Okay, I'm just thinking about the young people who sometimes get caught up in extreme behavior. I'm wondering if they're as rational about that. But that doesn't under that doesn't undermine the point, generally speaking, particularly about adults. But I do wonder if sometimes very young people actually do believe this, I think, you know, I told you I was raised Jewish and I remember as a child, I remember thinking I was very young, maybe eight or nine, and I remember thinking, you know, there was a time when I believed in the tooth fairy, there was a time when I believed in, well, I thought all my friends had the Easter bunny and I was so jealous because I wanted chocolate. I never got it. And I knew about Jesus, right? And I thought, you know, everybody came around on the tooth fairy and the Easter bunny, but some people never came around about Jesus. And that's how I thought about it. I think that was, you know, yeah, under 10. And it took a while for me to realize like, okay, wait, what's going on? And I remember my father said, I told my dad, and he said to me, it is never your place to take away somebody's belief. Like he was thinking about, like for children, you know, don't tell the other kids that there's no Santa Claus, for example.

Right.

Don't undermine people's faith in Jesus just because you don't think or you think you know it's not true. And he made this point to me. But I am thinking about how children sometimes are unable to disambiguate those things.

Yeah, so there's like so much to unpack there. But let me seize on one little detail of that. So when your dad said, it's not your place to, how did he put it? To take away someone else's belief. I think intuitively, he's showing an awareness there of the difference between what I call religious credence and factual belief. fire and they think it's not on fire is it's not only not the case that it's not your place to take away their their belief, you're obligated to tell them. Right. Anytime you correct someone you're taking away a factual belief that they have. Right. It's like you had the, you know, you had the factual belief that, again, boring example, the supermarkets open till nine. I know it's not, guess what? I'm gonna take away your belief and you're gonna thank me for it, right? Oh, better get over there quick then, okay? So the fact that there's a motto that it seems intuitively right, right? It's not your place to take away their belief. It shows that, at least at some level, your dad was thinking of a different kind of quote unquote belief from factual belief. So that's one thing that I wanted to unpack there. So even if the... Okay, so the second thing that I want to say is that this could be true in a lot of cases, right? Many kids could like just factually believe that there's Santa, right? But I think a lot of them do transition to a more playing along kind of, you know, maybe, it's, you know, like a game of make believe that we're all playing together. And we're not, we're just not going to say it right that that we all know there's there's no Santa right and so what I think kind of it's it's a good analogy so if you take that that playing a long kind of believing right or you know when Peter Pan play the play is is put on everyone has to like clap to express believing in Tinker Bell. It's just playing a long kind of believing that unifies us as a group is different from straightforward, straightforwardly factually believing. So since the point that I would make here is that since attitude and content are distinct features of a psychological state, you know, one person could have an attitude, a factual belief, say to the content that Santa Claus exists, and another person could have an attitude of imagining, another person could have an attitude of religious credence, all to that same content, and it might change over the course of someone's life. So one of the things that I think is is useful about the way I approach this is I do distinguish attitude and content. I think more forcefully than than a lot of people who write about this sort of stuff. In a way that allows us to say those those sorts of things. Yeah. could be, and here's an example from Ingele Visuri, a great researcher in cognitive science of religion. She works with people who are on the autism spectrum and who have religious practices and experiences and such. that unicorns existed, right? And you can see how someone on the spectrum might not read the indicators. And just as he heard people talking about elephants and tigers, he also heard people talking about unicorns, unicorns, and he just actually believed that unicorns exist. Okay, so most people fictionally imagine unicorns existing, right? So same content, different attitude. So you're absolutely right. It could work in different ways. And so it really, I think this is going to be an interesting question in developmental psychology. And if you take my work seriously, it's sort of like, well, when does the differentiation between factually believing and religiously creeding, when does it sort of start to come online? I think that's gonna be hard to tease out, but there is some work, again, in developmental psychology, that's relevant to this already. So Paul Harris and basically a bunch of his proteges have looked at, going back to the topic of doubt, levels of confidence in the existence of religious supernatural entities of people's own religions, right, versus scientific entities, all invisible, right? how confident are people that those exist versus germs in oxygen, for example, and even very religious people also, and this shows up already in children, so higher levels of confidence in the existence of the scientific entities, even in staunchly religious societies like United States and Iran, than they do in the religious supernatural entities. So I think that's very telling. I think maybe, hopefully, with my work as a theoretical motivation, hint, hint, developmental psychologists, if you're listening, this could be a good question. Feel free to get in touch with me. When does the differentiation between religious credence and factual belief come online, I wouldn't be surprised if it was pretty early because look imagining comes online very early. Children play pretend play, you know, pretty much out of the gate right as soon as they can start doing anything on their own about one and a half, they're starting with pretend play.

We are getting to the end of our time, so I'd like to ask you, what is the most important thing that you want our listeners to take away from the book?

Yeah, humans have the cognitive flexibility to relate to ideas in all sorts of different ways, and it's important to understand the space of those different ways of relating to ideas, including the difference between religious credence

and factual belief. Wonderful. And what is next for you? Well,

I'm really going to start transitioning from focusing on internal dynamics to what we would call in philosophy action theory. So I'm starting to develop a, an action theory of pretend play, right. And you can see how this this relates to my work on internal cognitive dynamics of the difference between religious credence and factual belief or between imagining and factual belief. Like what is it we're actually doing? What is it people are actually doing when they get, they, they engage in pretend play as a form of action or human behavior. And of course this is going to have lots of applications from understanding what deception is to understanding symbolic political or ideological action to ramp up that part of my work a lot more and hopefully publishing papers and maybe even writing a book before too long.

Well we will look forward to that and in the spirit of helping our listeners find their next great read, what do you recommend that they read next? Well

I've got a lot of answers to this. If I'm going to limit it to one however, I would recommend Joe Henrich's The Weirdest People in the World. And for people who don't know about this book, it's it's really marvelous. Weird is two meanings to it. think. The other is WEIRD, Western Educated Industrial Rich Democratic. So people who live in societies that fit that description are also from the world historical perspective, weird psychologically, right? So we're not, I mean, I say we because we come from broadly the same kind of stretches of North American society. Like we're not usual. The way people's psychology of morals functions in most of the world and in different societies is different from us. analytic thinking versus more holistic thinking were weird on those dimensions, right? And, you know, how we relate to families and groups, even there's even some perceptual phenomena, although I don't, I'm not as impressed by that evidence that there's that much difference there. But there's a lot of impressive differences, especially when it comes to how people relate to other people and what they take their obligations to be. So what we would maybe call the psychology of morals. Westerners are weird people in this technical sense, are outliers in humanity at large. And originally, this was a point made in a behavioral brain sciences article to say, hey, look, psychology research should be more cross-cultural because, you know, we're not, the kids at MIT aren't representative, right? But, right, well, yeah, I knew that true. You can laugh out loud if you want. But the book goes a lot further in kind of documenting what are the likely historical sources of the differences that we see and it's it's totally fascinating for anyone who's traveled to other countries and and you know wondered well this does feel different why. book will have a lot for you. So again, Joe Henrich's the weirdest people in the world. I love that book. I think a lot of people listening will love it too.

Great. We will put a link to that book in the notes, along with some of the other ones that you mentioned throughout our discussion. And I think we'll have to leave it there for now, unfortunately, because I think this is absolutely amazing. Neil van Lewen, it has been such a pleasure speaking with you today about religion and make believe a theory of belief, imagination, and group identity. Thank you for joining us on the new books network. All

right, well, thank you so much. It was a pleasure to be here. And I hope your listeners recommend my book to their local public library. So that's my that's my that's plug that I always make. Get involved with your local public library and recommend my book along with many others that you want to read. All right, thanks for having me.

A great call to action. Thank you so much.