I use evidence overlooked by Sraffa, namely his Commonplace Book, where he took notes of his reading verging partly on history, politics, and travellers’ reports on non-European countries, and partly  on pure philosophy, that is, epistemology and philosophy of mind, and philosophical and theological topics such as theodicy. Then I combine the evidence assembled with some less unknown evidence found in the correspondence, mainly on toleration, ‘natural’ morality, and again theodicy in connection with poverty and the social question. Finally, I try to illustrate the intellectual context of opinions he disclosed on several occasions on the ethical essence of religion, infertility of theology, impossibility of a theodicy, the unbounded right to religious freedom for everybody, atheists included. I conclude that:

i) Ricardo was apparently far from being an ‘unbeliever’; but belief or disbelief are existential attitude, not theoretical ones; so, one should better say: his own philosophy was a limited kind of scepticism leaving room for religious belief for whoever would like to avail himself of that option;

ii) toleration was justified not by the crude argument that religion is a fake but on the more sensible argument that nobody’s truth is the unique truth a reasonable person may adopt;

iii) he believed speculative theology to be irrelevant; it is an attempt to formulate as scientific truth what is unknowable; this is not an argument for atheism, but it is one more argument for toleration;

iv) morality is independent of revelation, there is a natural morality accessible to every reasonable mind; this is the Enlightenment’s staple, but also is far from being an atheist or exclusively modern view; it was simply an anti-Augustinian and anti-Calvinist doctrine defended in the Middle Ages by Aquinas and William of Ockham, and in modern Britain by every enemy of religious fanaticism.

v) theodicy is impossible for the same reasons why it is so for Kant; this – unlike James Mill, Ricardo’s friend and former Presbyterian minister – is for Ricardo no argument for unbelief; it is instead one more argument for moral responsibility vis-à-vis poverty and also against dogmatic Laissez-Faire optimism of the kind atheist Mill was prone to adopt;

vi) a sense of duty – including a duty to wage war on poverty – derives thus from ‘reason without hope’;

vii) last of all: social science has to be a secular science precisely for theological reasons; or, in other words, the anti-dogmatic kind of religious belief he declared legitimate (independently of the fact of his own belief or doubt – who doesn’t doubt? – ruled out any kind of dogmatic atheist theology such as Laissez-Faire Metaphysics.