The depth and limits of imaginative immersion in religious cognition

Abstract

Neil Van Leeuwen’s Imagination Thesis (IT) proposes that religious assertions usually function not as expressions of factual beliefs about the world but as distinctive acts of imagination. This paper first reconstructs the arguments supporting the IT and then examines its limitations in explaining crucial aspects of religious cognition. Finally, it introduces an alternative model, the Imaginative Support Thesis (IST), which aims to preserve the essential role of imagination while capturing the epistemic complexity of sincere religious assertions. It can be argued that the IST has certain advantages over both the traditional belief-based model and the IT in explaining how religious cognition generally operates.