Easy to imagine – or Hard to Believe?

In Religion as Make-Believe, Neil Van Leeuwen offers a novel and attractive hypothesis for why religious “beliefs” act so differently from paradigm beliefs — namely, that they are a fundamentally different kind of mental attitude. Van Leeuwen argues that these religious attitudes are better understood as akin to the imaginative states associated with make-believe. We argue, contra Van Leeuwen, that religious beliefs really are a species of belief, fundamentally of the same sort as ordinary beliefs; but they are sustained by different, less evidence-sensitive processes than ordinary beliefs.