 Bayle’s most able philosophical critic on these issues during his lifetime was Jean Le Clerc, who argued that Bayle’s doctrine on the problem of evil was intentionally subversive of religion. The basis of Le Clerc’s accusation of atheism against Bayle was his claim that it is not pyschologically possible to continue to believe some doctrine after one has conceded that it is met with insoluble difficulties. If this psychology of belief were true, then the second principle of Bayle’s doctrine would destroy belief in monotheism because, by supposition, it would be impossible to believe in the unity of God after acknowledging the irresistible force of the Manicheans’ objections. In response to Le Clerc Bayle argued in his posthumous Entretiens de Maxime et de Thémiste that it is not only psychologically possible to believe in a proposition that has been defeated in argument, but also very common. Bayle points to the debate over the continuum to illustrate his thesis. Those engaged in the debate over whether lines are infinitely divisible or ultimately reducible to points of finite size recognize that there are insoluble paradoxes opposed to each point of view. Yet there are adherents of both views all the same, which demonstrates, by historical fact, that it is possible to believe in a proposition (e.g. “lines are infinitely divisible”) despite recognizing unanswerable difficulties (e.g. Zeno’s paradoxes). Far from a recommendation of adopting irrational fideism in response to the problem of evil, Bayle therefore believed he was urging the same rational retreat from certain debates that philosophers are commonly forced into when they argue about labyrinthine philosophical topics like the continuum.