By Bill Littlefield

In Neil Van Leeuwen’s challenging book, belief and imagination overlap in ways that are provocative, unsettling, and unexpectedly illuminating.

Religion as Make-Believe: A Theory of Belief, Imagination, and Group Identity by Neil Van Leeuwen. Harvard University Press, 300 pages, $27.95 (paperback)

Neil Van Leeuwen, associate professor of philosophy and neuroscience at Georgia State University, begins this book with an elaborate discussion of children in a schoolyard. The kids are playing with plastic figures to whom they assign various personalities and powers, including the inclination to get angry and the ability to “call lightning down from the sky.” Though the children know that they are building castles for their characters out of sand, they imagine that it is gold. The group of children is also exclusive. Its members become angry when anyone else tries to play in the space they call their own. “They only let in an outsider who comes with the right kind of doll; they chase others away.”

Eventually the kids grow up, but some of them don’t abandon the dolls and indulging in their childish imaginings. One of them, John, “still has his original Zalla doll…and no matter where he lives, he finds a room where he can place the doll near a window through which sunbeams shine.” On some days, John feels in the doll “the presence of a voice saying to him, ‘You are not alone.’”

This story about children playing with dolls and the adults who continue to cling to the figures and imbue them with human or supernatural qualities introduces Van Leeuwen’s exploration of “the broad class of psychological states called ‘beliefs,’ as well as the relation between ‘belief’ (of which various sorts) and imagination.” His contention is that “factual belief” and what he terms “religious credence” operate at the same time within our minds, going on to argue that “religious credence differs from factual belief in many of the same fundamental ways that fictional imagining does.” Fictional imagining is what’s going on when the children are at play with the dolls they’ve invested with magical powers—and when the adults continue with that sort of entertainment, though they have ceased to call it play.

[]Readers associated with any religion that posits a supreme being and includes among its rituals the sanctification of various practices and objects—observance of particularly significant days, for example, or veneration of the relics of saints—may be put off by Van Leeuwen’s contention that “belief,” as the term is perhaps generally understood in the realms of particular religions, is, as he puts it, “strikingly similar to make-believe.” Van Leeuwen acknowledges that “we might find it unlikely that something as serious as religion, for which people are sometimes willing to die, could be psychologically processed, in basic respects, like the ideas behind make-believe play.” That said, there is little, if anything, in his thoughtful approach that is intended to ridicule religious belief. Sometimes his word choice can be … unfortunate … as when he writes that “religious credences are a species of groupish beliefs.” He admits that he is astonished at the “human characteristic of being able to be deadly serious about play.” But Van Leeuwen ends up being more concerned with understanding how belief, as he defines it, has come to be, how it is that beliefs of various sorts seem to be universal in appeal—or nearly so—and how our conscious minds can simultaneously operate on what might seem to be contradictory planes or, as he puts it, “maps.”

Religion as Make-Believe is a difficult book for the lay reader. The processes through which Van Leeuwen lays out and buttresses his theories and conclusions include digressions into the work of various philosophers, social scientists, and other explorers of the workings of the mind and the imagination, including not only Van Leeuwen’s contemporaries, but also Thomas Aquinas, Augustine of Hippo, and Plato. At some points, those who aren’t well acquainted with philosophy, linguistics, and those disciplines’ specialized vocabularies  are likely to be frustrated. Still, the gist of Van Leeuwen’s argument is made clear in the epilogue, which is titled “The Playground Expanded.” There he acknowledges that, as a six-year-old, he was welcomed into a group of children playing in the sand with plastic figures they’d imagined as all-powerful. Another child came by, wanting to join in, and was denied membership in the group. The collective thought he didn’t have a potentially interesting enough doll to contribute to the game. For Van Leeuwen, the experience was unforgettable, and it inspired this work: “The idea of this book—and it still astonishes me—is that considerable fragments of the multifarious social phenomena we call religions are large-scale versions of that: games of make-believe that define a group.”

Bill Littlefield’s most recent books are Who Taught That Mouse To Write? and Mercy.