  While this opens the way to a form of non-inferential, rational belief in God, no such claim appears among Reid's First Principles of contingent or necessary truths. Indeed, belief in God possesses few of the features associated with Reidian First Principles. Denying God's existence is not absurd, belief in God does not have “consent of ages and nations”, and it is not held independently of education and acculturation (see EIP 6.4, 463–467). Yet clearly Reid holds that belief in God appears to be rational (not a word that Reid deploys as a term of art) without inference. He bases his claim that belief in God is rational (again, not a term Reid uses) upon a model familiar from his theory of the formation of perceptual beliefs (see Nichols &amp; Callergård 2011).