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Recently, we co-edited a volume of essays (Draper & Schellenberg 2017) dedicated to the proposition that our field, the philosophy of religion, is not all that it could be. The new set of essays we’re joining here shows that this sentiment is, at the least, not going away. That’s encouraging, but how can we get beyond sentiment? In this our own essay we hope to do so by focusing very precisely and persuasively on problems and solutions: on why our field needs renewal and how to achieve it. More specifically, we hope to get every reader to recognize and accept at least one problem from the range of problems in the field as it exists today that we propose to identify, and to select for special thought and supportive effort at least one solution from the range of solutions we’ll be promoting. Let’s adjust that slightly: one extra problem and one extra solution – for we’re going to start by setting the right mood with some thoughts about a very basic problem/solution pair that we should all be able to recognize/support.

In this essay, I reply to the comments of Joanna Leidenhag and Nick Trakakis on my book Religion After Science: The Cultural Consequences of Religious Immaturity.

Distinguishing between the old atheism, the new atheism, and modest atheism, and also between belief and acceptance, and belief and acceptance tokens and types, I defend the disjunctive view that either modest atheistic belief or modest atheistic acceptance, construed as type, is today epistemically justified in the context of philosophical inquiry. Central to my defence is a deductive version of the hiddenness argument and an emphasis on the early stage of philosophical inquiry that we presently occupy.