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Fakers, fanatics, and false dilemmas: Reply to Van Leeuwen

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Fakers, fanatics, and false dilemmas: Reply to Van

Leeuwen

Maarten Boudry & Jerry Coyne

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Reply to Van Leeuwen, Philosophical Psychology, DOI: 10.1080/09515089.2016.1146244

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 Philosophical Psychology, 2016
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2016.1146244

Fakers, fanatics, and false dilemmas: Reply to Van Leeuwen

Maarten Boudrya,b and Jerry Coynec
a
Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium; bCenter for Cognitive Studies, Tufts
University, Boston, MA, USA; cDepartment of Ecology and Evolution, University of Chicago, USA

You have to check your brains at the church-house door if you take modern evolutionary biology seriously.
In memory of William Provine (1942–2015)
In our critique of Neil Van Leeuwen’s (2014) theory on religious credence, we argued that, by and
large, religious believers factually believe what they profess to believe (Boudry & Coyne, this issue).
Van Leeuwen, in contrast, sees religious “credence” as different from ordinary factual belief, mainly
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because it does not display “wide cognitive governance” and is only activated within religious settings.
Outside of these contexts, the spell is broken. If Van Leeuwen is right, we should find circumstances
when religious credences get switched off, no longer motivating people’s behavior. Van Leeuwen
mentions the “once-a-week Christians” that pastors rail against—those who profess on Sundays that
there is a God watching over them, but then seem to forget about Him during the rest of the week.1
In this respect (but not in others), belief in God resembles belief in an imaginary friend, whom you
ignore when playtime is over.2
We are grateful to Van Leeuwen for responding at length to our critique and for clarifying his
position. We now have a better view of the scope of his theory and of the nature of our disagree-
ment. Before we get to our disagreements, however, we’d like to clear up one misunderstanding:
neither Van Leeuwen nor we endorse a unitary view of belief, according to which the pre-the-
oretical notion ‘belief ’ picks out a single mental phenomenon.3 Our alternative account credits
religious beliefs (along with other irrational beliefs) with some distinctive characteristics (myste-
riousness, incoherence, semi-propositionality, convenient immunization). We even acknowledge
that religious mystery (e.g., the Trinity) may defy attribution of definite belief, a problem that
is usually not encountered with more mundane beliefs. Just because we dispute Van Leeuwen’s
two-pronged framework in terms of cognitive attitudes—and in particular his prediction about
cognitive governance—does not mean that we adhere to a monolithic conception of belief. Indeed,
in our paper, we conceded that Van Leeuwen’s theory may be valuable in capturing the etiolated
and halfhearted faith of some believers that still holds sway in the pews on Sunday, but loses its
hold during the rest of the week.4 So, when we use phrases like the “ordinary sense” of belief, we
are not sneaking in some unitary conception of belief through the back door, as Van Leeuwen
thinks,5 but we are merely adopting his own notion of factual belief, which he characterizes in
the very same terms: “mundane, ordinary sense of belief ” and “belief, in a mundane way” (2014,
pp. 699, 701).6 There is no disagreement thus far.
The major objection Van Leeuwen levels against us centers on a distinction he introduces between
two types of religious folk: the fakers and the fanatics. Fakers are people who like to keep up appear-
ances, “fictionally imagining God exists (and other doctrines) to maintain the pretense, but knowing
[their] attitudes are mere imaginings” (this issue). Those people, we all agree, are not believers at all,
no matter how broad and multifarious your conception of “belief ” may be. Right after his descrip-
tion of the fakers, however, Van Leeuwen makes a peculiar transition: “Then there are the September

CONTACT  Maarten Boudry  maartenboudry@gmail.com

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 2    M. Boudry and J. Coyne

11 terrorists.” These suicide bombers are what Van Leeuwen calls—and who would disagree with
him?—“fanatics.” In this extreme case at least, he is willing to grant us that suicide bombers factually
believe in the existence of their sexual rewards in the afterlife. Now we have a clear dichotomy. The
fanatic who blows himself up certainly isn’t a faker. And the faker—say, a spy infiltrating a jihadi death
squad—may pretend to be a genuine fanatic, but he would never follow through with the suicide attack,
as (for one thing) he lacks the belief in the 72-virgin reward. Such credibility-enhancing displays are
hard to fake and allow one to separate the fanatics from the fakers (Henrich, 2009). Van Leeuwen notes:
Now I ask: of all the world’s billions of religious people, are there any psychological types besides the faker and
the fanatic? (Alternately, should we deny that these categories are exhaustive?) I say “yes.” Common religious
people—granting this category is hugely diverse in various ways—are neither fakers nor fanatics. (this issue)
We agree. But Van Leeuwen doesn’t agree that we agree, and proceeds to attribute to us the view that
these categories are jointly exhaustive: all religious believers are either fakers or fanatics.
Boudry and Coyne, furthermore, persistently portray any non-fanatical religious attitudes as fakery. Notice their
dichotomy: either beliefs that motivate suicide bombing or “quasi-fictional credences, safely confined.”
But that extreme dichotomy between suicide-inducing fanaticism and outright fakery is nowhere to
be found in our paper.7 Here is our final paragraph, on which Van Leeuwen bases his interpretation:
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Hard though it may be for the godless to accept, some people really do believe in a 6-day creation or in 72 virgins
awaiting them in paradise. It is precisely because such heartfelt beliefs motivate behavior (e.g., suicide bombing)
that we cannot bring ourselves to “believe in belief ” in the Dennettian sense. Religions are not just harmless
tissues of quasi-fictional credences, safely confined within a special compartment of the mind, never to leak
into the real world. By and large, they consist of factual claims about the nature of the universe, endorsed and
acted upon by millions. We ignore the reality of such convictions at our own peril. (Boudry & Coyne, this issue)
The first thing to notice is that we mentioned belief in 72 virgins for martyrdom as a possible example
of factual beliefs that may instigate action, along with other examples such as belief in a 6-day creation.8
It goes without saying that these examples do not exhaust the category of what we called “factual claims
about the nature of the universe.” There is an infinite number of beliefs one may harbor about the
supernatural, with varying levels of belief strength. Not all of those prompt people to the same kinds
of actions, and thus not all are equally dangerous. We mention creationism and jihadi martyrdom
in the final sentences of our paper because these two examples (1) strike some secular people as so
bizarre that they are reluctant to attribute those beliefs to anyone, (2) Van Leeuwen himself had men-
tioned them in support of his theory, and (3) they motivate a kind of behavior that is a serious cause
of concern in modern society (suicide bombing obviously so, but the relentless opposition of many
parents to evolution in the classroom is troubling as well). The last point shows that our disagreement
is not inconsequential. It would be welcome news if the beliefs of, say, people who want to execute
blasphemers had the properties that Van Leeuwen associates with “religious credence,” in particular
the limited “cognitive governance.” If these people were only “once-a-week jihadis,” for example, at
least we would be safe for the rest of the week!
But why did Van Leeuwen end up forcing this false dilemma on us, as if our worldview allowed space
only for suicide bombers and secretly atheistic preachers?9 The problem, we think, is that Van Leeuwen
commits a fallacy of equivocation. His definition of a faker is clear enough, but if you look closely at
his definition of a “fanatic,” it is not clear what the extension of the category is supposed to be. Is it
only the suicide bombers, or does it include other forms of violent or dogmatic or intransigent belief?
Or is it even wider? The problem can be glimpsed from the way Van Leeuwen phrases the definition:
The fanatic, then, resembles this portrait of the September 11 terrorists: the fanatic’s religious “beliefs” have all
the characteristics of factual beliefs, except vulnerability to evidence; they guide behaviors in all settings and
govern inference in the widest possible way. (this issue)
But this “resemblance” of a “portrait” is very vague, compared to Van Leeuwen’s crisp definition of a
faker. By choosing the vivid example of suicide bombing, his definition of “fanatic” trades on the every-
day meaning of the word, vacillating between (1) someone who has heartfelt factual beliefs about the
universe that are active across different settings and (2) someone who has a specific set of such beliefs
and is disposed to commit terror attacks for their sake. To the extent that there is a dichotomy in our
 Philosophical Psychology   3

paper, it is one that we happily borrowed from Van Leeuwen between factual belief and what he calls
religious credence. We just doubt whether the latter category exists at all, given his characterization,
and we definitely dispute that it is good description of religious belief.
The very same equivocation, alas, undermines Van Leeuwen’s subsequent empirical objection.
He starts calculating the number of people who profess that the Quran is the literal word of God
(PewResearch, 2012 gives a figure of hundreds of millions) and confronts us with the following ques-
tion: if the beliefs of these people “hav[e] the same nature as the ‘beliefs’ of suicide bombers … then
we would expect there to be millions of suicide bombers, or at least millions of martyrs or potential
martyrs of some sort.” Notice the equivocation: Van Leeuwen starts with factual belief in the divinity
of the Quran, of which we indeed claim that it’s “endorsed and acted upon by millions,” but then slides
into the specific case of suicide bombers:
Why, we should ask them, does only a miniscule percentage of Muslims act on what you say are their factual
beliefs? Are those millions of men just unmotivated to receive dark-eyed virgins? It is difficult to see what Boudry
and Coyne could sensibly say here, without making concessions in the direction of my view. (this issue)
In fact, we think it is very easy to see, as we have an abundance of resources to explain this. First of all,
the Quran is not a manual for blowing yourself up in public. It contains calls for violence, to be sure, but
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no explicit instructions about suicide bombing (no wonder, given that it’s a seventh-century document).
To read the Quran as a justification for suicide attacks on civilian populations requires some serious
theological work. At every step along the way, the devout may choose different interpretations, all the
while retaining the very same basic Quranic doctrines about heaven, hell, and virgins in paradise.
Here, then, are a number of ways to answer Van Leeuwen’s rhetorical question: (1) Islamic theo-
logians have distinguished between offensive and defensive jihad. According to some interpretations,
a rightful jihad is permitted only when Muslims are being attacked by an enemy first. Others say that
offensive jihad is permitted, but only on the authority of a legitimate leader. (2) Even if you accept
offensive jihad, the targeting of civilians remains a contentious matter. Most Muslims do not buy into
the argument of jihadi scholars (like Al Qaeda ideologue Al-Zawahiri) that citizens of godless democ-
racies, having freely elected their infidel governments, are therefore legitimate targets for terror attacks.
(3) Even if you target civilians, some scholars argue that the Quran forbids the act of suicide—“Do not
kill yourselves” (Sura 4:29)—and thus rules out any kind of suicide attack. Radical scholars (e.g., the
charter of Hamas) agree that suicide is forbidden in Islam, but argue that it is permissible to destroy
one’s own body as an unintended and inevitable side-effect, as long as the goal is to kill as many infidels
as possible. In their theology, there is no relevant moral difference between unintentional suicide and
facing certain death at your enemy’s hand, the latter being clearly allowed by the Quran. The differ-
ence is not trivial, as Muslims believe that suicide is punished by eternal hellfire, with the perpetrator
having to relive his chosen method of killing for all eternity. As Bernard Lewis wrote, “the suicide
bomber is thus taking a considerable risk on a theological nicety” (2004, p. 39). (4) Many believers
have spiritualized the Quranic notion of “jihad” as a struggle of the soul or the pen, not the sword.10
(5) Some people, indeed, may simply be “unmotivated to receive dark-eyed virgins,” as Van Leeuwen
rhetorically asks, because they would rather spend time in this world with their wife and children.
The way of jihad, after all, is not the only way to reap the rewards of Islamic heaven. In short, these are
some (but not all) of the reasons why only a small minority of Muslims support or carry out suicide
bombings. Mere differences in belief content and belief strength are sufficient to answer Van Leeuwen’s
rhetorical question—there is no need to posit a special type of cognitive attitude.
If you find it incredible that such abstruse theological discussions have any effect on behavior,
consider this account, given in Lawrence Wright’s Pulitzer-prize winning book The Looming Tower,
of the moral dilemma facing Mohamed Al-Owhali, one of the perpetrators of the 1998 United States
embassy bombings. Having driven a truck full of explosives to the embassy, Al-Owhali’s main task
was to force the guard to raise the drop bar so that the truck could be driven closer to the building.
Al-Owhali botched that part of the job, but did manage to throw a stun grenade into the courtyard,
attracting more onlookers for the real explosion to come. Now he faced the dilemma of getting back
 4    M. Boudry and J. Coyne

to the truck and moving it closer still, or fleeing the scene before the bomb was going to explode. Not
only his current life, but his next one too, was hanging in the balance:
He had expected to be a martyr; his death in the operation would assure him his immediate place in Paradise.
But he realized that his mission of setting off the stun grenade had already been accomplished. If he were to go
forward to his own certain death, that would be suicide, he explained, not martyrdom. Damnation would be his
fate, not salvation. Such is the narrow bridge between heaven and hell. (Wright, 2006, p. 271)
Van Leeuwen wonders why all devout Sunni Muslims don’t join ISIS. Does that mean that they are
all fakers? In an open letter to ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, more than 120 Islamic scholars and
jurists take issue with the horrific practices of the self-proclaimed caliph. But the letter reveals that
they share many of his underlying beliefs. The scholars attack the caliph on almost purely exegetical
grounds, correcting several of his theological misconceptions (despite his doctorate in Islamic the-
ology at the University of Baghdad). For instance, they point out that waging jihad is permissible
only with parental consent (not fulfilled in the case of many ISIS fighters), that the jihadists’ desires
for martyrdom must be pure, and that one should bear in mind important theological distinctions
between “wicked evildoers” and “unbelievers,” as well as between idolaters and “People of the Book”
(in relation to the genocide of the Yazidi minority) (Open Letter to Al-Baghdadi, 2014).
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Similar theological niceties, we think, also explain why not all Christians are young-earth creation-
ists. A creation in six 24-hour days is one straightforward reading of Genesis, but, even in creationist
circles, there are others. Some interpret the days in the sense of “ages” (old-earth creationism), and
some think that the very first verses of Genesis (In the beginning … the earth was without form and
void) leave room for a generous billion-year gap, during which the earth was already in existence.
Many other Christians, of course, read the Genesis account in an allegorical way, all the while main-
taining that it is the word of God. As we argued in our paper, all of these people factually believe in
the existence of God and his authorship of the Bible, and their belief guides behavior across a wide
range of settings, with hardly any indication of limited cognitive governance. This conflicts with Van
Leeuwen’s prediction that “if we look persistently, we will find circumstances in which credences don’t
guide behavior (especially nonverbal behavior), even though their contents would make them relevant”
(this issue). This is particularly clear in the case of young-earth creationists, because, owing to their
particular reading of the Bible, they are forced to reject a large swath of modern science.
In short, although we agree with Van Leeuwen that supernatural beliefs have some peculiar
features, the problem as we see it is that he is indifferent or insensitive to the content of these
beliefs. Van Leeuwen pays little attention to the devils lurking in the details, perhaps because
he has no affinity with religious faith, or because he cannot imagine that such niceties would
make real-life differences. This again becomes clear when Van Leeuwen argues that the fear of
death displayed by religious believers shows that “their credence in the afterlife is not operative
in all settings.” The theological doctrine that Van Leeuwen has apparently overlooked here is the
existence of that other and darker place in the afterlife where you are punished for choosing the
wrong god, or for not behaving as the true god demanded. Is it any wonder that people are a little
bit nervous on their death beds? (Ellis, Wahab, & Ratnasingan, 2012). Moreover, even if people
do not believe in Hell, their fear of death may simply reflect some doubts about their impending
fate, just as we can harbor doubts about ordinary factual beliefs.
Once again, we’d like to thank Neil Van Leeuwen for this fruitful exchange. We now better under-
stand that he locates religious irrationality on the level of “self-ignorance” about one’s cognitive atti-
tudes. We hope it is also clearer to him that we did not and do not endorse a unitary view of belief,
and do not argue that religious beliefs are similar in all respects to ordinary factual beliefs. Indeed, we
agree with Van Leeuwen about the role of ineffable mysteries in religion, and the peculiar tendency
of some religious people to avoid exposing their beliefs to counterevidence, about which we have
written previously (Boudry & De Smedt, 2011). Religious beliefs also tend to be impervious to evi-
dence, although we claim that this is a function of the believer’s intransigence and/or the unfalsifiable
content of their beliefs, rather than a symptom of a special cognitive attitude. Indeed, as we pointed
out, many religious believers do care about evidence and are regularly swayed by it. In any case, all
 Philosophical Psychology   5

of these features are exemplified by all sorts of non-religious believers, such as conspiracy theorists,
psychics, political ideologues, paranoiacs, and just about everyone with deeply held convictions. In a
way, we agree with Van Leeuwen about some of the symptoms, but we have a different diagnosis. Let
us hope that both of us now evince the “vulnerability to counter-evidence” characteristic of proper
factual belief!

Notes
 1. It should be noted that Van Leeuwen is not committed to specifying the boundaries of the religious
domain. It could be “once-a-week,” but it could also be “when reading the Bible” or “when in the company
of fellow believers.” In the limiting case, the religious domain could cover almost all of people’s waking
hours, with the exception of some rare circumstances. Strictly speaking, therefore, Van Leeuwen is
making an existential claim, as he explains: “if we look persistently, we will find circumstances in which
credences don’t guide behavior (especially nonverbal behavior), even though their contents would make
them relevant” (this issue). Concerns about the low falsifiability of this hypothesis were discussed in
our paper, to which Van Leeuwen has now responded that “persistent failure to find such circumstances
would falsify my claim.”
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 2. The main difference, according to Van Leeuwen, is that children who play with an imaginary friend have
self-knowledge about their cognitive attitudes. The child knows that he is merely imagining the existence of a
friend to play with. The religious believer, by contrast, lacks this self-knowledge.
 3. In his footnote 7, Van Leeuwen admits our rejection of the unitary view, but argues that “it’s not at all clear
in what substantive way someone with the latter outlook [i.e., our disavowal of the unitary view] actually
disagreed with me” (this issue). But this would imply that the only way to deny the unitary view is to accept
Van Leeuwen’s specific theory about religious credence, cognitive governance, and setting-dependence. Surely
this cannot be what Van Leeuwen meant.
 4. Still, we think there are other, more plausible descriptions of such once-a-week Christians: such people may
simply be “fakers,” as Van Leeuwen describes them, or they may be “swingers,” gaining and losing strength of
faith as they enter and leave the pews. Or they may be characterized as “hypocrites” who don’t pay heed to the
moral precepts that they avow on Sunday (that is perhaps what the priests who rail against “once-in-a-week
Christians” are getting at).
 5. Van Leeuwen writes: “If ‘belief ’ is not unitary, however, it’s unclear what its ‘ordinary sense’ is or what ‘really
believes’ even means” (this issue). We think this is quite clear.
 6. We made this clear in the rest of the sentence quoted by Van Leeuwen. The claim we attribute to Van Leeuwen
was that religious believers “do not really believe their doctrines in any ordinary sense—at least not in the
sense that people believe that cats are mammals, that infectious diseases are caused by microorganisms, or
that clouds bring rain.”
 7. Van Leeuwen proceeds to put quotation marks around three full sentences expressing our alleged position,
not because we actually wrote them, but because he thinks we are “constrained to answer” thusly. Could this
be a sign that he is setting up a straw man?
 8. This belief, as we explain in our paper, instigates other types of behavior, such as building creationist
museums, campaigning against evolution in the classroom, or hunting for archaeological remains of
Biblical history.
 9. It is thus also unfair to attribute to us the view that “every genuine religious person is a fanatic inside,” as if we
claim that every Muslim is a potential suicide bomber. Of course we do not believe that. What we do believe,
is that holy books containing repeated calls for violence and hatred (such as the Quran and the Bible) provide
fertile soil for violent extremism (for an extensive analysis, see Cliteur, 2010).
10. One may argue that this distorts the original meaning, given the frequent references in the Quran to
war booty, captives, and military strategies, but this is beside the point here. That some people can pull
off remarkable feats of mental gymnastics in “interpreting” their holy books is a different matter (see
again Cliteur, 2010).

Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Bob McCauley, Robert Ross, and Ryan McKay for their insightful comments on an earlier draft,
and Neil Van Leeuwen himself for several hours of stimulating discussion in various bars.
 6    M. Boudry and J. Coyne

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