 These reinterpreted arguments presented new opportunities for apologetics (such as Paley’s design argument), but they also exposed belief in God to new forms of criticism (such as those raised in Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion). What the parties to these disputes had in common was a conception of what rationality in this realm requires – in particular, premises neutral with respect to God’s reality. By those lights, earlier ways of thinking that began from God’s reality, as well as later ways of thinking that shared this earlier starting point, appeared irrational and question-begging. “Faith,” which originally meant something like “trust,” came to refer to the act of holding beliefs without evidence sufficient to warrant them. Fideism was thus, paradoxically, the claim that it is rational to behave irrationally.