 A crucial premise in Bishop’s argument is what he terms the “thesis of evidential ambiguity,” which holds that, under “rational empiricist evidential practice,” our overall experience of the world is equally plausibly interpreted on either a theistic or an atheistic reading, thereby leaving open the question of God’s existence (70–1). He argues that under appropriate conditions – essentially those comprising what James called a “genuine option,” together with evidential indeterminacy, on the one hand, and the satisfaction of certain moral constraints on one’s passional motivations and the content of one’s faith-commitment, on the other – it is morally permissible to make a “doxastic faith-venture” – that is, to take belief in God to be true in one’s practical reasoning, while recognizing that it is not certified by one’s total available evidence (147). The brand of fideism for which Bishop argues is thus ‘supra-evidential’ in the sense that it defends the permissibility of reasoning on the basis of commitments that outrun what is warranted on purely evidential grounds. Like Evans, and in keeping with James and Pascal, however, Bishop is careful to distinguish supra-evidential fideism from counter-evidential fideism: unlike the latter, the former, he argues, cannot be shown to violate any epistemic obligations. Although, unlike some putative fideists, Bishop does not regard evidentialism as incoherent or epistemically irresponsible, he argues that fideism of the kind he defends is preferable on broadly moral grounds, suggesting, for instance, that fideism’s tolerance for passional commitments conduces to a more balanced acceptance of human nature as more than purely rational (216–220).