It's in the Code Ep 124: "Religion as Make Believe"
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What does it mean to “believe” something? What is distinctive about religious belief? Is it different from other kinds of belief? In this episode, Dan interviews philosopher Neil Van Leeuwen to discuss his book, Religion as Make Believe: A Theory of Belief, Imagination, and Group Identity, which opens up a provocative and illuminating account of religious belief. Check it out as Dan and Neil explore these and other questions.
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I am Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College, and I am joined today by a guest.
It's very exciting.
I usually get kind of lonely, but I am joined by Dr. Neal Van Leeuwen.
Dr. Neal Van Leeuwen, I will throw it to you to first say welcome, and if you would, just tell our listeners who you are.
Well, first of all, thanks for having me.
I'm Neil van Leeuwen.
I'm a professor of philosophy now at Florida State University, but currently I'm in Atlanta because I was at Georgia State University here in Atlanta for many years and technically still I'm a visiting researcher here.
So I work on Philosophy of mind, cognitive science, cognitive science of religion, really studying the nature of believing and imagining and what those are as ways of relating to ideas.
And just on a personal note that kind of maybe motivates the book at a You know, personal level.
I grew up in the Christian Reformed Church, and my parents were professors at Calvin College, so I was going to church twice on Sunday at CRC Church.
And so I really had kind of not just a lot of background research in philosophy and cognitive science and anthropology that went into the book, but also some personal experience, which I can maybe, you know, relate to some of your audience members about.
Yeah.
And of course, the reason we have you, you have a book with a cool title that's called Religion as Make Believe.
And of course, coming from the Reformed tradition, that's a tradition with a long history of, I don't know, focusing on thinking and focusing on belief and focusing on doctrine, these really core ideas of Christianity.
I stumbled onto your book.
I was at the American Academy of Religion.
And for those who don't know, it's got this giant room full of different publishers and all of we nerdy types.
Walk around looking at them and I saw it and picked it up, had a chance to read it in January and have found it really useful.
Folks may or may not know from things that I've said on the podcast that I've used it in a couple ways or kind of put it to use, have found it to be really useful.
I've used some of the ideas that you develop in the book in a couple of my classes.
And I don't know, I have lots of thoughts and questions and things like that.
So I want to throw it first over to you.
As you know, when you're in grad school, they always tell you to have like the elevator version of your dissertation topic because grad students will talk for like 40 minutes about like the first paragraph of their dissertation if you let them.
What's the sort of down and dirty, simple thing like religion is make-believe.
It's really a book about the nature of religious belief, as I understand it.
What's the thumbnail sketch of what you mean when you say religion is make-believe?
What are you talking about in this book?
Well, here's the basic idea, just so people can get clear on what I'm going to be saying and what I'm not saying as well, important.
So think about make-believe play.
Children on a playground and they're playing games.
Some are playing with G.I. Joe.
Some are playing with Barbie.
Some are playing with He-Man and so on.
And you'll notice that they form groups or coalitions or packs of friends, depending upon which game of make-believe play they're playing.
And the idea of the book is really that religions are large-scale versions of that, okay?
So maybe not every single religion around the world.
Religion is a multifarious word.
But generally speaking, there's a kind of activity, both behaviorally and psychologically, which really is a form of make-believe play.
But one that involves supernatural agents, allegiance to which defines an in-group and then also activates sacred values.
So that's kind of the paradigm of what I'm portraying religion as.
And I think it solves a bunch of puzzles.
Like, I'll give you an example, just jumping to the last chapter of the book, chapter eight, which I called Puzzle of Religious Rationality.
You see, there are a lot of smart religious people claiming to believe pretty outlandish things, seemingly with little evidence.
And you might, a lot of people who have read the book said, yeah, this is one of the more illuminating things about it.
I was always puzzled.
How are these smart people, you know, claiming to believe these things?
And if you see religion as this sort of identity constituting game of make-believe play, you can reconcile that puzzle.
how smart people with lack of evidence can profess belief in something.
It's part of the game that is constituting their in-group.
So that's, that's the idea of what religion as make-believe is.
And importantly, I'm not, it's not meant to be this sort of like screed where I argue, you know, religious beliefs are false.
Like that's not, that's not the, the, the implication.
I mean, As a matter of fact, I happen to think that many, many religious beliefs are not true.
But that's not the point of what the book is arguing.
The point is to sketch a psychology of religious belief and practice that really makes it make more sense as a human way of processing ideas and as a human activity.
Yeah, thank you.
And so I want to pick up on that because for me, what stands out about the book, and I tend to think of books and ideas as kind of tools or things that you can use for different projects and the parts that stood out to me.
And I think this is also an area where you address it in the book, people who have kind of misunderstood what you're saying.
It was clear to me and I found really provocative.
The first thing is to understand just the concept of belief.
I find it funny in the book because I have some training in mostly the continental philosophical tradition, not the analytic tradition.
For people who are like, what does that mean?
It doesn't matter.
It just means that we're like distant cousins and sometimes the analytic and continental folks don't get along and sometimes they do.
But you've got this part in there I thought was really funny because you're sort of like, hey, philosophers, when regular people use the word belief, they often don't mean what analytic philosophers mean.
And I thought it was funny because I've had that discussion so many times.
So...
Correct me if I'm wrong as I try to explain this to folks.
I think for a lot of people when they use the word belief, we mean what we might think of as like a deeply held conviction.
We say, I believe something.
We mean something big, something serious.
Maybe it's something, you know, an ethical belief or a political belief or a religious belief or something really significant.
And we tend to think like the really big things.
When philosophers, analytic philosophers, philosophers in my particular talk about belief, you're just talking about anything you believe.
So if I say, I believe, I am sitting in a chair right now talking to Neil van Leeuwen, that's a belief.
So it would include those really, really big things, but it's not limited to those.
And is that correct?
Because we're going to get into why that matters, but I want to make sure people know when we talk about belief that we're talking about anything you believe, including, as I understand it, what we call non-occurrent beliefs, not stuff I'm thinking about right now, Other beliefs that I have.
I believe that I have a dog.
I didn't think of that till just now, but it's a background belief that I have.
Yeah, so maybe it would be helpful if we situate this in a broader context.
And this is for your audience.
It's going to introduce a little bit of technical jargon, but it should be very intuitive.
Humans have all sorts of different ways of relating to ideas.
This is what I call cognitive flexibility.
We can think an idea is true.
We can assume an idea just to be safe.
Like I'm assuming the supermarket closes in the next hour just so I can get there on time.
I might not actually believe that, but assume it just for the sake of better safe than sorry.
I can assume things for the sake of argument.
I can suspect that something is the case.
I can fictionally imagine.
Like when I'm playing a game of make-believe with my nephew, we're playing dinosaurs or something like that.
I'm imagining that I'm a dinosaur.
So there's this independence of attitudes.
I can imagine one thing or another.
I can believe one thing or another.
I can suspect one thing or another.
And then the contents, what the attitude is taken in relation to.
And so when I'm talking about what believing is, I'm focusing on the attitude type.
How is it that we're relating to ideas?
Okay.
And the central Contention of the book is that the broad term believing can subsume really different types of cognitive relations.
I can factually believe that P or I can religiously creed that P or have the religious credence that P. And those are going to be two different ways of relating to the same content.
Now, it happens to be the case that, as a generalization, I contend, religious credence is the attitude that tends to be taken towards supernatural ideas that people, in some sense, have an allegiance to.
And factual belief is more mundane things.
Like, I have the factual belief that Atlanta's in Georgia.
Of course, that's knowledge, too.
But factual believing is the attitude component.
All right?
So this, what you were just gesturing at is a certain amount of crosstalk between philosophers and laypeople, because I think that laypeople, and the book trots out some linguistic studies to suggest this, when laypeople talk about, oh, what are your beliefs, they tend to think more in the religious credence type realm, okay?
These identity-constituting, you know, deeply held sacred ways of relating to ideas, Whereas factual belief, often we just don't talk about them.
I don't say, I believe that Atlanta's in Georgia.
I just say, Atlanta's in Georgia.
Or I might say, I know, or I think, right?
So the word think that, or the phrase think that, tends to be used in relation to factual beliefs.
So...
The contention of the book in line with what I was saying about make-believe play is, hey, look, just as there's this different attitude of imagining that we engage in make-believe play, that's different from factually believing.
When I imagine I'm a dinosaur, it's not crazy because it's imagining.
So just as there's those two maps, factual belief and imagining in the guidance of make-believe behavior, So, too, there's a parallel structure, a two-map cognitive structure, factual belief versus religious credence in the guiding of religious activity.
And the more provocative contention of the book is that religious credence is really a form of imagining.
It relates to factual belief in the same ways and is differentiated in the same ways from factual belief as imagining is.
And what makes it serious Is that it's group identity constituting and that it activates sacred values.
So one objection I've gotten, you know, lots is like, oh, you know, religious belief is so serious.
How can you say it's merely imagining?
I'm not saying it's merely imagining.
It's serious in a different way from factual belief.
And in a way, it's a lot more serious because it says to whom you belong.
So one of the ideas, so if I were to distill all this, and this is the piece I found so useful, it's this idea that there are lots of what we might call sort of cognitive attitudes or cognitive relations we could have to beliefs.
You're focused on two big ones, factual believing or what, a factual attitude toward belief or credibly believing or credence as sort of two types.
And if I understand you, because this is what I think is really significant in a direction I want to go here in a few minutes, that's not a judgment about the content of the belief.
In other words, two people could affirm the same belief.
They could say, I believe X, Y, or Z, but they could both say that and have different ones of these attitudes toward that belief.
One person could be factually believing it, and the other one could be credibly believing it.
Absolutely.
And just to spice this up with something that's relevant right now, you can imagine people relating in different ways to the same content.
And let's say the content is that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump.
I have that in my notes.
It's like, here's an example we could talk about.
Yeah.
Now, here's the important point.
It's possible, given a certain informational environment, that a lot of people are merely mistaken about them.
Okay, given the information sources they have, they have what I would call a false factual belief.
They just think it's so, and that's a product of their, what we would call their epistemic environment, their informational cocoons, or something like that.
Also, however, one could have a sort of religious credence.
And maybe we should get into a little bit what the differences cognitively are between those.
But this is someone for whom it's like an ideological bad.
It's going to be something that they relate to this in what I call a groupish way.
They affirm that the 2020 election was stolen as sort of part of their identity.
Not simply because they think it's so, they might have enough background knowledge, and I think this is so for many Trumpy politicians, enough background knowledge to realize that it's false, okay?
But even though they have it, religious credences, and this is one of the differences from factual beliefs, and groupish beliefs more generally, Aren't responsive to evidence, okay?
And you can glimpse fairly quickly why that would be so.
Say you and I are Trumpers.
Now, that's counterfactual to say the least, but let's pretend it's so.
Cognitive attitude of for the sake of argument lets you write.
Yeah, we're assuming that for the sake of argument, so a couple levels here.
We would be poor loyalists if we would update our identity constituting religious credence that the election was stolen just in light of evidence, okay?
The identity is something you're supposed to have come what may, all right?
And if the world throws evidence at you that your religious credence is false, then you shouldn't update it.
You should stick to it.
So going back to the person who's merely misinformed and has a false factual belief, in a way, they're much better off because if you have a false factual belief, the beautiful thing about factual beliefs, they can be false.
So that's a term of ARC factual belief.
I can factually believe something that turns out to be false.
The supermarket is open till 8?
Nope, only open till 7. Factual beliefs update in light of evidence.
And that has to do with their role in guiding action, instrumental action in the world.
And often factual belief update in light of evidence so quickly that we don't even notice it.
We see the sign says closed and poof, our factual belief goes away in light of that evidence.
So one of the big differences between religious credence and factual belief Is that factual belief revised quickly and easily in light of evidence and religious credences don't.
And kind of one of the things that I think my book, you know, pushes more than anyone else has is that that difference relates to their downstream role in guiding behavior and one, Guiding, you know, factual beliefs guide instrumentally rational action, and religious credences guide signaling and identity kind of constituting behaviors, which is instrumental, it's symbolic, all right?
So two, and we can see this difference in many, many different contexts, and one is religion.
So I focus on religion, but we just saw it also has a political application.
You could have it in politics, you could have it in Ethics, I think it would be hugely informative for thinking about sort of conspiracism.
And again, I think of these things as tools, and this is why when I read this, I was like, okay, this is useful for religion, but I can see the value of this for so many other things because part of what I hear you saying, and this is something that, you know, you read people and sometimes you're like, oh, this is a good way of saying something I've been trying to say but not really sure how to say it.
That, in fact, I would suggest that when it comes to that identity formation piece—and I'll just point out to people, we know this all the time when we say that somebody believes something as an article of faith.
We don't literally mean like a religious faith, but we mean it's something that's not open to counter-evidence.
It's something they hold, quote-unquote, dogmatically.
We have this, I think, an awareness of this in popular language, too— I think that
it helps to explain One of the things that people find really frustrating and confounding and often confusing that the more they try to engage somebody who is believing in this way on some issue, the more entrenched it often becomes in the face of factual counter-evidence.
Does that make sense?
Am I on to anything?
Yeah, yeah.
And what you're saying leads to, I think, another very useful point that I think might alleviate a puzzle that a lot of people have.
The role that a religious credence, which is a species of groupish belief, group identity constituting belief, the role that it plays is to be a badge, an internal badge that can be variably expressed through behavior.
Of your group identity, okay?
As such, it should be distinctive.
So, of course, there's a distinction between attitude and content.
In principle, anything can be sacralized.
But generally, religious credences are taken towards contents that are a little bit distinctive or off-kilter or even outlandish, like all sorts of supernatural ideas in the various religions.
Explored pantheons from ancient Greek religions to Christianity to Hinduism and so on.
And these are not the sorts of ideas that you would just arrive at by straightforwardly rational processing.
But what I want to say is that in those cases, the bug is a feature, all right?
So if you say that there's an immortal being with wings on his ankles that flies around and leads people to the shadowy afterlife, that's going to be distinctive of a certain group of people.
If we tried to make a religion of the idea that cats like fish and grass is green, it's not distinctive at all.
And so the distinctiveness and the lack of responsiveness to evidence of religious credences They go hand in hand.
One way of maintaining contents in your allegiances that are distinctive and can help mark out an in-group is by having ideas that don't get updated in light of evidence.
If you have ideas that get updated or beliefs that get updated in light of evidence, then hey, it's going to be stuff that most anyone will believe.
All right?
Like there's water on the other side of the hill.
All right?
Anyone who goes on the other side of the hill is going to believe that.
But if you say, well, 2,000 years ago, a virgin had a baby, now that's the sort of thing that not everyone's going to say, so you get some distinctiveness out of that content.
So yeah, generally saying the sort of formation and maintenance of religious credences goes hand in hand with their identity-constituting characteristics.
So one of the things that I find interesting, and I think you know this, listeners know this, but one of the things I do is I work with people as a coach helping people process religious trauma.
And one of the things that a lot of people struggle with, I hear a lot of clients who say this is they have all, you know, quote unquote, deconstructed or deconverted or whatever.
Most of them, you know, some of them still identify as religious.
A lot of them don't and so forth.
But let's say that there's somebody who grew up in white American evangelicalism, everything that that is, all the core beliefs of that and so forth.
And they will all have a story of like why they're not there anymore.
And one of the things that many of them struggle with is they will ask me and they will say or they'll just articulate that they really struggle with why it is that they came to see these things as just not holding together, not cohering as false as whatever.
And people that they care about didn't.
Their family members don't or others don't.
Or you get the same conversation with people who leave sort of conspiracism and, you know, they will feel this sense of like, why was I, like, why did I, was I able to leave this and see this and these other people weren't?
And a hypothesis that I have, and I want to throw this out to you and see if this makes sense.
I think that there are some people for whom even those religious beliefs are, in fact, factual.
And they were open to factual counter-evidence.
And when that factual counter-evidence came along, as you said, they were factually mistaken.
And they listened to the evidence.
They're presented with new evidence.
They go off to college and they take their first class and learn about evolutionary theory and the story of a literal divine creation as told in Genesis just doesn't make sense to them anymore.
It no longer seems credible.
Or in my own case, I was a biblical studies major and studying the Bible made it so I could not be an inerrantist.
And I was responsive to the factual counter evidence and those for whom it continues to simply be, maybe I shouldn't say simply, I'm not trying to trivialize it, Those for whom it continues to be a credence are not responsive to that.
And this is where I find it's really complex and nuanced, but I think that it adds a dimension that can explain that even within some of those same groups, you will have people holding different cognitive attitudes toward these professed beliefs And then you get the social dynamics we know, which is when they start not believing it, they're no longer part of the group.
That comes along.
Yeah.
But does that make sense, this notion that they could have the same content but have these different attitudes to it, and that can help explain why some people abandon those beliefs, modify them, and others don't?
Yeah, I think that's certainly true.
And it's something that would be very tricky to get at empirically.
But I think that part of the whole point of the framework is for allowing people to articulate those sorts of differences.
And as we're talking here, you know, we all have...
You know, your audience is very familiar with the core stories and doctrines of Christianity.
You and I still have some attitude toward the idea of the resurrection.
It's just a different attitude from what we might have had before.
So let me, but let me come at this, this, this proposal you're making from a somewhat different angle.
So there's been a lot of psychological research done about climate change denial.
All right.
So, and it's very important.
And, but I think this is something where my framework can actually potentially be helpful.
So two researchers who are both important and influential, I mean, Michael Rainey and Dan And Michael Rainey has these experiments where he shows that if you show people the mechanism of climate change, how, you know, it gets absorbed in greenhouse gases, it's pretty cool, like people will increase their acceptance.
Dan Kahan has these experiments where he shows that people who are more science-informed, if they're conservative, you know, the more informed they are, the more of a denier they are.
And it's puzzling.
Like, how could these two results coexist?
And one thing I think you can say is, If there are some people who are just, you know, not that well-informed, they might just factually believe that climate change hasn't been proven, all right?
Well, if they factually believe that due to poor information or misinformation, they'll update in light of evidence, okay?
But if you have a groupish belief or an ideological credence that climate change hasn't been proven, Then you're going to cling to it come what may, and you're going to see more, for lack of a better term, Dan Kahan type facts, okay?
So when you're talking to someone who holds that climate change hasn't been proving, and I've done this, right?
You kind of have to suss out, is this part of their identity group?
Type allegiance to that idea, in which case they're going to, unless you're very clever at jogging them out of their ideological mindset, it's going to be very hard to make progress.
Or are they just, you know, essentially deceived by the false controversy, which certain media circles have done?
And I remember, you know, I had one friend who thought that climate change hadn't been proven, and I, you know, We went over the various evidence and he was like, oh, okay.
Whereas another friend, you know, more Republican leaning, just to be frank about it, you know, it's sort of like...
Come what may, in terms of evidence, he's just gonna keep claiming that it hasn't been proven and, you know, use various strategies for that.
So same content that climate change hasn't been proven, different attitudes toward that content.
And you're gonna have to have different strategies.
For dealing with them.
And so I think it can be the case that, and maybe it was like this for me, that when you grow up, you hear about these events by going to church, by going to Bible class.
I went to a Christian school, Oakdale Christian School, shout out in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
And you maybe just start out by simply factually believing, well, this is stuff that happened Methuselah lived to 900 plus.
Well, that's pretty remarkable.
And so on.
And in a way, it's like you're not getting what's actually being done here.
And so if you're kind of building up this reservoir of factual beliefs...
It's going to be much more vulnerable when you start comparing it to evidence because that's what we're prone to do.
You know, humans are in many realms quite rational creatures.
And if you have a web of factual beliefs about something, it's very vulnerable to evidence.
And so then things start to come crashing down, whereas it's sort of like people who stay with the religion.
One, they might just need the group identity more.
But they might also kind of have gotten into the right, in quotation marks, of course, psychological frame of mind.
And I think that's, I mean, one thing you can do, I mean, I don't mean to tell you how to work with your clients, but I mean, maybe one thing I would say if someone asked me that is sort of like, well, pretend for a minute you're out of play.
You're watching Hamlet.
I mean, and some guy comes along as like, that guy's not really Hamlet.
That's not really Hamlet's mom.
It's like, shut up.
This is not what we're doing here.
And what you can say to someone is, look, the person who maintains Jesus died and rose from the dead is no more interested in evidence than I mean, some religious apologists decide because they're kind of weird.
But most regular religious practitioners are no more interested in evidence for that proposition than you are when you go see Hamlet are interested in the idea that this guy up on the stage is a Danish prince.
That's not why you're there.
You're there to have a different kind of experience.
Yeah.
I think, I really, I think this is a, for me, a really useful idea and has been for really trying to think through, you know, some of these kinds of issues.
You bring up the issue of evidence.
I have one more sort of weird, this is one of these, as I say, very half-baked kind of, you know, intuitions that I have.
I'm working to, you know, to turn it into more than an intuition, but...
This is how ideas start for me.
But, you know, one of the things, so if I say, if I teach my intro to world religions class, one of the first assignments I do is, you know, I just tell students to come up with a definition of religion.
They're not graded on whether it's right or wrong.
It can't be either.
But it just, you know, it gets them to think about it.
And oftentimes they will say, this is a part of popular culture, this is a part of a lot of things.
And I hear echoes of it in what you're saying.
They will often contrast religion with science.
I'm not asking about science, but science always comes in somewhere.
And they will say, science is about facts and religion isn't.
Or science is about evidence and religion isn't.
Or, as you say, factual believing is about responsive to evidence or counter-evidence.
And Credence isn't.
But I can hear a person saying, well, yeah, but what about other kinds of things?
And so I think there's another piece of this is what functions as evidence for the person who believes.
And what I'm thinking about is this, because part of what I think, and not totally without reason, but again, I'm not ready to write a book on it, Is that I think that sometimes for people, the way that a belief makes them feel is taken as a sign of its truth or falsity.
So, for example, I was talking with somebody the other day who they pick fights on Twitter with, you know, people, the Christian apologists.
And somebody said, you know, if God doesn't exist, there's no objective basis for morality.
Now, we could have, like, ethical arguments about that and whatever, but for the sake of argument, let's say that, okay, if God doesn't exist, there's no objective basis for morality.
In my view, it in no way follows from that that God exists or that there's an ethical basis for morality.
Like, the one doesn't.
But I think for lots of people, it's incredibly terrifying to think that there may not be An objective basis for morality, or they find great comfort in the idea that there is an objective basis for morality, or people for whom the idea that we have some sort of ongoing conscious existence after death is incredibly comforting, or maybe that the loved one who they just lost, that they will see them again someday and so forth.
I can't imagine.
I've had these conversations with people who say, well, everything you say about biology and science is true, but I can feel the truth of this.
This sense that the way it makes them feel is a form of evidence.
How or do you respond to that?
Or are people just doing different things if somebody's quote-unquote evidence is simply beyond the realm of the factual, the empirical, the phenomenologist will say the intersubjectively available evidence?
Does that make any sense?
Because I think there are people for whom they would say, no, no, no, I've got evidence for my beliefs.
It's these kinds of things.
Yeah, yeah.
There are a few points to make here.
Yeah.
One is, I think there's just a sort of winking way that the word evidence is being used.
I mean, if you were in court and you were to say, you know, well, if Proposition P weren't true...
Then a bunch of bad stuff would follow.
Therefore, P must be true.
Excuse me?
Maybe the bad stuff is true.
Maybe that's just the world we live in.
The ethics example, maybe we've all just got to muddle along and do the best we can to get along because there is no objective basis of morality or whatever, yeah.
I mean, we can come to that topic.
I had a long conversation with a Christian friend recently on that exact topic, but it's sort of like there's this, you know, the belief makes me feel good and that's evidence for it.
Well, Believing I'm a billionaire might make me feel good for a little while, at least.
But guess what?
That ain't evidence, right?
I wish it was.
I'd start believing it real hard.
The bank account records, which show quite the contrary, are the evidence.
So there's a winking way of using evidence.
And then the other thing to say is this, and this gets a little bit more into the technical weeds.
But I don't say that religious credence attitudes can't be formed in response to things that seem like evidence.
The crucial difference, and this is a difference between factual beliefs and secondary cognitive attitudes generally, Is the conditions under which you give them up.
Or it's not even a voluntary thing.
The conditions under which they go extinguished.
Let me explain what I mean.
You might hold...
You might hypothesize a certain idea on the basis of having some evidence.
You might have some evidence for something that you assume for the sake of argument.
So just holding...
Attitudes with some evidence in their favor isn't really distinctive.
It doesn't separate factual beliefs from even imagining.
So in some sense, when I'm watching the guy play Hamlet on the stage, there's some very weak, minimal evidence in favor of the idea that that's Hamlet, if he can act well.
Okay?
The question is, does one have a sort of involuntary proneness to reject an idea if there's contrary evidence?
All right?
So take the supermarket example.
I mean, factually believing the supermarket is open until 8 and then you go there at 7.30 and you see the closed sign, poof, it's extinguished.
Whereas your secondary cognitive attitude, that's a technical term of mine, like imagining, hypothesizing, and so on and so forth, can be maintained even if the evidence that you've taken in is completely contrary.
All right?
So, in a sense, when it comes to distinguishing religious credence from factual belief, one contrary argument that I get is like, oh, well, religious credences are held on the basis of evidence.
Now, I find that a little bit implausible in any case.
But that's not even the correct question when we're trying to distinguish what attitude they are.
It's, would they be given up if there were strong contrary evidence?
And it's pretty clear that there are many religious attitudes, which I call religious credences, which are not automatically prone to being given up, even when there's strong contrary evidence.
Okay, so those are my two points.
It's sort of like a winking sort of different way of talking about evidence, and then also there's a difference in attitude type on the extinction side more than on the formation side, if you follow that point.
Yeah, I think I do, and I think that it brings up an interesting point.
You know, a couple more things, I think, to talk about here.
One is, I think, and do you think people can be mistaken about the attitude they have?
Can people think that they, you know, in fact, if they had counter-evidence, they would give up their belief, that they have it based on evidence?
And it turns out they don't.
I mean, can people misunderstand, I guess, the nature of their own belief?
And the reason I ask is I cannot tell you how many times I've had conversations with people who I think, honestly think, they are open to being persuaded about something.
Maybe it's a deeply held political view, maybe it's a religious view, whatever.
And you bring all the evidence you can, you make your case, you know, whatever, and then It turns out that it's just not going to matter.
But I think that there are people who really think that they're open to being persuaded.
They're open to factual counter evidence.
And then they're not.
The sort of, you know, the kind of extinguishing mark, it turns out the bar is way higher.
Right.
It keeps moving.
It keeps moving.
Yeah, the goalpost move.
So to mix my sports metaphors here, is that is that a phenomenon?
Do you think that people can be mistaken about their own?
I mean, people don't sit around thinking about their cognitive attitudes to beliefs, but the people can think that they are persuadable or that they are responsive to evidence when, in fact, they're not.
Yeah, I would say.
People can be wrong about anything, even their own minds.
Perhaps I should say, especially their own minds.
And that happens most of all when there's social pressure to do so.
If it's part of the religious narrative that You, in order to be a member of the group, have to have a certain kind of belief, then you're much more likely to be wrong about it.
Now, let me take a step back, though.
I don't think that kind of confusion is the default.
And my reason for thinking this is the linguistic studies I was talking about before.
And it's very noticeable that people attribute factual belief Intuitively using different vocabulary from religious beliefs.
So if you give people, this is a quick and dirty summary of some of the studies that I did with, you know, a few colleagues.
So Larissa Heifetz, Casey Landers, Kara Weissman, and Tanya Lerman.
Lerman, author of When God Talks Back and How God Becomes Real.
Great collaboration I was very lucky to have.
If you give people fill in the blanks like, you know, Jeff blanks that George Washington was a U.S. president versus Jeff blanks that Jesus rose from the dead, if you give a forced choice between thinks and believes, People will overwhelmingly tend to use thanks in the matter-of-fact context.
Jeff thinks that George Washington was a U.S. president versus Jeff believes that Jesus rose from the dead.
And this, I don't want to go into all the weeds of it, but we controlled for a lot of different things.
And we also did it with vignettes that hold content fixed but vary the context.
So that we kind of really do our best to show that the differential vocabulary choice that people use in ascribing religious attitudes versus matter-of-fact attitudes is best explained by saying that they're intuitively attuned to To a difference between religious belief and factual belief.
And this shows up in people's norms as well in a sort of subtle way.
So lots of people hold the view that you shouldn't push your beliefs on other people.
Well, guess what?
If I factually believe that your house is on fire, I'd better push it on you.
And if I'm wrong, then I'll be corrected, but I'd better do that.
If you factually believe that my car is overheating, you should confront my factual belief to the contrary, because we live in a shared world.
And so when people have this kind of normative view, and many people have this, and even people of a certain religion say, well, it's personal to me.
I'm not going to push it on anyone else.
It's personal to me.
They're tacitly and intuitively Drawing the same sort of distinction that I draw at a theoretical level.
And you have to kind of remind people, the thing about factual beliefs is most people, you kind of take them for granted.
You don't think of yourself as having the factual belief that Atlanta's in Georgia.
You don't think about that belief.
You just think with it for like how to get to Atlanta if you're driving from some other state.
Okay, so importantly, to see the distinction, you have to remind people that they have all these factual beliefs in the first place.
And then once they see it, they were like, oh, I was kind of focusing on the religious credences all along.
But, so I think kind of the default is that people are pretty subtle, like psychologists, intuitive theory of mind.
It's not really bad, but it can be thrown off if there are norms in your social context for what kind of belief you're supposed to have.
So if you're an evangelical Christian in an inerrantist tradition, it might be some kind of social norm that you're supposed to be certain.
about all these Christian stories and doctrines.
And maybe you don't really feel that certain.
Yep.
And maybe you feel guilty that you don't feel all that certain.
So you start trying to convince yourself that you really are.
And that's a recipe for confusion about your own mind.
I talk about that in the epilogue a little bit, but I do think in ideological contexts, not just in Religious ones.
But you're not only pressured to do certain things, you're pressured to believe certain things.
And when those ideological beliefs stand athwart evidence, you face this unsettling and fearful thought that maybe the kind of belief I have isn't enough or isn't the right kind.
Or I have this nagging suspicion that it's not true.
And that sets you up for doing, psychologically, precisely the thing that you describe, which is having confused or distorted or just wrong metacognition about the cognitive attitude that you do have.
So I think maybe one thing that I hope comes out of my book is just being a better tool for self-knowledge and say, hey, look, Maybe I am committed to this idea, but it's more of a religious credence.
Maybe it's more hopeful.
Maybe it's more aspirational.
Maybe it is what I use to find who's in my community.
And that's okay, but I'm not going to lie to myself about how I'm relating to these ideas.
Yeah.
I've got so many directions I'd like to go, but I know we're getting short on time, so let me just pick one thing.
Well, I'm happy to hang out.
Yeah, I know.
It's your podcast.
It's your podcast.
Yeah, I know.
It's like, we could go, like, forever on this.
I mean, one is just, so I'll tell lots of stories, and sorry, folks, you're going to get another Dan story.
And I might have shared this in one of the episodes I do on the series, It's in the Code, but for me, it perfectly illustrates part of what you're talking about.
So I was a pastor, once upon a time, of a small church, two pastors.
I was the junior pastor.
There was a senior pastor.
And churches, like small churches like that are volunteer organizations.
We had this kind of work weekend where parishioners would come in and I and the pastor and this other couple people were like painting this room.
And the pastor starts this conversation, and he's asking folks—I've got all kinds of issues with this anyway—but, you know, what would really make you question, you know, sort of your faith?
I was like, okay.
And I was trying to avoid answering this.
He's being very pastoral.
And he asks me, and I'm like, God, this guy's like, he's supposed to be my boss, slash this, slash that, whatever.
And I was trying to avoid it.
I was like, eh, nah.
And he kept—he turned it into this, like, forced choice.
In front of these other parishioners, what would make you...
And I finally said, and this for me was a factual thing, I said, if what certain scholars of the Hebrew Bible in particular say about the formation of the Hebrew Bible and the texts were written hundreds of years later than the events they describe and so forth, if all of that were accurate for me, and it did, it caused to topple down a certain view of the Bible, I said, I guess that would be...
An issue for me.
I'd have to really, really reevaluate kind of what faith is.
And the pastor then again in front of the parishioners says to me, well, in this church, we affirm the truth of the Bible.
And any pastor here is going to affirm that.
And it was like right there on the surface of if you don't, you're not part of this group.
And not only that, you'd be unemployed or whatever.
Yeah, yeah.
But it was this really interesting, as I reflect on it now, obviously I didn't think about it in those terms, but I remember as I read your book, I'm like, wow, here's this concretization of that dynamic.
And I think what you're also getting into, these are connected for me, The cost, oftentimes, of abandoning or modifying those kinds of beliefs.
We talk about groupish beliefs.
We talk about identity.
People often are going to lose their social network if they don't continue to have or to at least affirm to say that they have those beliefs.
They might be estranged from family.
They might, you know, there's just all kinds of really, really high, often social costs that come with that.
Yeah.
And that's a huge pressure.
Yeah.
To insulate those from, I think, factual evidence.
Yeah, and I think that relates to some of the sociological literature on deconversion.
The long and short of it is people tend to deconvert when they're ready to leave the group for moral reasons or social reasons or whatever.
And it's usually not, I mean, you know, with respect to what we were talking about earlier, some people may do it due to evidence, but usually it is for social reasons.
And one thing to say about all this is, like, humans are weird creatures.
Like, you know, there's lots of creatures on Earth that are coalitional, bees, chimpanzees, all sorts of creatures, zebras, the fun packs, and so on.
But we do so on the basis of these internal psychological states.
Like if you have the same kind of emotion, and I go into the psychological elements of group identity more in my book, but a lot of group identity is sort of like, well, do you have the same psychological profile as I do?
If so, we can break bread.
And it's kind of like interesting and fascinating and kind of cool.
Like if I meet someone who loves Shakespeare, like I love Shakespeare, immediately there's a bit of a bond there.
But then it can also result in some kind of bullying.
Since you told the story, I'll tell a quick one as well.
At First Christian Reformed Church, Grand Rapids, Michigan, growing up, there were the cadets, that was like the analog of the Boy Scouts, and the Calvinettes.
That was the analog of the Girl Scouts.
I mean, like, if you just think about that, we actually call, like, Girl Scouts Calvinettes.
Okay, so that already says something right there.
But there was a day of skits, and I remember the one that I remember the most of these skits is, like, there's a chair representing a fence in the middle of the room, and then there's a guy who's playing Jesus on one side, and a guy who's playing the devil on the other side, and then there's this guy who's kind of Not sure where to go.
He's standing on the chair.
And at the end of it, the Jesus character says, well, then you can go with him because on the fence goes to the devil.
And I was almost thinking about calling a book or a paper.
Maybe I still should write a paper just called On the Fence Goes to the Devil.
But yeah, that's kind of a similar situation where...
People are using the beliefs not as a means of describing objective facts about the world, but as a way of defining who they are and to whom they belong.
Yeah.
Which is a very different kind of attitude.
Yeah.
I think that's a really, really great point.
This will be the last direction I go here.
Go for it.
Yeah.
Sometimes we have an interest, whether it's a personal interest, maybe it's a social or societal interest in, you know, contesting some of these things.
And I'm thinking about, you know, I do some teaching on conspiracism and you can read all the books on conspiracy theory and they'll always be the thing about, you know, engaging people who are like really in it, who are really in the conspiracy theory.
If I were to map that onto your work, I would say these are people for whom these are strongly held credences.
They are not open to factual sort of counter-information and so forth.
And there's a lot of debate in some of that literature about whether or not it is even profitable to try to engage with those folks.
And of course, it's often hugely emotionally loaded.
It's people who, you know, their families are in this, or maybe they're spending all their money and giving it to organizations that are sort of preying on this or whatever.
Or, you know, questions, I, you know, people often, I've had people asked to debate me, you know, they want to debate theology with me or something.
And I have to, I have to gauge, I'm like, do I think it's, there's actually any point in doing that?
Or is it, is it a, like a stacked deck?
Because I'm going to be persuadable, I hope, and they're absolutely not.
And I guess my question for you is, I know you've thought about this some.
Do we engage?
Like, if we really have a strong disagreement or a strong interest in trying to move somebody from some position and they are in that space or occupying that kind of cognitive attitude where they simply are not going to respond to facts like, How do we engage them?
Can we engage them?
Should we bother engaging them?
Is it a lost cause to engage?
And you talked about this a little bit, you know, even the client, but is that something you've thought about or something that you've pondered at all?
Or, yeah, what are your thoughts on that?
I ponder it all the time, and I think it's not very easy.
And I think, for starters, hopefully my work can just help people gauge the situation that they're looking at.
Absolutely.
You know, if it's just someone who is misled about the facts of, you know, what happened in 2020, I actually did talk to someone about that recently who didn't know about the fake electors scheme.
I mean, that's, you know, that's something that happened.
And, you know, people have been convicted in Michigan and a couple have pleaded guilty already in Georgia.
She simply didn't know, and that was maybe a problem with her informational environment, but was more than happy to learn.
So let's assume she probably had some other false factual beliefs and that got updated.
And then you can kind of just keep a normal tone of voice.
But I think maybe that's the main thing, is whether, if you're dealing with someone who has contrary factual beliefs, like, keep your cool.
Just keep presenting the evidence in a normal way.
And I think also, if you're trying to challenge someone who holds a conspiracy theory or some religious ideas as, like, part of their identity, The trick that I think is not necessarily going to work, but one thing that you should have in your back pocket and maybe start with it and try to maintain it, is don't you get all identity groupish on them?
Like if someone says, you know, I believe in young earth creationism.
If you say, well, I believe in science...
All of a sudden there's antagonism.
Whereas if you just keep your cool about presenting the evidence, then all of a sudden you're not a threat.
So I think the key thing is if you are going to engage, don't make yourself a threat.
And one little tip perhaps that might be helpful is Use the word think instead of believe.
So it, you know, I've pointed this out in other interviews.
So sorry if you've heard this before, but I'll repeat it again.
If you say, well, I don't think that there are any gods in the world.
I think it's just the world.
It sounds less threatening to a religious identity than if you say, I don't believe in God.
Because if you say, I don't believe in God, it feels like it's part of who you are that they're wrong.
Whereas if you just say what you think, you just say what you think.
So I think that's the way to do it, is it's almost like Keep your cool while the other person is getting heated.
I'm not guaranteeing it's going to work, but you'll be more likely to make progress.
One of my friend's father-in-law was a judge in Belgium, and he always said, the person who stays rational longest wins.
So, but part of staying rational is the keeping the cool aspect.
Anyway, that's the best I can offer your audience.
Hopefully it's a little bit helpful, but it's not as easy and by design to get people to update their religious credences as their factual beliefs.
And that's just a, I mean, as far as I can tell, that's just a fact of the world.
Yeah.
Well, another thing that I've played with a couple times in conversations, and it sounds a bit weird, but, you know, I've been focusing a lot on emotion and affect and the role of, you know, those and credence.
And shifting from offering counter evidence to it, there have been a couple conversations I had with folks where I would have said instead of, you know, why do you believe that?
Or what about this?
Or I think, you know, I've said, you know, something like, you know, it's interesting to think that, but I'll say, What would it mean for you if that weren't the case?
And really, because trying to kind of get it at what I think is the driving force behind it, because I think sometimes it's not the belief itself, but that can be a slow process.
But a couple times people have been like, oh, I've never kind of thought of that.
Just trying to bring forward even for them That there's more than just belief going on.
And that may go to people who maybe, as you were saying earlier, are confused about their own mind.
They think they're persuadable, but they're not.
But asking somebody...
I don't know.
In my mind, as I think about this, people ask me all the time, how do you engage or how does one engage this?
And there's no, as far as I can tell, no great magic wand answer for doing that.
But it's one that I've been thinking about a lot lately of, you know, if part of what drives this is emotion, group identity, senses of belonging, the threat of the loss of that, trying to bring that into view for the people who experience that to even recognize for themselves that that's the real issue, that that's the thing that's going on.
Don't be the person who goes in the theater and is like, there's no evidence that that guy's really Hamlet.
Be aware that something else is going on here.
So, you know, another question I think you can ask is, you can ask someone, well, what is more in the religious case, but what does that belief do for you in your life?
And that, you know, encourages a certain amount of reflections.
Yeah.
Well, thank you.
I really, I could go forever on this, but I won't.
Yeah.
Can I put in one little plug for the book?
Do it.
Absolutely.
I don't ask people to buy the book, but I do suggest to people that you can call or fill in an online form or some other form at your local public library.
And I have, you know...
Friends and even a couple of fans who have had some success in getting the libraries to stock the book.
Religion as Make Believe is the main title of it, Theory of Belief, Imagination and Group Identity.
And I would love to, at no cost to your listeners, love to hear about some more successes in getting them in local public libraries.
I think that would be a really great way of increasing access to it and related scholarship as well, if that crosses people's minds.
Yeah, I love that.
I use, you know, I live in a pretty nerdy part of the world.
I live in Amherst, Massachusetts.
So I love our library system and, yeah, absolutely affirm that.
I know a lot of other academics listening, they're already telling their libraries to get these, you know.
But yeah, I think that there are a lot of great public library systems.
And I think in most places, maybe your book won't even get banned.
Hopefully.
So maybe that's a good thing.
But yeah, so again, Professor Neil Van Leeuwen joining us, talking about the ideas in his book, Religion As Make Believe.
