May 19, 2024 06:01 PM
(This post was last modified: May 19, 2024 11:23 PM by C C.)
Review of Neil Van Leeuwen's "Religion as Make-Believe", Harvard University Press, 2023
https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/religion-as-...-identity/
EXCERPTS: Although some people may factually believe some religious doctrines, Van Leeuwen holds that commonly what religious people say they believe they instead religiously creed.
Van Leeuwen describes his view as a “two map” view. Many religious people have one picture of the world – one map – concerning what they factually believe, and a different picture of the world – a different map – concerning what they religiously creed. These maps can conflict. Someone might factually believe that Earth is billions of years old and religiously creed that it is under a million years old. Such conflict needn’t be irrational, since the attitudes differ. Compare: You might believe that Earth is billions of years old but imagine, desire, or assume for the sake of argument that it is under a million years old. We draw different pictures for different purposes. On Van Leeuwen’s view, the same holds for religious credence.
Why do we have religious credences, if they are so tenuously connected to evidence? Van Leeuwen suggests that religious credences function to support group identities: They guide symbolic actions (for example, ritual behaviors) that signal group allegiance; and by professing “belief” in religious doctrines, people indicate and partly constitute their membership in a social group. Notably, the second function is best served if the religious credence is not well supported by factual evidence.
If factual evidence compelled everyone to believe that God is a trinity, endorsement of that proposition would not distinguish group members from others. “Sacred” acts and values work similarly: Treating something as inviolable often works as a criterion of inclusion in a group identity. However, religious people typically factually recognize that sacred objects are ordinary mundane objects (an edible wafer, a simple doll) and can readily shift to conceptualizing them as unimportant outside of the context of the symbolic action.
Van Leeuwen also presents empirical evidence for a distinction between “think” and “believe” in ordinary usage, arguing that people more commonly use “think” for factual beliefs and “believe” for religious credences. It’s more natural to say I think there’s beer in the fridge and I believe that God is a trinity than the reverse. Such usage differences appear not only in Indo-European languages (for example, glauben in German and creer in Spanish being aligned with religious credence) but also in unrelated languages such as Thai and Mandarin (p. 136-139).
Plausibly, some people have religious attitudes that match the functional profile of Van Leeuwen’s religious credence. They voluntarily choose those attitudes. Counterevidence doesn’t budge them – not because they deny the counterevidence, but because they don’t regard their religious doctrines as factual, much as a child knows that their pretend telephone is not in fact a telephone but instead really a banana.
And their attitudes are segregated from practical action and reasoning outside of religious contexts. At a Passover Seder, perhaps, they affirm their Jewish identity by choosing to say “God spared our firstborn sons” – but outside of temple they readily accept, perhaps even insist, that such stories are historically false. Van Leeuwen clearly articulates how such religious cognition differs from ordinary factual belief, neatly explaining several features of it, such as why factually unsupported propositions often play a central role. Belief theorists across a wide range of theoretical viewpoints can generally agree with Van Leeuwen that in such cases the affirmed religious proposition is not really “believed” (in the sense of “belief” standard in recent Anglophone philosophy).
However, also plausibly, as Van Leeuwen explicitly acknowledges, some people factually believe, and don’t just religiously creed, some of the doctrines of their religion. These “true believers”, as we might call them, are guided by religious doctrine whenever the content is relevant...
[...] The question then becomes: How typical is the first form of religious cognition? Van Leeuwen presents no systematic evidence concerning the proportion of religious make-believers to religious true believers. Still, Van Leeuwen invites the reader to regard make-believe as typical... (MORE - details)
Cynic's Corner: But secular ideologies are often loaded with "just so theories" that similarly appeal to the concerns and moral relativism of a particular crowd. (For example, Marx stirring up the proletariat as a myrmidon base that Left intellectuals and bureaucrats could use to both overthrow and rule the state.) Such a biased apparatus can even be used to interpret and cherry-pick data to render bogus "facts" amenable to the philosophical school of thought.
Likewise, these ideologies may entertain items of fashionable silliness that go against commonsense, which they know the traditionalist public will deem absurd or object to, thereby likewise serving as an identity boundary for distinguishing devout members of the sociopolitical cult from practical-minded outsiders. These secular versions of "make-believe" can contingently be more dangerous because constitutions or national law frameworks may only enforce separation of overt religious systems and government -- not the irreligious counterparts.
https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/religion-as-...-identity/
EXCERPTS: Although some people may factually believe some religious doctrines, Van Leeuwen holds that commonly what religious people say they believe they instead religiously creed.
Van Leeuwen describes his view as a “two map” view. Many religious people have one picture of the world – one map – concerning what they factually believe, and a different picture of the world – a different map – concerning what they religiously creed. These maps can conflict. Someone might factually believe that Earth is billions of years old and religiously creed that it is under a million years old. Such conflict needn’t be irrational, since the attitudes differ. Compare: You might believe that Earth is billions of years old but imagine, desire, or assume for the sake of argument that it is under a million years old. We draw different pictures for different purposes. On Van Leeuwen’s view, the same holds for religious credence.
Why do we have religious credences, if they are so tenuously connected to evidence? Van Leeuwen suggests that religious credences function to support group identities: They guide symbolic actions (for example, ritual behaviors) that signal group allegiance; and by professing “belief” in religious doctrines, people indicate and partly constitute their membership in a social group. Notably, the second function is best served if the religious credence is not well supported by factual evidence.
If factual evidence compelled everyone to believe that God is a trinity, endorsement of that proposition would not distinguish group members from others. “Sacred” acts and values work similarly: Treating something as inviolable often works as a criterion of inclusion in a group identity. However, religious people typically factually recognize that sacred objects are ordinary mundane objects (an edible wafer, a simple doll) and can readily shift to conceptualizing them as unimportant outside of the context of the symbolic action.
Van Leeuwen also presents empirical evidence for a distinction between “think” and “believe” in ordinary usage, arguing that people more commonly use “think” for factual beliefs and “believe” for religious credences. It’s more natural to say I think there’s beer in the fridge and I believe that God is a trinity than the reverse. Such usage differences appear not only in Indo-European languages (for example, glauben in German and creer in Spanish being aligned with religious credence) but also in unrelated languages such as Thai and Mandarin (p. 136-139).
Plausibly, some people have religious attitudes that match the functional profile of Van Leeuwen’s religious credence. They voluntarily choose those attitudes. Counterevidence doesn’t budge them – not because they deny the counterevidence, but because they don’t regard their religious doctrines as factual, much as a child knows that their pretend telephone is not in fact a telephone but instead really a banana.
And their attitudes are segregated from practical action and reasoning outside of religious contexts. At a Passover Seder, perhaps, they affirm their Jewish identity by choosing to say “God spared our firstborn sons” – but outside of temple they readily accept, perhaps even insist, that such stories are historically false. Van Leeuwen clearly articulates how such religious cognition differs from ordinary factual belief, neatly explaining several features of it, such as why factually unsupported propositions often play a central role. Belief theorists across a wide range of theoretical viewpoints can generally agree with Van Leeuwen that in such cases the affirmed religious proposition is not really “believed” (in the sense of “belief” standard in recent Anglophone philosophy).
However, also plausibly, as Van Leeuwen explicitly acknowledges, some people factually believe, and don’t just religiously creed, some of the doctrines of their religion. These “true believers”, as we might call them, are guided by religious doctrine whenever the content is relevant...
[...] The question then becomes: How typical is the first form of religious cognition? Van Leeuwen presents no systematic evidence concerning the proportion of religious make-believers to religious true believers. Still, Van Leeuwen invites the reader to regard make-believe as typical... (MORE - details)
Cynic's Corner: But secular ideologies are often loaded with "just so theories" that similarly appeal to the concerns and moral relativism of a particular crowd. (For example, Marx stirring up the proletariat as a myrmidon base that Left intellectuals and bureaucrats could use to both overthrow and rule the state.) Such a biased apparatus can even be used to interpret and cherry-pick data to render bogus "facts" amenable to the philosophical school of thought.
Likewise, these ideologies may entertain items of fashionable silliness that go against commonsense, which they know the traditionalist public will deem absurd or object to, thereby likewise serving as an identity boundary for distinguishing devout members of the sociopolitical cult from practical-minded outsiders. These secular versions of "make-believe" can contingently be more dangerous because constitutions or national law frameworks may only enforce separation of overt religious systems and government -- not the irreligious counterparts.
