Van Leeuwen’s Thesis

Neil Van Leeuwen’s Religion as Make-Believe: A Theory of Belief, Imagination, and Group Identity is an insightful contribution to the expanding debate on the cognitive science of belief and religion. His central thesis is twofold. First, religious states originate from imagination or make-believe, similar to the kind of imaginative activity children take part in when making up contents—personalities, powers, supernatural features, etc.—for their toys and play-scenarios. This makes religious states highly similar to imagined states.¹ Second, religious states are held with a different attitude than that of factually believing, an attitude van Leeuwen terms “religious credence,” akin to what others would call “faith.” Preliminarily, we could say that religious credence roughly consists of willingly adopting propositions and acting as if they were true. Importantly, this state is not one of merely entertaining false propositions for the sake of amusement (propositions that might later come to have a life of their own): religious credences are often central to a person’s identity, and subjects often take them profoundly seriously.

Admittedly, Religion as Make-Believe is prone to overgeneralizations. The book leaves the reader with the impression that Van Leeuwen’s claims apply to all religious states, all the time. On the one hand, we certainly disagree with this overgeneralization. For example, some religious states are clearly factual beliefs, a possibility that, as we will see, Van Leeuwen rejects. Examples are “Muhammad and his followers fled to Medina in 622 CE” or “the pope is the main authority in the Catholic Church.”² On the other hand, however, we argue that Van Leeuwen’s points are not generalized enough. As a matter of fact, we believe that (some of) the features Van Leeuwen attributes to religion are far from limited to this dimension of life and are actually features of states central to all worldviews (be they moral, political, aesthetic, etc.). The takeaway claim of this commentary is therefore the following: we do not disagree with Van Leeuwen’s framework per se, but with its extension, or application. Let us start by summarizing the main claims of the book.

The book begins with a long (and surprisingly detailed) prologue, describing the adventures of Cleo, John, Kevin, and Misha. As children, the four of them played with dolls, gradually creating more and more complex imaginary scenarios in which these dolls interacted. Eventually, through various twists and turns, the group begins to suspiciously resemble a religious group, with a religious experience at its origin, a sacred text, and specific rituals. Convinced of the good that what they created could bring to the world, The Playground—as the group is now called—starts spreading their teachings. The metaphor is on the nose but effective: the story of The Playground is supposed to sketch how, according to Van Leeuwen, religions develop out of a practice of make-believe.

Chapter 1 clarifies the main theoretical remarks that emerge from this story. Van Leeuwen’s main point could be summarized as follows: factually believing—the attitude that we have towards the everyday material world—should be distinguished both from fictional imagining and religious credence, the two central religious attitudes. The chapter ends with the claim that “anything can be sacralized,” i.e., anything can become an object of religious credence. This is an important remark that we believe Van Leeuwen does not properly develop. We will come back to this point later.

Chapter 2 defines “factually believing” in greater detail. Van Leeuwen describes factual beliefs as having four key properties:

• involuntary

• non-compartmentalized

• evidentially vulnerable

• cognitive governance.

Involuntariness refers to the fact that one cannot voluntarily choose one’s factual beliefs. Non-compartmentalization refers to the fact that factual beliefs guide our actions independently of any change in practical setting. If I move the same chair from one room to another, for example, my understanding of the chair does not change. Evidential vulnerability, then, indicates that factual beliefs are responsive to evidence, both positively and negatively. Finally, factual beliefs have cognitive governance in the sense that they determine the information background upon which other faculties (e.g., imagining or thinking) rely. Religious states would lack all four properties. In the words of Van Leeuwen (2023, 62): “Factual beliefs are the basis on which we choose, extend, and evaluate the other cognitive attitudes: factual beliefs are thus conditions for the possibility of having and using the other maps—the other cognitive attitudes.”

Chapter 3 explores what distinguishes factual belief from religious credence. Van Leeuwen starts by stating that his is a “two-map theory” of religion: factual belief is the more fundamental cognitive map on which religion, a secondary cognitive map, depends. This second “layer” is a product of make-believe, Van Leeuwen tells us, and is characterized by an attitude of religious credence. The first factual layer continues to shape and constrain the second layer. For example, a religious state may be that Jonah survived inside a whale for three days. The state depends on a first factual layer containing various beliefs regarding whales and human survival. The state adds a second “imagined” layer where the subject imagines the prophet being swallowed as punishment by God. The religious state mainly pertains to the second mapping but crucially relies on the first. This is highly similar to how pretend child’s play is constrained by the physical properties of toys and the environment.

The main claim of chapter 4 is that religious credence is an attitude that exists and should be distinguished from factual beliefs. The extension of religious credence—i.e., in what kinds of worldviews it can be found—appears to be a surprisingly secondary concern for Van Leeuwen. Chapter 5 argues that religious credence is a cognitively specific kind of “believing” and that this is one of the senses in which people use the word “belief,” even though they might not be aware of it.

Chapter 6 is, in our opinion, the turning point of Religion as Make-Believe. Here, Van Leeuwen argues that religion is normally a matter of group identity. A big part of this chapter is dedicated to determining what “groupish beliefs” and group identity are and how they relate to each other. The details are not relevant to our evaluation of Van Leeuwen’s work. What matters for us is the relvelation in this chapter that religious “belief” behaves as it does because religion is often a matter of group identity. This “groupish” nature of religious states appears to distinguish them from pretend child’s play and other forms of imagination.

Chapter 7 deals with the role of values in religious contexts, and specifically argues that their often puzzling role can be explained by reference to religious credence.

Finally, in chapter 8, Van Leeuwen proposes his framework as a solution to the “puzzle of religious rationality,” i.e., the fact that despite being, for the largest part, impressively rational creatures, humans hold religious beliefs that appear to often have irrational contents or behave irrationally. The following sections discuss Van Leeuwen’s treatment of religious rationality in greater detail.

Credences and Hinges

Let us now move on to our main critique of Van Leeuwen’s work. As noted, Van Leeuwen argues that religious states are different from factual beliefs with regard to four properties:

• involuntariness

• cognitive governance

• no compartmentalization

• evidential vulnerability

Whereas factual beliefs have all four, religious states do not.

Another central property of these states not included in the list is their “groupish” nature. As discussed, Van Leeuwen states in chapter 6 that religious credence is a product of group thinking and can be found in contexts in which group identity takes a central role. We can therefore safely assume, despite Van Leeuwen’s lack of clarity on this point, that religious credence is not unique to religion and can be found in all identity-focused worldviews. Conspiracy theories, politics, sports, and perhaps even certain academic fields can then be prone to “religious” credence.

At various points in the text, Van Leeuwen gives the reader the impression that this generalization can be taken further. For example, he claims that “[identity centrality] apparently involves the positing of another attitude type altogether [i.e., religious credence]” (Van Leeuwen 2023, 228). On the next page, he argues that “[religious credence] is ‘strong’ in the sense of centrality to one’s identity” (Van Leeuwen 2023, 229). This subtle shift from “group identity” to “identity centrality” (whether Van Leeuwen intended it to be a shift or not) is insightful. Specifically, we believe it opens the door to the possibility of religious credence being unique to neither religion nor “groupish beliefs”: religious credence might be the attitude one has towards any belief central to one’s identity in general. Let us explore this possibility further.

A similar tying of some states to identity is the main concern of the developing research field of hinge epistemology. “Hinges”—a concept extrapolated from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s On Certainty (1969)—are surprisingly slippery epistemic entities, and epistemologists are currently debating what they specifically consist in (cf. Moyal-Sharrock 2022). One idea that emerged from the debate is that certain beliefs can become central to a person’s worldview and identity, and by doing so they stop being “beliefs” and become “hinges.” The main outcome of this transition is that the belief-turned-hinge becomes invulnerable to evidence: by assuming a central position in our worldview, the hinge functions as an unquestionable, indubitable assumption or certainty; that is, by turning into a hinge, the belief becomes a starting point for our reasoning and acting in the world, and as such is largely taken for granted.³ We could concede to Van Leeuwen that religious beliefs might be more prone to becoming hinges than other classes of states. However, in theory, any belief can become central to a person’s identity and thus assume this peculiar a-evidential status: “God exists” and “God does not exist”; “humans have been to the moon” and “humans have not been to the moon”; “religion is make-believe” and “religion is not make-believe”; etc. As Van Leeuwen (2023, 27) puts it, “anything can be sacralized.”

Hinge epistemology, then, suggests that the lack of evidential vulnerability Van Leeuwen attributes to religious credences has nothing to do with religion and actually concerns our core “beliefs” in general. This is confirmed by the fact that many religious beliefs are responsive to evidence, contrary to what Van Leeuwen claims (think, for example, of beliefs regarding the lives of the apostles or the belief that Christmas is celebrated on December 25th).⁴ Hinge epistemology suggests that this is the case because they have a more marginal role in a person’s worldview and are therefore open for revision. We could say that they are held with less fervor. Them being “religious” has nothing to do with whether or not they can be revised on the basis of evidence.

We believe evidential vulnerability is the central feature of Van Leeuwen’s account of religious credence. This feature is the one he spends the most time on and, we would argue, is the most credible. We therefore believe that the symmetry between the evidential invulnerability of Van Leeuwen’s religious credence and that of hinges is the most telling. However, the parallel between hinges and religious credence appears to demand a more radical restructuring of Van Leeuwen’s proposal. Let us then consider how this parallel affects the other three features of religious credence, starting with involuntariness.

According to Wittgenstein, many hinges can, in theory, be given up. However, he also remarks that, during our upbringing, we internalize all sorts of beliefs that become “constitutive” of our existence (e.g., Wittgenstein 1969, 143). This is not necessarily a matter of indoctrination: all of us inevitably absorb all sorts of “certainties” from our surroundings, through school, our parents, our community, the internet, and so on. Such certainties can include “Jesus died for our sins,” but also “religion is infantile,” “I am a human,” and “my name is Neil Van Leeuwen.” Importantly, these hinges we internalize during our upbringing are not chosen and, if they have become central enough to one’s life, cannot be voluntarily given up (think, for example, of an older person’s incapability to change their habits). Does this defeat “involuntariness”? Not necessarily. Van Leeuwen could, for example, still argue that these internalized beliefs can in theory be given up and are thus “voluntary.” Fair enough. It must be admitted, however, that this would be a somewhat abstruse use of the word “voluntary.” We thus suggest that the parallel with hinges demands, at the bare minimum, a rethinking of the “involuntariness” criterion. If we are correct, all “beliefs” have the potential to be passively soaked up and become so central to who we are that their “giveupability” might be theoretically possible but practically unthinkable—that is, they have the potential to be “involuntary,” or “voluntary” in a very peculiar sense of the word. And, as noted previously, whether they are religious or not has little to no influence on this process.

Next, what about “compartmentalization”? Van Leeuwen argues that while factual beliefs guide action across the board, religious credences do not. Religious states are instead confined to (ritual) settings in which they become activated. Now, most hinges do not appear to have this compartmentalization. Standard examples of hinges like “there is an external world” or “I have been existing for longer than five minutes” continuously govern our actions independent of the practical setting. But what about religious hinges? Some religious hinges like “God exists” or “the Qur’an contains the guidelines for life” are clearly not easily “switched off,” contrary to what Van Leeuwen states: if they truly are core commitments (hinges), they impact a person’s life at multiple levels, not just on Sunday at mass or on Friday during Jumah. It is true, some religious hinges do not have a wide-reaching impact. For example, “the Eucharist is the body of Christ” only gets “activated” when the Eucharist is seen or mentioned. The same goes, for example, for “snakes are demonic.” However, this is the case for all our core commitments. The hinge “my name is Neil Van Leeuwen” is only activated, for example, when that hinge becomes relevant. States that are central to our identity can therefore be more or less wide-reaching, and this seems to have nothing to do with their religiosity. The same goes for their compartmentalization: core “beliefs” (hinges) are never compartmentalized, whether religious or not; and if they are, they are simply not truly central to our identity.

Finally, let us turn to “cognitive governance.” According to Van Leeuwen, factual beliefs are the material, unalterable substrate that religious credences ultimately depend on. Factual beliefs are, in other words, a first cognitive map, and religion is an imagined, second map that is superimposed, yet dependent, on the first one. Hinge epistemology suggests a different picture. Specifically, it suggests that hinges determine the “first map,” the substrate that other beliefs must adapt to, rather than factual beliefs. Does this contradict Van Leeuwen’s claim? Not necessarily. As a matter of fact, many examples of factual beliefs proposed by Van Leeuwen are quintessential examples of hinges. One of On Certainty’s main claims is that “there is an external world” is an unquestionable certainty, and so are many related claims, such as “there is a chair in front of me.”⁵ Our point then is not that Van Leeuwen’s factual beliefs are not part of the first map but rather that this first map can also include other beliefs that one takes for granted and that every other belief must adapt to. For some religious people, for example, every other belief must adapt to the hinge “God exists,” or “the Qur’an is the word of God” and cannot contradict it. Similarly, for some atheists, every belief must adapt to “only matter exists” and cannot contradict it. Van Leeuwen’s claim that only factual beliefs have cognitive governance over other beliefs should be questioned in light of the “foundational” role other beliefs can play in people’s lives.

One feature of Van Leeuwen’s religious credence remains yet unaccounted for: its “groupish” character. It must be admitted that not all hinges can provide a basis for this feature. We believe two options are available to overcome this challenge. The first—our preferred option—is to decouple religious credence from group thinking and group behavior. We argue that, as hinge epistemology suggests, “religious credence” is as much a group phenomenon as it is an individual phenomenon. If this is correct, then what we have said so far is sufficient to correct Van Leeuwen’s account. A second option would be to restrict the hinges that are to substitute Van Leeuwen’s religious credence to those hinges that are more likely to become central to a group’s identity. Let us call them “groupish hinges” (see Mion 2023). This is a concession in Van Leeuwen’s direction. However, it should be clear, these groupish hinges would be far from restricted to religion. “God exists” and “God does not exist,” “religion is dangerous” and “religion is not dangerous,” and “carbonara should be made with pecorino cheese” and “carbonara should be made with Swiss gruyere cheese” are all, arguably, groupish hinges.⁶

In the epilogue of Religion as Make-Believe Van Leeuwen (2023, 232) claims that “there is every reason to be confident that religious credence, in a form at least something like I’ve characterized it, exists. The question is how widespread it is.” In this section, we have proposed the following answer: religious credence does indeed exist, and it can be found in any worldview ever in relation to one’s core beliefs, or hinges. As should be clear, this is not a critique of Van Leeuwen’s proposal but rather a call to reframe it in a way that does not unjustifiably single out religious worldviews. We have suggested what such a reframing might look like: not all core “beliefs,” or hinges, are vulnerable to evidence, potentially involuntary, non-compartmentalized, or have cognitive governance. Whether they are religious, factual, both, or neither is largely irrelevant.

Let us now turn to how the parallel between hinge epistemology and religious credence might affect Van Leeuwen’s solution to the “puzzle of religious rationality” explored in chapter 8.

The Rationality of Religious Credences

In chapter 8, Van Leeuwen mentions three ways in which the apparent tension between religion and rationality can be defused. The tension traces back to the lack of evidential vulnerability, which seemingly compromises rationality. He finds all but one account (his own view of religious states as religious credences) wanting.

First, one could bite the bullet in either one direction or the other and argue that religious beliefs/people truly are rational (more on this option to come) or truly irrational. A second approach consists in arguing that religious beliefs cannot be rationally appraised, or cannot be appraised in the same manner as other beliefs, because (1) their content is different than what it seems to be (e.g., they might just be different claims), (2) their content is too unclear (e.g., it can be interpreted in multiple ways), or (3) they have no content at all (e.g., they are symbolic expressions of feelings, needs, hopes, etc.). After rejecting these two approaches (and their multiple subaccounts), Van Leeuwen presents the third approach to resolving the puzzle of religious rationality: religion involves a different attitude. He discusses first Daniel Dennett’s idea that religious people only believe in religious claims because of the potential rewards, and thus do not actually believe them; second, he discusses the idea that religious people only “believe” in a weak sense of the word. Finally, after partially rejecting these two proposals, Van Leeuwen (2023, 228) lands on his own position: religious people can generally be considered rational, independently of their religious beliefs, because of the compartmentalization that religious credence allows.

It should be noted, however, that rather than being a claim about the rationality of religious states, this is a descriptive claim about personal character. Sure, religious people can be broadly regarded as rational, but are religious beliefs themselves rational or not? Van Leeuwen never gives a clear-cut answer. Nevertheless, the fact that he leans towards religious beliefs being irrational often seeps through the text or is mentioned en passant. And the main reason seems to be that religious credences, according to Van Leeuwen, do not respond to evidence, where “evidence” refers to perceptual states and recognition of contradictions or coherence between states.⁷

All proposed solutions thus differ with regard to content, attitude, responsiveness to evidence, and rationality. Van Leeuwen also distinguishes between overall rationality (i.e., whether the subject can be regarded as rational in general) and the rationality of religious states. Table 1 summarizes his discussion.

On all but one account (the “rational” option), religious states are not rational. The “rational” option is the view of religious apologetics, of which Anselm and Alvin Plantinga are clear representatives. They argue that evidential support for religious states is available. Van Leeuwen quickly dismisses the position because of their focus on a very limited set of religious states. For example, he argues that providing support for the state “God exists,” as most apologists do, does little to support other religious states like “Hermes/Quetzalcoatl/Ganesh exists.” In all other accounts, religious states do not respond to evidence and hence, once again, do not merit the label “rational.” The “weak belief” account may be an exception, since it allows for some rationality, as religious states are held with less firmness. This may correspond to weak evidential support for those states.

Van Leeuwen’s own solution to the puzzle of rationality, however, opens the road to a new approach to religious rationality. Van Leeuwen advocates a view where religious states are not factual beliefs but religious credences, and religious credences, as we have already seen, imply a different attitude towards their contents. This raises the question of whether different standards for rationality apply. After all, this is the case for other propositional attitudes. For example, desiring that p does not seem to require evidence for the desire to be rational (if there is such a thing as rational desires), or at least not evidence of the same kind as Van Leeuwen’s requires for factual beliefs.

Rationality of Hinges

Noting parallels between religious credences and hinges leads to different conclusions with regard to rationality. Especially given the central role of hinges for commonsensical beliefs, simply denying their rational status would have enormous collateral damage.

As discussed, hinges are commonly credited an a-evidential and “groundless” status. According to Wittgenstein, rational practices necessarily presuppose some “certainties” or assumptions that are taken for granted. Without these unquestioned starting points, rationality does not get off the ground, Wittgenstein tells us.

Because hinges lack evidential support, our attitude towards them has often been likened to trust (e.g., Coliva 2015). Since there is no basis for believing them to be true, our attitude towards them cannot be one of believing (believing being defined as “accepting as true”). Holding a hinge therefore always seems to imply a risk, a “leap of faith”; we hence trust in them. Importantly, some argue that trust in hinges can be rational. Crispin Wright (2004), for example, argues that one has a “rational entitlement” to trust hinges when there is no reason to believe that trust is misplaced. Annalisa Coliva (2015), on the other hand, argues that one can rationally trust some hinges because they are constitutive of rationality itself.⁸

Duncan Pritchard objects and argues that our attitude towards hinges is not one of trust but a state altogether different. This is a sui generis attitude he characterizes as “commitment,” i.e., “an all-out conviction in the truth of the target proposition” (Pritchard 2023). For Pritchard, hinges are beyond the scope of rationality. Nevertheless, he believes, first, that committing to hinges is justified because they are inevitable components of rationality, and second, that they are indirectly open to rational revision, in that the beliefs depending on a hinge can change, thus influencing our commitment to the hinge itself (Pritchard 2018).

To all of this we can add that in religious epistemology there is ample discussion on the rationality⁹ of religious states without evidence. Plantinga and other defenders of reformed epistemology argue, for example, that religious belief without evidence is allowable if the state is produced by a properly functioning belief-forming mechanism (Plantinga 2000). Elsewhere, Plantinga argues that religious states may not (always) have evidence but do have inductive grounds for regarding them as true (Plantinga 1981). William Alston (1993) argues instead that religious states can be justified by mystical practices that are deemed acceptable within a religious community. Many religious scholars thus appear willing to grant rational status to religious states even though they may not be supported by evidence.¹⁰

Ultimately, if we add “conceptualizing religious states as hinges” as a tenth option to Van Leeuwen’s list, we get a more favorable verdict on the rationality of religious states. While hinge epistemologists deny that our attitude towards hinges is factual, a considerable number of authors, as we have seen, do grant that they are, at the very least, reasonably acceptable.

Conclusion

There is much to like about Van Leeuwen’s account of religious credences. He rightly points out that there exists an attitude, different from factual belief, that can be found in religious contexts. He also, again rightly, argues that these states do not respond to evidence in the same way beliefs about the physical world often do. We have suggested, however, that this peculiar behavior has to do neither with the fact that they are religious nor with the fact that they are more prone to becoming the defining “belief” of a group. It has to do with the fact that they are central to a person’s identity. These features are, however, not unique to religious states and apply to states in many domains.

The relation between this centrality and the other features (voluntariness, compartmentalization, and no cognitive governance) of Van Leeuwen’s account is less straightforward. We have nevertheless suggested various ways in which his understanding of religious credence might be reframed in a way that does not unjustifiably single out religion.

Finally, we have argued that Van Leeuwen’s suggestions regarding the rationality of religious states do not hold water. Given the strong parallels with hinges, and following various accounts on the justifiability of hinges, religious states can be regarded as rationally acceptable.