Is Religion Make-Believe? With Neil Van Leeuwen

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Neil Van Leeuwen (0:31)

I was sort of vilified by the hardcore atheists as a religious apologist, right?

Dan McClellan (0:37)

And when your book is called Religion as Make-Believe, I mean, right? Are there are there Christians out there like, oh, that's going to be really cool.

Dan Beecher (0:47)

This is this is this works for us. This is going to be good for us.

Dan McClellan (0:50)

Hey, everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher (0:57)

And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan (0:58)

And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?

Dan Beecher (1:11)

Well, it's a lovely spring day.

The birds are chirping. It's spring, the sun is out and we're going to make some people mad.

Dan McClellan (1:21)

What a lovely day, as the great poet once said. All shiny and chrome. OK, so we are very excited today to welcome Neil Van Leeuwen to the show, or Van Leeuwen, if you're nasty.

Neil, thank you for being here. Neil is associate professor of philosophy and neuroscience at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia, a good old hotlanta, and how are things today? Neil?

Neil Van Leeuwen (1:50)

Well, it's a beautiful day here. I'm really happy to be here and the sun is shining where I am as well. So I think those are auspicious signs.

Take comfort in that.

Dan McClellan (2:03)

Auspicious is such a great word.

I don't think a lot of people who refer to things as an August body are aware of the relationship of August to auspicious to divination based on the flight patterns of birds. So yes, the success of our endeavors today have been decreed by the flight patterns of the birds. We have a little bit of snow on the ground here in Utah, but we can ignore that for now.

And Neil is the author of a new book entitled Religion as Make-Believe, A Theory of Belief Imagination, and Group Identity. And this is a little bit outside of the beaten path for our podcast because we're getting into cognitive neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, cognitive science of religion is kind of the generic title I have for this field of study, which was a big part of my doctoral dissertation and that I like to bring up from time to time. But I wonder, just because some of our listeners probably aren't familiar with cognitive science of religion, of evolutionary psychology when it comes to religion, can you tell us a little bit about the field as you perceive it? What do you think this approach brings to the table? What are the main questions this research is trying to ask? And if you're able to, can you just talk a little bit about how the idea for your book came about based on your work in these fields?

Neil Van Leeuwen (3:38)

Yeah, sure. So I'll start with cognitive science generally in case people aren't familiar with that phrase. So cognitive science is basically the more theoretical end of psychology and linguistics. So it's asking, well, what is the basic nature of the psychological structures that guide certain behaviors, like talking, like watching movies, like getting in political arguments and so on? What are the basic structures and processes? So your experimental psychologists will gather data to test certain hypotheses. And you can think of cognitive science as sort of the back end theory behind, well, what do the hypotheses even mean? Right? What is a belief? That's something that I work on. What is it to imagine an idea? How is imagining different from belief? And you start to see that cognitive science is really a place where philosophical questions meet psychological data. And that's the space I've been working in for quite some time.

The way I got into working in cognitive science of religion, which is basically investigating the psychological structures behind religious belief and practice, is as follows. I kind of got in there in a surprising way. So I was basically looking at the philosophical question of what is the difference between believing an idea and merely imagining it, right? Like you imagine something for the sake of make-believe play. In either case, you've got a mental representation of something. So just to give a concrete example, I could believe that there's a lion in the hallway or I could imagine that there's a lion in the hallway. What's the difference? Either way, I'm representing it as if there's a lion in the hallway.