Studia Theologica - Nordic Journal of Theology

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Religion, fiction, and facts

Timo Koistinen

To cite this article: Timo Koistinen (2024) Religion, fiction, and facts, Studia Theologica - Nordic
Journal of Theology, 78:1, 23-43, DOI: 10.1080/0039338X.2023.2264266
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Studia Theologica - Nordic Journal of Theology, 2024
Vol. 78, No. 1, 23–43, https://doi.org/10.1080/0039338X.2023.2264266

Religion, fiction, and facts

Timo Koistinen

Religious fictionalism is a philosophical theory that aims to provide an

alternative to the metaphysically realistic (theistic or God-centred) view of the
nature of religious discourse. Religious fictionalism argues that being an
atheist is compatible with a certain kind of personal religiousness because it is
possible to understand traditional religious discourse as a useful fiction. In the
first part of my presentation, I will outline the central ideas of religious
fictionalism. After that, I highlight some key problems associated with it.
These have to do with the “make-believe” attitude of the fictionalist account
of faith and the problems linked with personal integrity. In the last part of the
article, I will turn to metaphysical and epistemic presuppositions that play a
central role in religious fictionalism. I will deal with these issues in the light of
Bas van Fraassen’s empiricist views on science, secularism and religion.

Introduction
Philosophers of religion working in the analytic tradition have not usually
paid attention to the role and meaning of stories in religious traditions.
Studies in the field typically focus on the analysis and assessment of the
propositional aspect of religious faith, and emphasize the role of beliefs
and truth claims as a central and essential part of faith. However, there
are analytic philosophers of religion who have argued for an alternative
perspective. Recently, a theory referred to as “religious fictionalism” has
aroused interest in the philosophy of religion. While there are interfaces
with some themes and methodological approaches in modern and post-
modern theology, such as narrative theology, the main themes of religious
fictionalism arise from the post-positivistic analytic philosophy of religion
rather than from theological hermeneutics. The issues under consider-
ation are closely related to the typical topics of the field of philosophy
© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis
Group
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24 Religion, fiction, and facts

of religion, such as the existence of God, the nature of religious faith, the
rationality of religious beliefs, and the meaningfulness of religious
language. The debate on this subject touches on the possibility of a kind
of religiosity or religious faith for atheists who find deep personal,
moral, and spiritual meaning in religious stories.
In contemporary philosophy, fictionalist theories have been developed
in several different subfields of philosophy, e.g. in modal semantics, the
philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of science, and ethics. Thus,
fictionalism in the general sense of the term posits the thesis that certain
claims in a given area of discourse, i.e. “fictionalist discourse”, are not
true descriptions of factual reality, although they appear to be such.
However, fictionalists consider that this is not a sufficient reason to
reject the use of such discourse, as there are good reasons to pretend
or make-believe that the claims in the discourse are true., Many philoso-
phical questions linked with fictionalism are not new. Fictionalist
elements can be found in the history of philosophy from Pyrrhonian
scepticism to Hans Vaihinger’s philosophy “as if”.1
Themes associated with fictionalism have much to do with the contro-
versy between metaphysical realism and antirealism. However, it
should be noted that fictionalism is not understood as a “global” view
concerning the general relationship between reality and mind/language,
but is restricted to offering a fictionalist account of some particular dis-
course (religious, mathematical, etc.). This is important for understand-
ing the starting point for religious fictionalism. Namely, atheism is often
based on the, assumption of a contradiction between the scientific and
religious pictures of the world. The assumption that both of these pic-
tures contain truth claims that contradict each other plays a significant
role in religious fictionalism. To resolve this contradiction, religious fic-
tionalists propose a fictionalist (antirealist) account for religious dis-
course and a factual (realist) account for scientific discourse.
A distinction is often made between hermeneutic fictionalism and
revolutionary fictionalism.2 Hermeneutic fictionalism is a description
of how a problematic discourse is actually used. According to herme-
neutic fictionalism, language users normally think they are not
making factual assertions in the context of problematic discourse, they
only appear to do so. Revolutionary fictionalism admits that according
to normal understanding, the normal use of problematic discourse
does in fact involve factual assertions about things that do not exist.
But according to revolutionary fictionalism, we ought to treat these
assertions as pretend assertions. We will see that religious fictionalism
takes the form of revolutionary fictionalism.
 Timo Koistinen 25

Michael Scott and Finlay Malcolm define religious fictionalism as

follows:

Religious fictionalism is the theory that it is morally and intellec-

tually legitimate to affirm religious sentences without believing
the content of what is said. Additionally, religious fictionalists
propose that it is similarly legitimate to engage in public and
private religious practices, such as the observation of religious fes-
tivals, going to church, or prayer, without having religious beliefs.3

What motivates the adoption of such a view? Obviously, the historical

roots of the discussion are connected with the secularization of modern
societies. But while traditional Christian churches have lost their
members in the twentieth century in Europe, the cultural, ethical, and
spiritual significance of Christianity has not disappeared. As Matthew
Arnold said in commenting on the state of culture at the end of the nine-
teenth century: “Two things about the Christian religion must surely be
clear to anybody with eyes in his head. One is, that men cannot do
without it; the other, they cannot do with it as it is.”4 This observation
is no longer a wholly accurate description of the place of Christianity in
multicultural Europe. Nevertheless, Arnold’s dilemma is still relevant
for many people today, and religious fictionalism deals with difficulties
that have been present in modern theology for a long time now. One
famous and powerful formulation of the central theological problem
can be found in Rudolf Bultmann’s paper, “New Testament and Mythol-
ogy: The Problem of Demythologizing the New Testament Proclamation”:

The world picture of the New Testament is a mythical world

picture. The world is a three-story structure, with earth in the
middle, heaven above it, and hell below. Heaven is the dwelling
place of God and of heavenly figures, the angels; the world below
is hell, the place of torment. But even the earth is not simply the
scene of natural day-to-day occurrences, of foresight and work
that reckon with order and regularity; rather, it, too, is a theatre
for the working of supernatural powers, God and his angels,
Satan and his demons. These supernatural powers intervene in
natural occurrences and in the thinking, willing, and acting of
human beings; wonders are nothing unusual.5

According to Bultmann, the mythical world picture of the Bible is not

believable for educated people in the twentieth century, and the question
26 Religion, fiction, and facts

for the modern theologian is how to interpret the Christian Gospel for
modern culture. The perspective of religious fictionalists differs from
Bultmann’s biblical theological hermeneutics – I will return to this ques-
tion in the last part of this paper – but here it is worth noting that reli-
gious fictionalism is closely related to themes which are at the heart of
modern theology. Like Bultmann and many other theologians, religious
fictionalists seek an answer to the question of how the valuable elements
of a religious faith can be maintained in a situation where religious
beliefs and doctrines appear to be unbelievable in the light of a scientific
view of the world.
In the first part of this article, I outline the central ideas of religious fic-
tionalism. After that, my intention is to highlight some key problems
associated with it. First, I refer to problems with personal integrity.
After that, I turn to problems which are to be found in the assumptions
– which are common in the current analytic philosophy of religion – con-
cerning the understanding of the concept of reality in a religious context,
and how these assumptions are related to metaphysics and science. I
deal with these questions by referring to Bas van Fraassen’s views, as
developed in his work The Empirical Stance (2002), in which he offers
an analysis of the relationship between science, secularism, and religion
in light of his empiricist approach to philosophy. Van Fraassen defends a
version of fictionalism (anti-realism) about scientific theories and offers a
view concerning the relationship between science and religion that
differs from religious fictionalism. His account of the nature of truth
claims in religion and science calls into question the assumptions that
govern not only religious fictionalism but also the prominent theism-
atheism debate in analytic philosophy of religion. In my opinion, his
approach has not received enough attention in current studies.

Religious fictionalism – Robin Le Poidevin

In the analytic tradition, philosophical theists and atheists commonly
suppose that the Christian faith – or, more broadly, the faith of Abraha-
mic religions – entails the acceptance of some metaphysical claims about
the nature of reality. According to this theological realism, the central
claims in religious discourse are thought to refer to an “objectively” or
“independently” existing divine reality. In view of this, it is irrational
or even absurd for a philosophical atheist – who is convinced that
central religious doctrines are not true – to participate in religious prac-
tices. This assumption is, however, disputed by advocates of religious
fictionalism.
 Timo Koistinen 27

Robin Le Poidevin is one of the most prominent exponents of this

view.6 In an early work, Arguing for Atheism: An Introduction to the Phil-
osophy of Religion (1996), he argued that the abandonment of theism
and theological realism does not make a Christian religious form of
life impossible. He has returned to this topic in his most recent book,
Religious Fictionalism (2019). In both books Le Poidevin defends the
possibility of being an atheistic religious believer by developing a fic-
tionalist account of religious faith.
Le Poidevin holds that the rejection of religious metaphysics does not
mean that one should draw the practical conclusion that it is irrational,
nonsensical, or morally illegitimate to participate in religious practices.
He defends taking a religious position based on an instrumentalist
account of religious language and argues that instrumentalism (associ-
ated with fictionalism) provides a better justification for religious prac-
tice than theological realism, because the former is not based on
“dubious metaphysical assumptions”.7
In this case, participating in religious practices means something other
than a purely formal participation in worship. It is common for atheists
who do not have any kind of faith to participate in religious ceremonial
services (e.g. in baptisms of children, funerals, or the weddings of their
relatives), and there is of course nothing irrational or morally reprehen-
sible in that. The central question concerns the legitimacy of adopting a
certain kind of personal religious faith that involves an attitude of make-
believe.
The make-believe aspect of fictionalist faith distinguishes it from the
usual way of understanding the nature of religious commitment. Le Poi-
devin openly admits that in this respect, religious fictionalism differs
from the way that religious people have generally thought about their
religious faith. However, he holds that the fact that religious believers
have (in the past and today) thought that metaphysical beliefs are essen-
tial elements of genuine faith is not a fatal problem for religious
fictionalists.8
Le Poidevin distinguishes fictionalism from some other non-realistic
interpretations of religious language. The most important of these is a
view called “expressivism”, whose best-known advocate is Richard
Braithwaite. In a much-discussed article that was published in the
middle of the last century, “An Empiricist’s View of the Nature of Reli-
gious Belief” (1955), Braithwaite developed an expressivist or “non-cog-
nitivist” view of religious language, according to which religious
discourse does not describe facts, but the use of religious language has
to do with a commitment to an agapeistic way of life.9
28 Religion, fiction, and facts

Although fictionalism and expressivism come close to each other in

some ways, according to Le Poidevin, there are significant differences
between them. Braithwaite thinks that the meaning of religious state-
ments is not propositional, and thus not fact-stating, i.e. they are not
capable of being true or false. In contrast, religious fictionalism treats
religious statements as propositional and fact-stating. According to fic-
tionalism, religious statements are “truth-apt”: they can have a truth
value, but they are only true within a fiction.10 A truth value can be
attached to worlds of fiction, for example, in the following way. Think
of the case when someone describes the content of Kafka’s novel The
Trial to others, and says that “Josef K. is arrested and accused of a
crime, but he does not know what the crime is.” It is undeniable that
this claim is true within this story. So, this is one way in which we can
apply a truth-value in fictional sentences. Using Le Poidevin’s terms,
the language of fiction is “truth-apt” but is not “truth-normed”, i.e. it
is not answerable to the world. In a similar way, the notion of truth
can be applied to religious narratives. He says: “The religious narratives
(in which category the fictionalist will include the more obviously doc-
trinal elements) are not to be taken as attempts to describe the world as it
really is, but rather how it is in fiction.”11
Another important characteristic of religious fictionalism concerns the
attitude of pretence and make-believe that one adopts towards the world
of fiction. This phenomenon is familiar to all of us from children’s games.
When children play the game “cops and robbers”, they take on roles in
this game world, and to be fun, this of course requires immersion in that
world. However, children obviously know that they are pretending to be
someone they are not. This, and many other ordinary human practices,
are examples of cases where “pretending that p is perfectly acceptable
when p is known to be false”.12 Religious fictionalists argue that this atti-
tude is also acceptable in religious contexts: an engagement in religious
practices can be understood as an engagement in a “make-believe in
God” game. Immersing oneself in religious narratives can be emotion-
ally and practically relevant for us in the same way as other fictions
are. Religious stories, teachings and doctrines illustrate deep ethical
and spiritual questions in human life, and by generating emotions,
these stories influence peoples’ lives and conduct in a useful way.
Le Poidevin’s fictionalism differs from agnostic and non-doxastic
views linked with theological realism, according to which having reli-
gious faith or being a religious person does not necessarily require
that one believes that central religious claims are true. It has been
argued that genuine and epistemically acceptable religious faith does
 Timo Koistinen 29

not necessarily entail belief, but only some epistemically weaker attitude
such as “acceptance”, as William Alston has suggested, or the “hope”
that religious statements are true, as Louis Pojman and Simo Knuuttila
have suggested.13 Adherents of non-doxastic positions do not think
that genuine religious faith requires epistemic belief in the existence
God.14 However, this does mean that pretending to believe that God
exists is an adequate attitude in religious life. For adherents of non-dox-
astic views, the question of the truth of religious beliefs is still a crucial
matter. This is what fictionalists deny. A fictionalist may think that the
probability of religious claims is so low that even hoping and accepting
are not adequate attitudes. A fictionalist does not hope – or at least he
does not need to hope – that God exists, but nevertheless make-believes
that there is a God. Thus, in uttering religious statements, for example in
reciting the Apostle’s Creed, fictionalists pretend to assert them. In recit-
ing the Creed, in addressing prayers to God, etc., they locate themselves
in a fictional world that they do not think of as a real world.15
An interesting feature of the theory is a certain kind of traditionalism.
Religious traditions offer a starting place for adopting religious fiction-
alism. Religions are culturally established practices and institutions; a
fictionalist does not invent them, but takes them as given. A fictionalist
does not construct his own religion, but is obliged to choose between
different religious traditions. Le Poidevin borrows a quote from
G. K. Chesterton: “A man can no more possess a private religion than
he can possess a private sun and moon.”16 In addition, when one
takes a fictionalist attitude to religious stories, these stories can be
taken as they are. This attitude does not require much hermeneutic
reflection. This is well illustrated by Peter Lipton, who has developed
a version of religious fictionalism that comes close to Le Poidevin’s
views.17 Lipton distinguishes between two ways of solving the tension
between science and religion: adjusting the content and adjusting
one’s attitude. Lipton argues for the latter option. He does not want to
adjust the content of religious claims. Although he considers Biblical
stories to be false, he takes these stories as they are and, in this
respect, adheres to a “literal” interpretation of the Bible.

Personal integrity and the usefulness of playing the God game

One obvious problem with fictionalism is linked with the question of
whether pretence and make-belief are compatible with being honest to
oneself and others. For many people, this is and has been a serious ques-
tion. The ethics of belief and personal integrity have not only been a
30 Religion, fiction, and facts

significant theme for philosophers, but they have also touched the lives
of many people in different social and historical contexts. One culturally
prominent example can be found in Victorian Britain. In those days, a
public break between citizens and religion became a real possibility
for the first time, and religious doubts arose in an unprecedented way.
Struggles with religious doubts, intellectual honesty, and questions
associated with hypocrisy grew, and these struggles were strongly rep-
resented in many novels and autobiographies of that time, as has been
shown in many literary studies.18 In the context of these intellectual
and moral controversies and inner struggles, solving this problem by
pointing to the possibility of make-belief would have been – and still
is – a somewhat strange option for many people. In fact, when such
an attitude has been adopted, it has not been something that one actually
wants to do. Instead, by pretending, individuals have often wanted to
protect themselves by keeping their own beliefs hidden. There are
those who have wished to avoid conflict with religious or political
rulers. There are also those make-believers who have wanted to avoid
causing grief to their religious parents or friends. In these cases, ques-
tions linked with personal integrity cannot be ignored.
Anthony Kenny’s life story echoes these issues. Kenny was a priest of
the Catholic Church before he became a world-famous philosopher. In
his autobiography, A Path from Rome (1985), he relates his inner struggles
during the time when he started to doubt essential doctrines of the
Catholic Church and finally renounced his priesthood. For many years
he had put aside his doubts, but over time, his doubts only intensified,
the central problem being that he felt he was living the double life of a
hypocrite. After leaving the priesthood, Kenny, who has taken an agnos-
tic stance, still continues to attend church services, although he states
that he does not recite any creed.
Interestingly, Le Poidevin rejects the possible accusation that fictional-
ists are insincere when they recite a creed. He thinks that “sincerity is to
be judged according to the intentions of the participant,” and “if those
intentions are to deceive, […] then this is indeed insincere. But if it is a
means to moral and spiritual improvement, to the benefit of all, it is
not.”19 He claims that, in this respect, there is an important difference
between an agnostic, such as Kenny, and fictionalists, for “an agnostic
cannot utter these words without hypocrisy or self-deception.”20 This
is because Kenny assumes that genuine faith requires that one believes
that God exists, and this belief, according to Kenny, is epistemically vir-
tuous only if one has convincing evidence of the existence of God. He
does not have such evidence, and in this case, the ethics of belief
 Timo Koistinen 31

prevent him from reciting the creed. Fictionalists or instrumentalists

need not restrict their religious activities on the same grounds,
because for them, religion has a valid point because it is useful, and its
usefulness is independent of the truth of religious beliefs. Strangely
enough, fictionalists are thus not guilty of self-deception, because they
consciously pretend to believe something they know to be untrue.
Le Poidevin’s view that this religious make-believe game is sincere,
insofar as its intention is moral or spiritual improvement for the
benefit of all, brings out the deeply instrumentalist nature of fictional-
ism. In order to receive the moral and spiritual – or psychological –
benefits of religious faith, one has to make-believe with regard to reli-
gious doctrines and act as if one believes in them. The appeal of religious
narratives for a fictionalist is that they are devices which strengthen be-
haviour through the emotions. Instrumentalism here takes a rather
extreme form, and this raises the question of the religious or spiritual
aspect of the theory. The idea that an expression of moral commitment
is a central element of religious language plays a central role in Le Poi-
devin’s thought, although he explicitly rejects the view that “theistic
language is really moral language in coded form”.21 At any rate, the
fact that he rather often appeals to the idea that religious stories are
useful for offering a lively expression of ethical values and ideals22
leaves us with doubt as to whether his approach does justice to the reli-
gious meaning that these stories possess. It is possible that in the utilitar-
ian make-believe game, the religious point of a story is lost. The words
one uses might be the same, but the meaning is different.
Of course, religious discourse may contain elements that an atheist (or
more broadly an unbeliever) finds useful. An unbeliever can learn
morally important insights and aspects of the wisdom of life from the
teachings and stories of religious traditions. However, for me it is hard
to see that this requires that the unbeliever pretends to believe them.
Learning something from religious stories may require sensitivity and
imaginative openness towards religious matters, but this does not
require an internally fragmented attitude connected with pretending
to believe in something that one does not believe in.23

Religion, secularism, and objectifying inquiry

I next turn my attention to issues that I find central in evaluating the fic-
tionalist approach. These have to do with the semantical and epistemo-
logical questions concerning the notions of reality and unreality in
science and religion debates.
32 Religion, fiction, and facts

Le Poidevin points out in the epilogue of his book Religious Fictional-

ism that he has left out of his examination some possible questions
related to religious fictionalism. One of them concerns whether the
central distinction in his discussion between realistic and anti-realist atti-
tudes is meaningful.24 He refers here to D. Z. Phillips, who has criticized
this distinction (as it is usually understood in contemporary analytic
philosophy of religion) in many of his writings.25 According to Phillips
and other Wittgensteinian writers, such as Rush Rhees and Peter Winch,
the way many philosophers (metaphysical realists and anti-realists) use
such expressions as “reality”, “the world” or “a referent” is misleading
because they do not have fixed meanings, but are context-dependent.
These expressions are used in various ways in different contexts, and
these uses are not unified. Wittgensteinian philosophers of religion
have emphasized the multiplicity of reality that is intertwined with
forms of life and the ways of using language that belong to them:
“reality” is not limited to the world of scientific facts.26
There has been a lot of discussion about the Wittgensteinian philosophy
of religion in the contexts of controversies over realism, and I find the topic
extremely relevant to religious fictionalism.27 However, I am not going to
deal with these debates now, but instead I want to explore somewhat
similar views developed by Bas van Fraassen, whose ideas are much
less discussed in the philosophy of religion. Van Fraassen, like Wittgenstei-
nian philosophers of religion, represents a philosophical thought that devi-
ates from naturalistic and supranaturalistic metaphysics. Van Fraassen
criticizes the naturalistic approaches in contemporary philosophy and
also considers metaphysical idea of God to be erroneous. Rejecting meta-
physics does not mean that he defends atheism or that he regards God as a
useful fiction. Of particular interest to the discussion of the relationship
between science and religion is that van Fraassen’s philosophical starting
point is the empiricist tradition, which he develops in an original way.
Van Fraassen is best known for his studies on the philosophy of
science. He is classified as an adherent of fictionalism in the philosophy
of science. His most extensive writing on religion is The Empirical Stance,
published in 2002, which has received surprisingly little attention in the
philosophy of religion.28 This is no doubt the case because his thinking
differs significantly from mainstream philosophy of religion. What is
interesting here is that, like the fictionalists, van Fraassen’s aim is to
reflect on the nature of religious faith in the light of the challenge of
the secular scientific worldview. He also has a very critical attitude
towards the metaphysical idea of God. However, his ideas about religion
differ significantly from religious fictionalism.
 Timo Koistinen 33

Van Fraassen’s most influential contribution to philosophy is the theory

of “constructive empiricism”, which stands in contrast to scientific
realism. Scientific realism and constructive empiricism understand the
aim of science in different ways. According to scientific realism,
“Science aims to give us, in its theories, a literally true story of what the
world is like; and acceptance of a scientific theory involves the belief
that it is true.”29 Constructive empiricism, in turn, claims that “Science
aims to give us theories which are empirically adequate; and acceptance
of a scientific theory involves as belief only that it is empirically ade-
quate.”30 The fictionalist elements in van Fraassen’s conception of scienti-
fic practice are connected to the criticism of the philosophical tradition of
“realist metaphysics”. From the perspective of an empiricist, the meta-
physical tradition goes wrong in postulating theories concerning unobser-
vable entities or aspects of reality, which are then offered as explanations
of things.31 This speculation goes beyond science. However, he thinks that
in practising science, scientists treat theories as if they fully believe in
them – this is the fictionalist aspect of van Fraassen’s thought. He
describes this attitude in terms of immersion in the scientific world
picture. But this immersion does not mean that scientists fully believe
in the theory that they are working with; they only “accept” it. Immersion
in a world picture does not “preclude ‘bracketing’ its ontological impli-
cation”.32 In this respect, scientific fictionalism is reminiscent of religious
fictionalism,33 but Fraassen ends up with a different view concerning reli-
gion than Le Poidevin and Lipton. He does not think of religion as a fic-
tional world of imagination that is the opposite of the real world.
What van Fraassen means by empiricism is a complicated matter.
Constructive empiricism is not committed to the problematic doctrines
of earlier logical positivism, such as the verificationist theory of
meaning or the doctrine that sense experience is the only source of infor-
mation about reality. He argues that empiricism should not be under-
stood as a single philosophical position, but rather as a historically
developed tradition consisting of a variety of approaches. He under-
stands empiricism as a stance, as an antidogmatic philosophy that is
not committed to metaphysical or scientific theories, doctrines, or
theses. Thus, empiricism does not consist of some statement about
what the world is like, although “Such a stance can of course be
expressed, and may involve or presuppose some beliefs as well, but
cannot be simply equated with having beliefs or making assertions
about what there is.”34 Empiricism is not committed to certain scientific
theories of reality, although it takes a positive attitude towards science as
34 Religion, fiction, and facts

an activity, but this “is not directed so much to the content of the sciences
as to their forms and practices of inquiry”.35
Van Fraassen does not think that the interests of science and religion are
the same. It is a mistake to think that they can be treated and evaluated by
the same epistemic standards. He develops his position by offering an
analysis of some central aspects of scientific thought, and with this he
seeks to find an answer as to how a secular orientation is related to
science and how it differs from a religious orientation. Van Fraassen’s
basic insight is that scientific research has certain general limits, and it
is a mistake to limit cognitively meaningful thinking and experience
only to science. A key issue is linked with the notion of “objectification”,
which is a central characteristic of scientific research. Van Fraassen’s
analysis has explicit affinities with Rudolf Bultmann’s theology, in
which the notion of objectifying thinking plays a very important role.
One main feature of objectifying inquiry is delimiting an inquiry
beforehand. This means that an objectifying inquiry must be linked to
a certain domain, and the domain of the inquiry is initially limited to
questions linked to certain parameters. When scientists decide to
conduct research, they define its subject and what is being studied
about it. To use van Fraassen’s own example: if someone is conducting
research on frogs, the study is limited to frogs, and to be meaningful it
must address certain kinds of questions concerning the properties of
frogs, for example frogs’ jumping abilities.36 The field of scientific
research is always necessarily limited because in testing theories, one
must determine beforehand what kind of answers might be possible.
This means, according to van Fraassen and Bultmann, that scientific
study is not open to a radically new kind of reality. Nothing radically
new – i.e. that which was not foreseen in the context of the domain to
which the object belongs – can emerge.37 An essential feature of objecti-
fying inquiry is the avoidance of subjective parameters in scientific
research. The parameters used in scientific studies are independent of
the people who are carrying out the research. In “objective distancing”,
a researcher is taken out of the picture; the results of a study must be
independent of a particular researcher.38
According to van Fraassen, it is arbitrary to think that only science and
objectifying inquiry can provide us with cognitively significant activi-
ties. For many secular thinkers, this idea has been a part of their scientific
and naturalistic worldview, but van Fraassen argues that it is not based
on scientific inquiry. According to him, there are forms of human activi-
ties and thought that are not limited in the same way that scientific
research is. Concrete examples of this are poetry, the creation of new
 Timo Koistinen 35

kinds of art, interpersonal communication, and religious texts. These

activities and forms of thought open up new perspectives in a very
different way than science and objectifying inquiry does. They also
involve a subjectivist element. Personal experiences and the activities
associated with them are cognitively significant, without offering
viewer-independent knowledge about reality. They do not give us the-
ories, but offer us a radically new understanding of reality.39
According to van Fraassen, there are questions that cannot be solved by
the investigation of scientific facts, but that are no less real than scientific
problems. Examples of these include certain questions concerning person-
hood: “What are persons?” and “Is someone a person or not?” These
questions have been very real and burning questions in various historical
contexts; for example, when it has been asked whether members of some
ethnic group (e.g. slaves in America and in Europe, Jewish people in the
Holocaust) are persons and what rights they have in society. It is a mistake
to seek answers to these questions from a purely scientific perspective by
exploring scientific facts concerning the organisms of the entities in ques-
tion. Therefore, scientifically oriented naturalistic and materialist philos-
ophies have nothing to offer to those who ask these questions. These
questions are moral and existential questions: they are solved by taking
a stand, and their solutions involve an element of choice.40
Van Fraassen’s approach to religious matters is strongly influenced by
existentialist religious thinkers such as Emil Fackenheim, Martin Buber,
and Rudolf Bultmann. All of these thinkers held that there is a strong
tension between religious faith and a modern culture that is dominated
by a secular, naturalistic perspective on reality. These thinkers take the
problems linked with this tension seriously. Their position, van Fraassen
notes, was “radically different from the so-called neo-orthodox view of
Karl Barth, who refused a dialogue with scientists, because theologians’
and scientists’ topics of concern are disjoint and unrelated to each
other”.41 Like religious fictionalists, these thinkers try to respond to
the challenge posed to religion by the secular worldview. However,
van Fraassen’s account of the ideas of these existentialist thinkers
offers an understanding of religious faith that goes in a different direc-
tion than religious fictionalists’ insights. The central concern here is
the attitude towards religious experiences and their “real” meaning.
Fackenheim pays attention to the way in which modern secular
persons understand religious events in the Biblical stories and how
their perspective differs from the perspectives of the persons in these
stories. The attitude of Biblical figures in these stories is characterized
by “abiding astonishment”: for them, these events were historic
36 Religion, fiction, and facts

moments of divine presence in the world. For secular critics, things are
different. For in light of their presuppositions, these stories are about
subjective experiences, and the task of the secular critic is to explain
them. In this case, astonishment is replaced by scientific or historical
curiosity, which seeks out information about facts, and this “curiosity
ceases to abide when the facts are explained”.42 Thus, there is a deep
difference between the secular scientific attitude and the religious atti-
tude towards these stories and religious experiences linked with them.
However, van Fraassen argues that it is a mistake to assume that a
secular scientific attitude is itself based on science. The secular account
of the nature of religious experience, as Fackenheim describes it, is not
part of science as science, but it is a worldview, “it is the secular stand-
point, which is merely one possible orientation for the participants in
science”.43
In Eclipse of God (1952) Buber speaks about the loss of belief in secular
culture, where belief in a reality that is absolutely independent of us is
replaced by the subjective and fictitious existence of God. Van Fraassen
quotes Buber, who equates secularism with subjectivist reductionism:

In some periods, that which men “believe in” as something absol-

utely independent of themselves is a reality with which they are
in a living relation. [. . .] In other periods, on the contrary, this
reality is replaced by a varying representation that men “have”
and therefore can handle. [. . .]

Men who are still “religious” in such times usually fail to realize
that the relation conceived of as religious no longer exists
between them and a reality independent of them, but has existence
only within the mind – a mind which at the same time contains
hypostatized images, hypostatized “ideas.”

Concomitantly there appears, more or less clearly, a certain type of

person, who thinks that this is as it should be: in the opinion of this
person, religion has never been anything but an intra-psychic
process whose products are “projected” on a place in itself fictitious,
but vested with reality by the soul.44

Van Fraassen agrees. He holds that the significance of religious faith is

lost “if we think of the [subjectivist] experience of God’s presence as
what is immediate to us, rather than God.”45 God’s reality is not the
reality of an object, but neither is it fiction.
 Timo Koistinen 37

What van Fraassen says about the reality of God should be under-
stood in the light of his empiricist understanding of how we are in
contact with reality. The difference between subjectivist religious experi-
ence and the objective reality behind it is misleading. Experience shows
what things are; experience is not something that hides some deep meta-
physical facts that are behind the phenomena. In other words, religious
experience is at the heart of religiousness. Van Fraassen considers that
the real question is not the “worn-out” question of the existence or
reality of God, which is burdened “by the concepts in which philoso-
phers have simulated religion.” The real question is not whether the
God of philosophers exists. What, he says, is the real question is
“Does it ever really happen that anyone anywhere encounters God?”46
This is, however, a question that is outside the limits of objectifying
inquiry. The crucial difference between the secular and the religious is
not in the theories they hold or their beliefs about the facts of the
world, but “an attitude, in how we approach the world and experi-
ence.”47 For van Fraassen, religious faith is a matter of decision in the
face of the wholly Other. It is a matter of living “differently within the
world” and “within divine presence.”48 This does not mean that God
is a fiction, and that having religious faith is a matter of immersing
oneself in a fictive world of make-believe.
However, van Fraassen shares the concern of Bultmann’s theology. He
holds that a religious person living in a culture permeated by science
and objective thinking cannot ignore Bultmann’s problem. The concepts
and beliefs of the Holy Scriptures belong to a world picture that is
foreign to educated persons in the twenty-first century. Van Fraassen
as a philosopher does not give an answer to this question, but he
merely highlights some aspects that he considers relevant to Bultmann’s
theological problem. The valuable feature of Bultmann’s thought is, on
the one hand, a rejection of the fundamentalist’s attempt to hold the
ancient mythological world picture, and, on the other hand, a rejection
of the attempt to make the gospel “hygienic” by replacing the gospel
message with idealistic ethics.49 Bultmann thought that the correct sol-
ution was not to eliminate the myth from the Gospel, but to interpret
them. When the mythical language of the New Testament describes
human life as under the power of demons and gods, this language
expresses a certain conception of existence. The myth makes it apparent
that “our knowledge that the world in which we live as human beings is
full of enigmas and mysteries, and that we are not lords over the world
and our own life”, and in this way, “demythologizing seeks to bring out
the real intention of myth, namely, its intention to talk about human
38 Religion, fiction, and facts

existence as grounded in and limited by a transcendent, unworldly

power, which is not visible to objectifying thinking”.50

Conclusion
Religious fictionalism seeks an answer to the question of how to main-
tain the valuable aspects of religious faith and life in a secular culture
where religious beliefs appear implausible to many people in the light
of a scientific worldview.
From a historical perspective, the origins of religious fictionalism
can be traced to Kant’s critique of proofs of God’s existence and meta-
physical theism, which has had a significant impact on modern Protes-
tant theology. Le Poidevin’s theory is heavily influenced by earlier
British analytical philosophy of religion, particularly Braithwaite’s
expressivist theory of religious language. Le Poidevin’s approach rep-
resents an alternative to the prevalent analytic philosophy of religion
and “the return of metaphysics” associated with it. It is an important
aspect of religious fictionalism that it considers the function and sig-
nificance of stories in religious traditions. In this regard, the theory
offers perspectives that have not been extensively investigated in ana-
lytic philosophy of religion.
The problematic aspects of religious fictionalism are, on the one hand,
the combination of religious faith and a make-believe attitude, and, on
the other hand, an instrumentalist understanding of the meaning of reli-
gious language and action. Even nonreligious individuals can find moral
or other value in religious narratives, without having to pretend to
believe in the doctrines of religions. The instrumentalist perspective
on religion relates to the question of religious language’s meaning and
its connection to reality. This subject has been discussed at length in
theological hermeneutics and Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion.
Le Poidevin and Lipton pay little attention to the viewpoints expressed
in these discussions.
One of the most significant philosophical problems of religious fiction-
alism is the question of how to understand the nature of religious reality
and its relationship to science. Van Fraassen, who has been characterized
as a representative of fictionalism in the philosophy of science, has
developed an original perspective on the relationship between religion
and science, and it is intriguing that his perspective differs from reli-
gious fictionalism. Van Fraassen is critical of the metaphysical God of
the philosophers, but unlike Le Poidevin, he does not regard God to
be a fictitious being.
 Timo Koistinen 39

Instead, he approaches the relationship between science, secularism,

and religion from an existentialist theological perspective. Van Fraas-
sen’s combination of existentialism and empiricism provides a per-
spective that is thought-provoking and guides philosophy of religion
in a different direction than mainstream analytic theism, but it does
not result in religious fictionalism. Religious faith is directed to the
divine reality, but it is not an attitude toward a metaphysical object
or a theory, it is distinct from objectifying thought. In this regard,
van Fraassen’s empiricism not only converges with continental philos-
ophy and existentialist theology, but also Wittgensteinian thought. Van
Fraassen’s distinction between objectifying and non-objectifying
inquiry illuminates some important methodological problems in the
scientific and historical study of religion. It provides a basis for the
view that the secular and purely factual study of holy texts is in
some respects irrelevant for religious belief. What is religiously rel-
evant – what is real for the believer – belongs to a completely different
level than the probability of historical facts. Religious faith is a matter
of embracing a perspective about the world, it is not a belief that is
subjected to rigorous historical testing. Van Fraassen does not refer
to Wittgenstein in The Empirical Stance, but it is interesting to note
that some of Wittgenstein’s remarks about religion come close to
what has been said above. Wittgenstein – who read diligently and
appreciated William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience –
wrote in 1937:

Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has

happened and will happen to the human soul, but a description of
something that actually takes place in human life. For “conscious-
ness of sin” is a real event and so are despair and salvation
through faith. Those who speak of such things (Bunyan for instance)
are simply describing what has happened to them, whatever gloss
anyone may want to put on it.51

Timo Koistinen
Department of Systematic Theology
University of Helsinki
Helsinki 00014
Finland
timo.koistinen@helsinki.fi
40 Religion, fiction, and facts

Notes
1. Eklund, “Fictionalism.”
2. Eklund, “Fictionalism” and Stanley, “Hermeneutic Fictionalism”.
3. Scott and Malcolm, “Religious Fictionalism,” 1. It is worth noting that the expression
“without having religious beliefs” is ambiguous. When “belief” is understood as a
propositional attitude, one can make a distinction between two cases: 1) “a believes
that not p”, and 2) “it is not the case that a believes p, and it is not the case that a
believes that not p”. This distinction can be used to illuminate the difference
between atheism and a certain form of religious scepticism or agnosticism (when p
= “God exists”).
4. Arnold, The Complete Prose Works, 378.
5. Bultmann, New Testament and Mythology, 1.
6. In addition to Le Poidevin, there are several other recent writers who have developed
ideas linked with religious fictionalism: Eshleman, “Can an Atheist Believe”; Lipton,
“Science and Religion”; Harrison, “Philosophy of Religion”; Deng, “Religion for Nat-
uralists”; and Sauchelli, “The Will to Make-Believe”.
7. Le Poidevin, Arguing for Atheism, 119–20.
8. Le Poidevin, Religious Fictionalism, 7–8.
9. Le Poidevin, Religious Fictionalism, 59.
10. Ibid., 25.
11. Ibid., 31. Incidentally, the question of how “key religious truth claims” are identified is,
of course, a difficult theological problem in Christianity with a long – indeed, a very
long – history.
12. Ibid., 29.
13. Alston, “Belief, Acceptance”; Knuuttila, “Usko, järki”; and Pojman, Religious Belief. See
also Eklund, Faith and Will.
14. In this context, it is interesting to note that according to Kant, the “minimum” of theol-
ogy is not that God exists, but that it is possible that there is a God. See Kant, Religion
within, 6:153-4/142.
15. Le Poidevin appeals here to Kendall Walton’s theory of the nature of emotional
responses to fiction. Walton, “Fearing Fictions.”
16. Chesterton, “Introduction to the Book,” 9; Le Poidevin, Religious Fictionalism, 33.
17. Lipton, “Science and Religion,” 43.
18. See e.g., Barbour, Versions of Deconversion, chaps. 4 and 6.
19. Le Poidevin, Religious Fictionalism, 38.
20. Le Poidevin, Arguing for Atheism, 118.
21. Le Poidevin, Arguing for Atheism, 112; see also Le Poidevin, Religious Fictionalism, 23–4.
22. Le Poidevin holds that morality is independent of religion, in the sense that religion is
not required as a basis for morality, although religious stories are useful from a moral
point of view. See Le Poidevin, Arguing for Atheism, chap. 6.
23. An especially strange suggestion is posed by Andrew Sauchelli, who argues that
appreciating religious art may require one to make-believe in something that one con-
siders morally wrong. According to him, fictionalist behaviour can be based on “the
desire to appreciate some of the artistic works belonging to certain religious traditions
despite the irrationality, falsity or even immorality of the beliefs.” Sauchelli, “The Will
to Make-Believe,” 621.
24. Le Poidevin, Religious Fictionalism, 56.
25. Phillips, Wittgenstein and Religion and Phillips, Religion and Friendly.
 Timo Koistinen 41

26. Rush Rhees writes: “What I am trying to get at is the point that to talk about the reality
of God as illusory – or rather, to talk about belief in God as illusory – is a misunder-
standing; that the whole distinction between illusion and reality, which belongs to
the physical object language, is out of place here. Although Freud and others have
taken belief in God to be an illusion, that is not the matter that is really in question
here […]’The reality of the spirit’ would be more in place. It would be exactly in the
same sort of way if one said that the preoccupation with moral issues is illusory.”
Rhees, Rush Rhees on Religion, 26.
27. I have also dealt with it myself before: Koistinen, “D. Z. Phillips’ Contemplative
Philosophy”.
28. Van Fraassen has not written much on the philosophy of religion. His most extensive
treatment of the subject can be found in The Empirical Stance. See also van Fraassen,
“Three-sided Scholarship” and van Fraassen, “Response: Haldane“. One treatment
of van Fraassen’s philosophy of religion is Jaeger, “Bas van Fraassen on Religion”.
29. Van Fraassen, The Scientific Image, 8.
30. Ibid., 12.
31. Van Fraassen, “The World of Empiricism,” 114.
32. Van Fraassen, The Scientific Image, 80–2.
33. Le Poidevin and Lipton describe the religious fictionalist attitude in a similar way: they
suggest that religious fictionalists “immerse” themselves in religion. Le Poidevin, Reli-
gious Fictionalism, 32 and “Lipton, Science and Religion,” 41–3. Lipton explicitly
borrows the idea from van Fraassen.
34. Van Fraassen, The Empirical Stance, 47–8.
35. Ibid., 63.
36. Ibid.,160.
37. “[O]bjectifying thinking [. . .] understands its object in the context of the domain of
objects to which it belongs. Thus, for objectifying thinking a phenomenon is not under-
stood and is a mere x or enigma until it can be located in some definite place in the
order proper to some domain of objects. Nothing can be new here in a radical sense;
each individual thing is to some extent already foreseen in the outline that always
guides the study of objects in a particular domain.” Bultmann, New Testament and
Mythology, 142; Van Fraassen, The Empirical Stance, 165. Even in the case where scien-
tists are constructing new theoretical models and parameters, there must be connec-
tions to older theories and models; scientific revolutions, as van Fraassen points out,
“do not take us out of science”. This means that after scientific revolutions, the key fea-
tures of objective inquiry in testing new scientific theories remain. Van Fraassen, The
Empirical Stance, 167.
38. Ibid., 156–64.
39. Van Fraassen refers to Aristotle’s view that poetry and plays, such as tragedies, may
offer experiences and perspectives that reveal deep truths to us. In this case, both
the viewer and its writer are involved in the subjective inquiry. Van Fraassen, The
Empirical Stance, 170–1.
40. Ibid.,190–1.
41. Ibid.,179.
42. This quote is taken from Fackenheim’s second Deems Lecture. Van Fraassen, The
Empirical Stance, 181.
43. Van Fraassen, The Empirical Stance, 182.
44. Buber, Eclipse of God, 13; van Fraassen, The Empirical Stance, 183.
45. Van Fraassen, The Empirical Stance, 183–184.
42 Religion, fiction, and facts

46. Ibid., 255, note 32.

47. Ibid., 194.
48. Ibid., 189.
49. Ibid., 187.
50. Ibid., 228; 260 n. 43; Bultmann, New Testament and Mythology, 98–9.
51. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 28e. This article is based on my presentation at the
Nordic Society of Philosophy for Religion Conference, “Symbolizing Transcendence:
The Limits of Language”, at the University of Tartu, October 2021. I thank the
various participants at this meeting and the anonymous reviewers of this article for
their helpful comments.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

ORCID
Timo Koistinen http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3548-7683

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