperson for Academic skepticism in his dialogue tells us something important about it, that it was possible to combine Academic skepticism with religious conviction. But the attitude, which resembles fideism, that Cotta attributes to Carneades may not have been Carneades’. There is no special reference to the Stoics in Sextus’ presentation. Carneades’ arguments, like those in the broader context, may have been intended to raise doubts about the existence of the gods that did not depend on Stoic philosophy and had implications that were not for the Stoics alone. Carneades would have been arguing not as a committed atheist of course, for he would have been sensible of the force of the argument in support of the gods’ existence, but perhaps as a pioneering agnostic (see Sedley, 2020).