Religion is Fictional!?
With a title like that, how can you not read this essay?
Contrary to what one might assume based on the title, this piece is NOT my way of coming out as Off the Derech. But it IS my way of asking: What can a recent exploration of Philosophy of Fiction teach us about our engagement with religion? This piece is fundamentally an examination of what Judaism (and, in fact, religion as a whole) means in light of recent work co-written by my teacher Rabbi Dr. Sam Lebens and Professor Tatjana Von Solodkoff - Thinking About Stories: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Fiction. I’m going to focus on Lebens’ chapters and how they relate to his broader epistemology, but I want to quickly point out that each chapter is interrupted at various points with questions from the other author that are responded to, so the book in many ways reads like a podcast. This provides a unique and deeply engaging reading experience that I hope to see in more co-authored works.
So what exactly is fiction? It turns out that this isn’t a simple question, and several possibilities are invoked by Lebens. John Searle defines fiction as language “used with the intention to pretend, non-deceptively, to make assertions” and that “whether or not a text, or a speech, or anything else, should count as fiction, depends on the intentions of the author.” But Gregory Currie offers a different definition:
“A work of fiction is a text written, or sentences uttered, as an invitation, issued with a reasonable expectation that an audience will understand it as an invitation, to make-believe that certain things are true, in recognition of the author (or storyteller)’s intention. Or (at least) it is a text that a group of readers have decided to treat in that way.”
Currie’s definition acknowledges the importance of the author’s intentions, but also allows for a text being treated as fictional even without it. It also allows for a text written as fiction to not be treated that way if the invitation to do is not accepted. Lebens’ own definition builds off of both:
A work of fiction requires twofold attention from beginning to end, because a work of fiction, as a whole, has a twofold sort of aboutness. A work of fiction is always about at least one fictional world, in addition to, and at the same time, as being about the actual world.
Another critical part of fiction is having a comparison class, which allows the fictional world and the actual world to be placed into genuine conversation with one another. In technical terms, the comparison class is “a set of propositions that are part of the fictional world, but which are also true of the actual world.” The more realistic the fictional world is, the larger the comparison class. Lebens notes, though, that
Even genres that invite us to have very selective and small comparison classes - stories about magical worlds, for example - still have a lot to teach us about the real world. If, for instance, the psychology of the main characters is supposed to be sufficiently similar to the psychology of human beings, then all sorts of claims about how hobbits or elves or wizards might act in certain situations will translate straightforwardly into claims about the psychology of intelligent and emotional beings in general. Those claims will thereby find their way into the comparison class, and we will be licensed to export them to the real world. We will take the story to be teaching us something about the real world.
In this genre specific way, we use the real world to fill in relevant gaps in a story, and we use the story to learn things about the real world.
This mediation between the fictional and the actual worlds via the comparison class is why our emotions can get so strong when invested in a good story. Of course, some like Colin Radford might claim that feeling such emotions towards the fictional story itself (or the characters therein) is irrational. He offers five explanations for why we think we’re feeling emotions towards fiction when we really do not:
What we feel towards fictional characters are not real emotions.
We get so caught up in the fiction that we momentarily forget that it’s fiction.
When engaged with fiction, we suspend our disbelief.
We don’t really feel emotions towards fictional characters and events. Instead, what happens in fictions, and what happens to fictional characters, can cause us to feel emotions for the real people who experience similar events in the actual world.
Even though the emotions we feel for fictional characters and events are real, we feel them in a different way. Emotions only rationally require belief when they’re felt in a non-fictional way. There is no such requirement when they’re felt in the fiction-way.
Michael Weston, on the other hand, disagrees with Radford. As Lebens summarizes,
There really is a palpable sense in which the plight of fictional women like Anna Karenina are relevant to the tears we cry for her. That’s to say: 1) we only cry for her because we’re moved by the fiction in which she features; 2) we’re only moved by the fiction in which she features because of the conception of life that it expresses (at least in its treatment of her character for whom we’re crying); and 3) we can only be moved by a conception of life if we care about the real possibilities that it makes salient.
Fiction, then, can be an immersive experience that draws out real emotions because of how strong the comparability is to our own world and experiences. For Lebens, Radford “goes wrong because he doesn’t do justice to the extent to which our engagement with fictional characters is bound up with our engagement with the works of fiction in which they feature, nor the extent to which our engagement with works of fiction is bound up with our appreciation of conceptions of this life that we’re living.” This causes him to “ignore the ways in which our emotional engagement with a fictional chapter can be an expression of an underlying emotional engagement with life itself.”
This naturally leads to the question of how we can apply the lessons that we learn from fiction to the actual world beyond that fiction. Lebens summarizes two possibilities offered by Tamar Gendler. One is that fiction ought to act as a “clearninghouse” in which various propositions are imported and exported. Those that we import are ones “that we feel entitled to bring from our background knowledge of the real world into the comparison class” while those that we export are what “the author seems to have placed, for our benefit, into the comparison class, even though we didn’t know them to be true of the real world, until we read the fiction.”
Fiction can also act as a “factory” in that “by reflecting upon the fiction itself, perhaps on your emotional experience through your engagement with the fiction, or perhaps upon your running through the fictional events of the story in your head, you come to think things about the world, beyond the fiction that you didn’t think before you read the fiction.” It’s in this way that fiction has the capacity to impact us in actuality and even to influence our deeply held convictions about ourselves and others. Fiction not only can “play a role in altering our perspectives - which may well be the definition of learning” but also “gives rise to forms of first and second-personal knowledge that may be essential to our education as ethical agents” in the actual world.
Now-controversial psychologist Jordan Peterson makes a similar point in his 1999 book, Maps of Meaning:
Narrative presents semantic representation of play or drama - offers essentially abstracted episodic representations of social interaction and individual endeavor - and allows behavioral patterns to contained entirely in linguistic representation to incarnate themselves in dramatic form on the private stage of individual imagination. Much of the information derived from a story is already contained in episodic memory. In a sense, it could be said that the words of the story merely act as a retrieval cue for information already in the mnemestic system (of the listener), although perhaps not yet transformed into a form capable either of explicit (semantic) communication, or alteration of procedure…
Interpretation of the reason for dramatic consequences, portrayed in narrative - generally left to the imagination of the audience - constitutes an analysis of the moral of the story. Transmission of that moral - that rule for behavior, or representation - is the purpose of narrative, just as fascination, involuntary seizure of interest, is its (biologically predetermined) means. With development of the story, mere description of critically important (and therefore compelling) behavioral/representational patterns becomes able to promote active imitation. At this point the semantic system, activating images in episodic memory, sets the stage for the alteration of procedure itself. this means establishment of a “feedback loop,” wherein information can cycle up and down “levels of consciousness” - with the social environment as a necessary intermediary - transforming itself and expanding as it moves. Development of narrative means verbal abstraction of knowledge disembodied in episodic memory and embodied in behavior. It means capability to disseminate such knowledge widely and rapidly throughout a communicating population, with minimal expenditure of time and energy. Finally, it means intact preservation of such knowledge, simply and accurately, for generations to come. Narrative description of archetypical behavioral patterns and representation schema’s - myth - appears as an essential precondition for social construction and subsequent regulation of completely civilized individual presumption, action, and desire…
Behavior is imitated, then abstracted into play, formalized into drama and story, crystalized into myth, and codified into religion - and only then criticized in philosophy, and provided, post-hoc, with rational underpinnings.
Lebens does not end the discussion there, though. He goes on to ask one final question - are we fictional? This question is based on the following argument that he formulated alongside Tyron Goldshmidt:
God is necessarily perfectly rational and necessarily omniscient (ie, He knows all things).
If God is necessarily perfectly rational and necessarily omniscient, He would not do what He knows to be otiose (ie what doesn’t need to be done to achieve His goals), and He knows what is otiose.
It’s possible (even if it strikes you as very unlikely) that you are a fictional character, in the mind of God. All of your experiences could be just as they are, even if (however unlikely it may seem) you and all those experiences are fictional. God could have made all things that way.
If God could have created you as a fictional character without taking any of your experiences away from you, then making you into a concrete non-fictional being of flesh and blood would have been otiose.
God doesn’t do anything otiose (this follows from 1 and 2)
Making you into a concrete non-fictional being of flesh and blood would have been otiose (this follows from 3 and 4)
Therefore, God didn’t make you into a concrete non-fictional being of flesh and blood (this follows from 5 and 6)
Therefore, you are a fictional being in the mind of God (this follows from 7)
Lebens goes on to argue that even atheists have considerable reason to believe we are fictional through variations of the Simulation Theory, though David Chalmers notes in his 2022 book Reality + that "even if our simulator is our creator, is all-powerful, is all-knowing, and is all-good, I still don’t think of her as a god… the simulator is not worthy of worship. And to be a god in the genuine sense, one must be worthy of worship.” There are also questions raised about how Lebens’ proposal interacts with the doctrine of free will and the problem of evil, which he addresses in his books Principles of Judaism and A Guide for the Jewish Undeicded.
Since this is already a long piece, I’m going to focus instead on how this theology should impact how we engage with religion in our (fictional?) lives according to Lebens’ broader philosophical project. This can best be done by examining the criteria provides for what constitutes a religious life:
A religious life is a life that is meant to be lived as part of a community that defines itself around a system of ideas and/or practices.
To live a religious life requires propositional faith directed towards the fundamental principles of the system of thought referred to in criterion 1, and/or towards some set of propositions such that faith in them can warrant commitment to the practices referred to in criterion 1.
To live a religious life requires imaginative engagement (either via a species of make-belief, attentive-seeing-as, alignment, or in terms of signing on, depending on the context) with the canonical narrative metaphors, prescribed games of make-belief, persons, and/or perspectives of the system of ideas and practices in question.
Criterion 1 is straight-forward, but criteria 2 and 3 are less clear. Criterion 2 explicitly implies that it is enough for one to hold a set of propositions that warrants commitment to religious praxis, rather than accepting particular faith propositions themselves. Additionally, Criterion 3 lists many forms of required imagination in addition to warrant-granting propositions. This is because religions
tend to demand that their followers imaginatively engage with a particular set of narratives… To engage with a narrative is, first and foremost, to engage one’s imagination. Whether we’re dealing with a fictional narrative, or a non-fictional narrative, if it’s written as a narrative, then we engage our mind’s eye. We imagine the scenes described unfolding, as if we’re watching them… To read or listen to a narrative is to engage in an act of offline stimulation of witnessing the events described.
Such imagination is achieved through several suggested methods:
Attentive-seeing-as: “trying to attend to something that’s all too easily ignored… as if you’re engaging your imagination in order to see the world more accurately - in accordance with your faith.”
Signing-on: “to agree to structure your life through [a] prism, to engage your emotions with it, to make it your own, to choreograph your life with this image as part of your personal symbolic landscape.”
Make-Belief: “attempting to experience the world as being a certain way.”
Ultimately, Lebens believes that “mere faith, or even belief, isn’t enough to make a person holy… making-believe that God exists, to wit, trying to experience the world as a world in which God is your God, is an ingredient for real religiosity; an ingredient for inculcating the right picture and attitude towards the world.” He hammers this in with a narrative about “Golda:”
Golda believes in God. She believes that God wills her to observe Jewish law. She recognizes the psychological import of those beliefs. Accordingly, she diligently observes every detail of Jewish law. To strengthen the thought experiment, let us imagine that she’s almost superhuman in that she never suffers from any form of akrasia (weakness of will). Furthermore, given her recognition of the psychological import of her beliefs, she is suitably moved by God’s kindness, and suitably reverential of his power and might. She never acts in ways that conflict with her beliefs. She is clearly frum in the sincerest way imaginable.
Despite her sincere and unimpeachable frumkeit, whole hours go by (between performance of ritual laws, for instance) in which Golda doesn’t think about her theological beliefs. She gets distracted, although she never sins. At those times, the relevant beliefs are background beliefs. And, at those times, perhaps her reverence, and her being moved by God’s kindness, are also background, or dispositional, states. At any point, if you asked her, “Are you moved by God’s kindness?” she’d say, “Yes, I am.” But her theological beliefs and the concomitant psychological states might be equally in the background. At those times, despite her sincere frumkeit, she fails—in those moments of distraction—to be religious (in my sense of the word).
It probably isn’t possible to be religious all of the time. Between moments of religiosity, Golda has the requisite beliefs, and she adopts the appropriate psychological attitudes towards those beliefs. But it’s all dispositional; it’s all in the background. Religious beliefs (as opposed to regular frum beliefs), and religious emotions, are occurrent (as opposed to dispositional) - almost overwhelmingly so.
Beliefs and emotions become occurrent only when a person is concomitantly attending to the world in a certain way: through the prism of those beliefs. I maintain that that is a function of the imagination, even though you may have faith, or belief, that the proposition you’re imagining is true.
A similar point was made by Rav Mattisyahu Rosenblum Zt’l in his book Rays of Wisdom:
Creativity is thus the essence of the mitzvah of emunah and at the root of all other mitzvos. (Obviously, any mitzvah in a world without G-d is completely meaningless.) Man must create a world filled with G-d’s presence. If he is not creative, if he does not remake his world, everything is lost.
Since man’s deepest essence, his Divine image, is to be a creator, this is his deepest obligation. Calling upon all his powers of will and intellect, he must re-form his world into one where he sees G-d. He must say, like the prime Creator did, “let there be light.” Man’s every success in reshaping his world will bring immense benefits. Not only will his world here be filled with greater meaning and purpose, he will be simultaneously building his next world.
This is all well and good when one genuinely believes in what they are now attending to, but it gets complicated when one doesn’t. And this is where Lebens acknowledges that “sometimes religiosity requires making-believe things that are known to be false.” He even gives an example in his own religiosity:
I don’t believe that the world was created in six days in exactly the way that God’s Torah, taken literally, describes. I don’t think that God revealed a natural history book to us. That’s not how I relate to God’s word. But perhaps those words are an invitation to view the world—without deceiving ourselves or anybody else (since we’re sophisticated beings who can look at one world in multiple ways)— through the prism of that story. Perhaps the rich tapestries and narratives of the Jewish canon provide me with a God-given symbolic landscape according to which I might be able to choreograph my life, with a great deal of imaginative engagement, and in this way come to heal myself, and the world around me, and also come to know, through the corrective effects of this make-belief, a fundamental religious reality that might be impossible to grasp unaided.
If, then, one cannot bring themselves to believe in the particular religious faith propositions, there are still significant benefits in relating to them through a narrative/fictional framework that is capable of inspiring one to live their best life. This is where everything comes together: if everything is a fiction in the mind of God, then the line between fictional and non-fictional narratives all but disappears. Even were this not the case, engaging in religion would still ultimately be a choice in which narratives to align oneself with and bring to life to in daily practice. This is ultimately what Psychiatrist and Neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist writes in The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World (2021) is the very point of religion:
Religion, at its best, is a cultural expression… of an awareness of and openness to a God or gods; of a context that transforms out understanding of the world, and which enables this sense to be shared and celebrated with others; in other words, it involves community in space, but also over time. Indeed, it helps to bind a community together: that is what religion means (from Latin religare, to bind). It makes tangible the betweenness, the relational nature of existence. And in this respect, if no other, it is hard to replace. What there is to be known is reciprocally bound up with the way that we attempt to know it, something science generally glosses over. The way we choose to attempt to know anything has moral implications, a point I have repeatedly emphasized. The myths of religions convey truths that are absent from everyday thought and language and speak directly to us at the deepest level of our understanding of life itself.
Secular gatherings, by contrast, do not remind us of what our lives mean sub specie aeternitatis, but merely confirm further our everyday views. This probably explains the enduring desire for religious ceremonies of birth, marriage, and death among those who are not regular attenders at a place of worship. In fact, one of the reasons for having religion is constantly to remind us of a broader context; a moral order; a network of obligations to other humans, to the earth, and to the Other that lies beyond. Extending beyond our lives, that is, in space and time, yet rooted firmly in places, spaces, practices, here and now. A religion forms the bridge between worlds, which is the purpose of metaphor - and the purpose of ritual, which is metaphor embodied…
The way in which one equips oneself to understand religious truths is not - fairly obviously, but I’m afraid still needs saying - by the scientific method. God is not a force in physics that we have not yet discovered. Propositional beliefs are what science has to offer. Yet propositional belief, while indisputably valuable, is the least that religion has to offer. Indeed, we are not dealing primarily with propositions at all, certainly not with a simple body of propositions the truth of which could in principle be determined in the same way that the date of the Big Bang, or the number of bonds in a carbon atom, can be determined. Religion offers deep, imaginative archetypal truths about the human condition that cannot easily be expressed in any other way, never mind in the sort of prose you might expect in a science textbook. and such truths are primarily experiential, although they may have cognitive aspects. In order to understand, you not only may, but must, try for yourself. Knowledge is of many kinds. Science is a matter of wissen, knowing facts; religion is a matter of kennen, knowing by experience. (I am coming to believe that the limited nature, and many of the confusions, of the Anglo-American tradition in philosophy is in part due to the fact that in English we have only one word for “know”.) Science is - at least purports to be - purely a matter of cognition. Religion is about the whole business of human being, human existence. Cognition alone will not do for that…
Religion performs a role of incomparable importance, whether one believes in it or not, which is why, presumably, it attracts such strong, and strongly opposed, feelings.
Religion, then, is the ideal way to embody the values that our core narratives and deepest longings for the transcendent attune us to. Viewing religion in the way that Lebens asks us to view fiction then provides many benefits to believers and to non-believers alike. Non-believers can utilize religious texts and practices as a way to better themselves and find greater meaning in life while believers can learn to better attend themselves to God via His written revelation and the mitzvot that come from it. This means in some sense seeing religion as fictional without relegating it to the realm of fiction. It’s a balance that is quite difficult but promises significant reward to those who do so. The question, as with most out-of-the-box philosophical approaches is: is it worth it? On that, I’ll conclude with words from Thinking About Stories’ introduction:
Our hope is that the journey on which we’re about to embark will enrich people’s engagement with fiction and inspire people to think philosophically about the world in which we live, and the hobbies - such as reading or binge-watching Netflix - with which we fill up much of our time.
My hope is that this discussion has given over much food for thought, and that we can all give our religious lives at least as much thought and attention as reading books or binge-watching Netflix.