Beliefless Spirituality 

The Beliefless Spirituality Project: Philosophical Foundations and Scientific Explorations is a 32-month, interdisciplinary research project generously funded by a $699,369 grant from the John Templeton Foundation, with additional support from the University of Sheffield. Launching in January 2025, the project team will be investigating forms of sincere religious or spiritual engagement that are underpinned not by explicit beliefs but by alternative cognitive attitudes such as assumptions, conditional attitudes, credences, or pretences. We aim to investigate which distinct types of beliefless spirituality there are, the (dis)value of these types of spirituality, and how they can be fruitfully studied in empirical research. The results of the project will be especially illuminating for understanding the options for religious/spiritual practice available to those who find it difficult to hold explicit beliefs in religious/spiritual realities, which may include spiritual-but-not-religious individuals, agnostics, atheists, and people of faith experiencing significant doubt.

Project research will include eight distinct individual/joint research projects concerned with different forms of beliefless spirituality, led by nine co-investigators. The team will also collaborate on two empirically-oriented projects: one that aims to provide general recommendations for the empirical study of beliefless spirituality and a second that aims to provide an example of empirical study of beliefless spirituality which implements some of these recommendations. The project will host a Capstone Conference in 2027 with an associated call for papers soliciting additional research on the project theme.