eate new conceptual or epistemic possibilities. This can mitigate the circularity worry, since alternatives can present other means of epistemic evaluation. And it can mitigate the distortion worry, since new epistemic alternatives can complement or improve on aspects of your own belief system or help you understand, by direct contrast, why your belief system is epistemically preferable. 4. Whereas the first three benefits address the circularity and distortion worries, the fourth helps mitigate the exacerbation problem. This problem (to recall) says that reasoning about religion strengthens the negative effects of our biases, thus exacerbating the other two worries. Disagreement can help here by supplying counterinstances (Saul, 2012, 259). A counterinstance is a person or thing that does not correspond with what a bias would lead one to expect; exposure to counterinstances can help weaken bias and can improve one's ability to engage in nuanced and differentiated reasoning. For example, if fear of dogs biases us against them, then the more friendly dogs we meet, the less we will tend to fear dogs and the more we will assess the dangerousness of each dog individually. Similarly, the more intelligent and admirable people we meet among those who disagree with us about religion, the more likely these interactions are to de-fuse some of the defence mechanisms that close us off to constructive discourse. Of course, if our interactions with our interlocutors are adversarial, things could go the other way: our biases may be reinforced and our nuanced thinking diminished. But if our discourse is cordial and constructive, engaging in disagreement can work against the factors that exacerbate the circularity and distortion worries. One might think that these epistemic benefits arise primarily from disagreements between epistemic peers;x if so, this would limit my argument (though how much it did so would depend on how demanding our notion of peerhood is). For epistemic peers are a mere subset of the people we might encounte