In this paper I examine William Alston's work on the epistemology of
religious belief, focusing on the threat to the epistemic status of Christian belief
presented by awareness of religious diversity. I argue that Alston appears to
misunderstand the epistemic significance of the ‘practical rationality’ of the
Christian mystical practice. I suggest that this error is due to a more fundamental
misunderstanding, regarding the significance of practical rationality, in Alston's
‘doxastic practice’ approach to epistemology; an error that leads to arbitrariness
among the class of rational doxastic practices. I suggest how one might remedy this
weakness, with an additional, epistemic, criterion that rational doxastic practices
must satisfy.