1.  John Hick An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 12.

2.  For an account of ambiguity that emphasizes both the rationality of the alternatives and the broad range of responses to religious issues that are rational, see ch. 6 (‘Faith and ambiguity’) of Terence Penelhum Reason and Religious Faith (Boulder CO: Westview, 1995).

3.  For convenience I will generally mention hypotheses as what it is that evidence supports. Of course the cases that interest me most are large-scale worldviews that are matters of the greatest seriousness to many of those who endorse them.

4.  Consider the property of being an Irish male (human being) between the ages of twenty and eighty. Call this property ‘I’. Now consider some necessary conditions of having this property. Not being identical with a paperclip is a (very) minimal necessary condition of having I. On the other hand being an Irish male who is nineteen or older is a significant necessary condition of having I. If we establish that someone satisfies the latter condition we have thereby acquired important and weighty evidence that someone has property I. (In between, and listed in minimal to close-to-sufficient order, are, say, being a living thing, being human, being Irish, and being an Irish male.) Significant necessary conditions and minimal necessary conditions are at two ends of a spectrum. There are plenty of in-between possibilities – such as a condition that makes a non-trivial contribution to sufficiency but that does not on its own steam take you close to sufficiency.

5.  We will assume that for some reason – left to the reader to concoct – there is no possibility that the suspects have collaborated in the crime. Also, you may wonder whether there could be the sort of exact equilibrium under discussion in cases in which the evidence is as different as is indicated. If you are troubled by this, change the case slightly so that all three parties are implicated by a small, and equal, amount of exactly the same sort of evidence in each case.

6.  I will not be discussing simple ambiguity further since I do not think it has much application in the area of religion. But it is interesting to note the following. There may be, and probably are, cases of simple ambiguity in which the only reasonable way to respond is to suspend judgement. If such situations are to be classified as ambiguous, then its being rational to take a number of positions on the relevant issue is not a necessary condition of ambiguity. We could, on the other hand, define things such that this is in fact a necessary condition of ambiguity – in which case, of course, the instances of (what I am calling) simple ambiguity that are under discussion would not be instances of ambiguity at all.

7.  In the second sentence of this section I mention the variety of interpretations of what ambiguity consists in. While, as I say there, I will make no attempt to provide a comprehensive account of the possibilities, some of the alternatives are already apparent. Thus we might consider there to be ambiguity whenever the necessary conditions of ambiguity are met. And if we consider the entire set of characteristics that we have found to be either necessary conditions of ambiguity or among the definitive features of either simple or rich ambiguity, there may be a number of subsets of this full set of characteristics that are candidates for interpretations of ambiguity.

8.  I realize that there is something of a tension between my unwillingness to purchase the aforementioned wares and my invocation, here and earlier, of the notion of people of integrity. As I indicate above, I take the fact that others who hold certain views are people of integrity to provide us with some reason to take those views seriously. However the tension here is resolved somewhat by noting that we may take the views of others seriously while being unimpressed by the certainty with which they hold them.

9.  William P. Alston Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 208.

10.  Jacob Joshua Ross ‘The hiddenness of God: a puzzle or a real problem?’, in Daniel Howard-Snyder and Paul K. Moser (eds) Divine Hiddenness: New Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 187.

11.  I examine many such proposals in chs 2–4 of Robert McKim Religious Ambiguity and Religious Diversity (New York NY: Oxford University Press, 2001).

12.  To follow up on an earlier theme (see n. 7) one could take this absence of a clear case to be what ambiguity consists in, or to be a form of ambiguity that is distinct from those already discussed – namely the simple, rich, and extremely rich varieties. However, since my interest is especially in extremely rich ambiguity I will continue to think of the absence of a clear case as a necessary condition of ambiguity, albeit a significant necessary condition.

13.  To show that this is the case across the board would be a truly daunting project. However, by way of example, I have argued that the basic belief apologetic of Plantinga admits of application to other traditions in ‘Theism and proper basicality’, The International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 22 (1989), 29–56. I have made the corresponding case for the doxastic practice apologetic of William P. Alston in ch. 11 of my Religious Ambiguity and Religious Diversity.

14.  Ah, so you think that your experience is important, that it needs to be taken into account. Have no fear; we treat it with complete seriousness. But you are not the only person whose phenomenal states are to be taken seriously. Part of the appeal of the position under discussion is that it takes everyone's position seriously.

15.  I discuss a sort of belief that would involve diminished confidence in ch. 8 of McKim Religious Ambiguity and Religious Diversity.

16.  For some relevant discussion see Penelhum Reason and Religious Faith, 133ff.

17.  Sincere (and plentiful) thanks to Matt Davidson, Walter Feinberg, Blair Goodlin, Terence Penelhum, and Michael Scoville. Each provided me with many thought-provoking and insightful comments.