We may smile to be told that, in some cultures, the eating of timid or ugly animals is believed to make the eater timid or ugly. Yet, equally fundamental misunderstandings of the relations between things, words and ideas are rife among Western thinkers. In this provocative essay, G.A. Wells identifies some influential mistakes about language embedded in the empiricist philosophical tradition of Locke, Russell and Ayer. Wells shows how these errors stimulated a religious backlash, in which faith became coupled with commonsense realism, in such writers as Keith Ward, Teilhard de Chardin and Thomas Altizer. Similar misconceptions gave rise both to the behaviourism of Watson and Ryle, and to the anti-behaviourist Chomskyan reaction with its chimera of a "universal grammar". Magical thinking, the writer claims, derives from plausible errors concerning the efficacy of gestures and words, and survives even though these errors have been refuted. Wells illustrates the influence of misconceptions about language as they manifest themselves in contemporary religious apologetics.

In this book, Professor Wells, one of the leading freethinkers of our time, addresses the question of why so many people believe and adopt the doctrines of religion. The work opens with a new attempt to analyze the nature of belief, developing the theoretical approach of the late F.R.H. Englefield. Wells rejects the view that an idea is a definite image, and distinguishes between general and abstract ideas. An account of the evidence for reasoning in non-human animals rebuts the frequently-heard claim that language is intrinsic to thinking, and a discussion of fairytales and primitive thinking concludes that these are closer to modern modes of thought than some philosphers have maintained. Moving to a consideration of the Bible as a basis for religious belief, Professor Wells describes the Bible's contradictory views of the person of Jesus, and presents an account of the traditional Muslim theory that Jesus was in fact saved by God from crucifixion. Wells also appraises the significance of various modern attempts to rethink the significance of the New Testament (Schweitzer, Hoskyns and Davey, Sanders and Davies), and reviews Charlesworth's attempt to salvage some historical evidence for Jesus from the Christian interpolation in Josephus. "Belief and Make-Believe" also contains explorations of conceptual difficulties in the New Testament view of man, with special attention to bodily resurrection, predestination, and eternal punishment, and analyzes recent attempts to defend the Christian message by restating it in more abstract terms. Finally, Professor Wells investigates the links between poetry, arts, and religion and the prevalence of make-believe in the arts and artistic criticism.

In this provocative book, noted scholar G. A. Wells tells the story of Higher Criticism: the close study of the scriptures that reveals difficulties and discrepancies. Wells traces the discipline's German beginnings, exploring the problems in the New Testament that prompted scholars to revise traditional theories of the scriptures' origins. Wells then traces the development and reception of these views from the 18th century to today. Drawing on current biblical scholarship, Wells explains how the Jesus of Paul's epistles differs radically from later versions and addresses conservative Christians' attempts to reconcile them. He carefully analyzes what the New Testament says about miracles, the Virgin Birth, the Nativity, Jesus' conflicting genealogies, the Resurrection, the post-Resurrection appearances, and the failed prophecies of imminent apocalypse. Wells persuasively profiles the New Testament as a fascinating but flawed collection of incompatible viewpoints, revealing Jesus as a shifting, ambiguous, legendary figure who reflected the evolving teachings of a fragmented, emotion-based cultic movement.