 One way of understanding the emergence of the category “fideism” is as a by-product of the development of secular conceptions of rationality that, while not overtly hostile to religion, moved God from the premises of thought to its possible conclusions. On a classical theological account, the Christian approaches the world coram deo – in God’s presence. God, on this view, is not the product of inference from the world but rather its logos, the hermeneutical key to understanding the world, where the latter is imagined not as what Charles Taylor calls an “immanent frame” (542) – a lawlike space that can be understood fully on its own terms –but as creation. Creation, conceived coram deo, presupposes a creator, but it is not the starting point from which one is inferred. This classical Christian view was gradually displaced by a secular imaginary, in which the world, while not, as Descartes demonstrated, self-evident, was no longer viewed as requiring reference to anything beyond itself. Ostensibly theologically neutral, it thus came to provide a starting point not simply for atheism, but for a new understanding of natural theology, in which belief in God could be grounded in probabilistic arguments from premises not themselves in dispute between believers and unbelievers.