To explore the evidence behind my main thesis, I have to defer to people who are masters of their respective fields. I’m not a specialist in genetics, geology, astronomy, physics, or history—and I don’t want to pose as one. Still, with many complex topics it helps to have some working understanding across multiple domains, because reality doesn’t come neatly divided into academic departments.
So here is a starter video list—meant less as a syllabus than as an invitation to curiosity:
1. A very approachable place to start is simply to watch nature documentaries. David Attenborough is, in my view, among the greatest nature documentarians in history. One can see that Attenborough is also a great human being—gentle, wise, kind, caring—and most everyone, regardless of religious or political leanings, would surely appreciate him. The BBC Planet Earth series is a good gateway:
Planet Earth
Planet Earth II
Planet Earth III
And separately (not BBC): David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet (2020).
These films can begin with simple appreciation of the wonder of the natural world—then, if you’re willing, they also confront something darker: predation, starvation, disease, and the high baseline suffering in wild ecosystems. And these documentaries are a good background to understand evolution as the phenomenon which has guided the history of life, as opposed to some kind of divine hand. Increasingly, they also point to the scale of human-caused ecological damage—habitat loss, pollution, and the accelerating loss of biodiversity.
For people raised in literalist traditions, geology is often the first immovable wall of evidence: the Earth is old—billions of years old. A clear and enjoyable entry point is the work of geologist Iain Stewart, who has presented excellent television introductions to Earth’s history and processes, for example his geology series Earth: The Biography (released in some markets under that title in 2008). This matters here because many forms of dogmatic faith make specific claims about origins and timescales, such as that the Earth is only a few thousand years old, which simply do not survive contact with the evidence.
2. Cosmos—the original series with Carl Sagan (1980), and the modern reboot with Neil deGrasse Tyson (Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey)—is a beautiful introduction to astronomy and to the history of scientific discovery. The central lesson isn’t that “science has all the answers.” It’s that science has developed methods for correcting itself, revising its claims when new evidence arrives, and building an increasingly coherent picture of nature—methods that look very different from dogma.
3. Alice Roberts’ 2009 documentary The Incredible Human Journey is a vivid, evidence-focused account of human origins and migration. It tells the story of humans emerging in Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago, and then spreading across the world over long stretches of time. It’s “hands on” in the best way: bones, artifacts, genetics, geography—real evidence you can actually reason about. A similar more recent documentary, produced in 2025, is Human, a five-part series hosted by paleoanthropologist Ella Al-Shamahi; it argues that a defining feature of humanity is the capacity for communicating abstract thought, and it invites reflection on how symbolic practices—including religion and sacrifice—became important elements in the development of human culture.
4. The Cambridge historian Christopher Clark has made accessible historical work available in lecture/documentary form, especially in his series The Story of Europe, beginning with Origins and Identity. Some of this can be found on YouTube. I recommend watching serious history partly because it inoculates against simplistic religious apologetics. Every major religion has sometimes been entangled with education, social organization, and cultural development. But history also forces us to look directly at atrocities, wars, persecutions, and massacres carried out under religious banners—including conflicts between rival branches of the same religion.
5. PBS’s Evolution (2001), narrated by Liam Neeson, is a solid place to begin learning about evolutionary science. This documentary is dated now in production style, and much of evolutionary biology has advanced dramatically since 2001—especially with the explosion of genetic evidence. But it still introduces the central logic clearly, and it’s hard to overstate how overwhelmingly strong the evidence is. Understanding evolution does not have to “dampen morale” any more than understanding that the earth revolves around the sun. It’s simply a lucid way of seeing how biological systems actually work.
A very good follow-up here is PBS’s Your Inner Fish (2014), based on Neil Shubin’s work. It is especially good because it links fossils, embryology, genetics, and the odd quirks of human anatomy in a vivid, understandable way. The basic theme is that many parts of the human body—our limbs, necks, lungs, and even aspects of our hands—make much more sense when you see them as products of deep evolutionary history rather than as pristine design.
A small rhetorical critique, though: documentaries sometimes lapse into personification—phrases like “nature wants” or “evolution tinkers.” This is just figurative language, but it can confuse a literal-minded viewer into imagining a conscious agent. Evolution is not a being; it is a process. Nature doesn’t “decide.” Things happen because systems have certain constraints, causal mechanisms, and regularities—and those regularities can be studied.
6. Documentaries such as Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking (2010) are an accessible entry point into questions about the origins and fate of the universe. If you’re drawn in, it becomes worth learning at least the basic conceptual outlines of cosmology, relativity and quantum mechanics—not to become a physicist, but to appreciate what modern science has learned about time, matter, and causation.
This list is not meant to “replace” religion with documentaries. It’s meant to give readers a way to encounter the natural world and human history directly—through disciplines that are constrained by evidence, and that openly correct themselves when they’re wrong. If my broader argument is that dogma fails under scrutiny, then the honest next step is to offer people good places to do that scrutiny.
Next Chapter
Tuesday, February 24, 2026
The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 9: Video Recommendations
The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 8: Charlatanism
The word charlatanism sounds harsh, but I think it is sometimes the right word. By charlatanism, I mean the presentation of exaggerated or false claims of special spiritual, prophetic, healing, or paranormal authority—especially when these claims are used to gain trust, money, status, or obedience. I do not mean that everyone in these roles is a deliberate fraud. In many cases the line between fraud and self-deception is blurry: some people are consciously manipulative, while others sincerely believe in powers or insights that are not actually there. The effect on followers can be similar either way.
There are many examples of charlatanism in religious history and in the wider history of spiritual practice. Over the years, some highly visible church movements and leaders have been exposed for deceiving followers—manufacturing moral authority, staging spiritual “results,” and in some cases enriching themselves dramatically through offerings and donations. Outside formal religion, there are also psychics and fortune-tellers who make strong claims about paranormal abilities that they cannot substantiate. Yet even here, the picture is not uniform. Some may sincerely believe in what they are doing, and some—whatever their beliefs—can still offer genuinely helpful human wisdom, sometimes resembling a perceptive psychotherapist. Once again, this is often a frame issue: if there is a setting in which a perceptive person pays close attention to a needy and trusting client, many helpful interactions can occur, including occasional insights that feel “predictive,” even when no paranormal or spiritual mechanism is involved.
With regard to psychics and fortune-tellers, much of what feels uncanny in these settings is better explained by ordinary psychology. Some “predictions” rely on cold reading—careful observation of verbal and non-verbal cues, strategic ambiguity, and gentle probing—combined with the Forer (Barnum) effect, in which feedback is so broad that it could apply to almost anyone, yet is delivered in a way that feels intimate and precisely tailored. In a sense, the client supplies the specificity while the psychic supplies the theatre.
Ironically, a kind of “faith” in the mechanism can make the experience more powerful. If you believe in psychic powers, you will likely be more open, more trusting, more suggestible, and more motivated to find meaning in what is said. This can make the encounter feel transformative—while still having nothing to do with paranormal abilities.
On the evidence: it is tempting to say that careful research on parapsychological phenomena has always been negative. A more precise—and still unsparing—statement is that after decades of investigation, these claims have not produced a robust, independently replicated body of evidence that would justify belief in paranormal powers. There are occasional studies that report statistically significant results, but these effects tend to be small, fragile, and disputed, and they do not survive replication under tighter controls (better blinding, preregistration, fixed stopping rules, and independent labs). Most apparent “successes,” in practice, are better explained by coincidence, selection effects (remembering “hits,” forgetting “misses”), motivated interpretation, and the cognitive biases that flourish in emotionally charged settings.
I am aware, too, of some influential figures in the “new age” / self-help spiritual milieu who, as people, have had a genuinely delightful, warm, and thoughtful style. Louise Hay is an example. Many of her self-help affirmations are beautiful—arguably a more poetic and intimate cousin of cognitive therapy. One shortcoming of how CBT is often presented is its cool mechanistic tone, and the affirmations approach can feel refreshingly humane. So I do sometimes encourage patients to use affirmations.
But alongside the affirmations, this same genre often carries dogmas about disease causation—claims that illnesses are produced by emotional states like resentment, criticism, or guilt, and that changing one’s attitude can dissolve even severe disease. Versions of this claim have been widely quoted from the preface of a best-selling affirmations text, and they are not just scientifically implausible—they are ethically hazardous, because they imply that people with tragic illnesses are partly to blame for having the “wrong” emotional life. Even when there is a kernel of truth (stress matters; psychology affects coping and health behaviour), this is a massive distortion of complex causation.
Most importantly, these beliefs become dangerous when they delay or obstruct timely evidence-based care. A “spiritual” frame that provides comfort and meaning is one thing; a causal dogma that misleads people away from effective medical treatment is another.
A related issue is accountability. In medicine and licensed psychotherapy, there are training standards, ethical codes, professional regulation, and at least some recourse when someone harms you. Spiritual markets are much murkier: the more grandiose the claims (“I can see your future,” “I can heal your cancer,” “the universe told me”), the less often there is oversight commensurate with the potential harm. The result is a predictable asymmetry: vulnerable people—often frightened, grieving, or desperate—are asked for trust, money, and obedience, in exchange for claims that are difficult to test and easy to excuse away when they fail.
And we should not flatter ourselves that education inoculates against this. Even very intelligent people can be drawn into false frameworks when the framework meets a psychological need: relief from uncertainty, the soothing of grief, a sense of control, a narrative that restores meaning, or simply the comfort of being seen. In fact, verbal intelligence can sometimes make the problem worse: it supplies better rhetoric to defend the belief, better stories to rationalize disappointment, and sharper arguments to dismiss critics as “closed-minded.” The vulnerability here is not stupidity—it is humanity, under stress, doing what human minds do best: turning ambiguous experience into a story that feels coherent and safe.
There are many examples of charlatanism in religious history and in the wider history of spiritual practice. Over the years, some highly visible church movements and leaders have been exposed for deceiving followers—manufacturing moral authority, staging spiritual “results,” and in some cases enriching themselves dramatically through offerings and donations. Outside formal religion, there are also psychics and fortune-tellers who make strong claims about paranormal abilities that they cannot substantiate. Yet even here, the picture is not uniform. Some may sincerely believe in what they are doing, and some—whatever their beliefs—can still offer genuinely helpful human wisdom, sometimes resembling a perceptive psychotherapist. Once again, this is often a frame issue: if there is a setting in which a perceptive person pays close attention to a needy and trusting client, many helpful interactions can occur, including occasional insights that feel “predictive,” even when no paranormal or spiritual mechanism is involved.
With regard to psychics and fortune-tellers, much of what feels uncanny in these settings is better explained by ordinary psychology. Some “predictions” rely on cold reading—careful observation of verbal and non-verbal cues, strategic ambiguity, and gentle probing—combined with the Forer (Barnum) effect, in which feedback is so broad that it could apply to almost anyone, yet is delivered in a way that feels intimate and precisely tailored. In a sense, the client supplies the specificity while the psychic supplies the theatre.
Ironically, a kind of “faith” in the mechanism can make the experience more powerful. If you believe in psychic powers, you will likely be more open, more trusting, more suggestible, and more motivated to find meaning in what is said. This can make the encounter feel transformative—while still having nothing to do with paranormal abilities.
On the evidence: it is tempting to say that careful research on parapsychological phenomena has always been negative. A more precise—and still unsparing—statement is that after decades of investigation, these claims have not produced a robust, independently replicated body of evidence that would justify belief in paranormal powers. There are occasional studies that report statistically significant results, but these effects tend to be small, fragile, and disputed, and they do not survive replication under tighter controls (better blinding, preregistration, fixed stopping rules, and independent labs). Most apparent “successes,” in practice, are better explained by coincidence, selection effects (remembering “hits,” forgetting “misses”), motivated interpretation, and the cognitive biases that flourish in emotionally charged settings.
I am aware, too, of some influential figures in the “new age” / self-help spiritual milieu who, as people, have had a genuinely delightful, warm, and thoughtful style. Louise Hay is an example. Many of her self-help affirmations are beautiful—arguably a more poetic and intimate cousin of cognitive therapy. One shortcoming of how CBT is often presented is its cool mechanistic tone, and the affirmations approach can feel refreshingly humane. So I do sometimes encourage patients to use affirmations.
But alongside the affirmations, this same genre often carries dogmas about disease causation—claims that illnesses are produced by emotional states like resentment, criticism, or guilt, and that changing one’s attitude can dissolve even severe disease. Versions of this claim have been widely quoted from the preface of a best-selling affirmations text, and they are not just scientifically implausible—they are ethically hazardous, because they imply that people with tragic illnesses are partly to blame for having the “wrong” emotional life. Even when there is a kernel of truth (stress matters; psychology affects coping and health behaviour), this is a massive distortion of complex causation.
Most importantly, these beliefs become dangerous when they delay or obstruct timely evidence-based care. A “spiritual” frame that provides comfort and meaning is one thing; a causal dogma that misleads people away from effective medical treatment is another.
A related issue is accountability. In medicine and licensed psychotherapy, there are training standards, ethical codes, professional regulation, and at least some recourse when someone harms you. Spiritual markets are much murkier: the more grandiose the claims (“I can see your future,” “I can heal your cancer,” “the universe told me”), the less often there is oversight commensurate with the potential harm. The result is a predictable asymmetry: vulnerable people—often frightened, grieving, or desperate—are asked for trust, money, and obedience, in exchange for claims that are difficult to test and easy to excuse away when they fail.
And we should not flatter ourselves that education inoculates against this. Even very intelligent people can be drawn into false frameworks when the framework meets a psychological need: relief from uncertainty, the soothing of grief, a sense of control, a narrative that restores meaning, or simply the comfort of being seen. In fact, verbal intelligence can sometimes make the problem worse: it supplies better rhetoric to defend the belief, better stories to rationalize disappointment, and sharper arguments to dismiss critics as “closed-minded.” The vulnerability here is not stupidity—it is humanity, under stress, doing what human minds do best: turning ambiguous experience into a story that feels coherent and safe.
The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 7: Dogma
Aside from the common factors I have already described, religions also feature dogmatic belief, which in some cases can be very strict. This is where the biggest problems lie—when myth hardens into fact, and metaphor into law. In this chapter I am speaking mainly about Christianity, since it is the tradition I know best, though similar patterns appear elsewhere.
Some dogmatic beliefs may contain wise reflections about morality or justice. At best they can be treated as mythic narratives—not history or physics, but poetic story, figurative teaching, or a prompt for moral reflection. But once people treat dogma as literal fact—or as rigid moral law—it often produces a narrow and flattened morality. Furthermore. some religious stories are so brutal, or so sharply at odds with other parts of the same tradition, that even a charitable metaphorical reading can feel strained.
One can often find, in the same religious text, stories or teachings that contradict each other—sometimes directly, sometimes in subtler ways. Because of this, many individuals end up “picking and choosing” passages to bolster a pre-existing stance on almost any subject. There is a name for this in religious studies—proof-texting—and it is one of the main ways dogma becomes both rigid in tone and flexible in application.
One of the clearest signs of the problem is that the same sacred text can be used to defend opposite moral conclusions. Christians have quoted the Bible to defend hierarchy, exclusion, and harsh punishment; others have quoted it to argue for equality, mercy, and liberation. That alone should make us cautious about treating scripture as a self-interpreting moral manual.
Many people feel that their guidance regarding right and wrong—their foundation of morality—comes from religion or religious texts. People may consider the Ten Commandments to be an obvious moral guide. Yet thinking about morality this way reminds me of the moral development of children. At an early stage, a child may feel morality is dictated by a rigid external rule: “don’t take that cookie,” or “you’ll be punished if you take that cookie.” In this stage, the reason not to take the cookie is not understanding, empathy, or principle, but obedience and fear of punishment. That may keep order, but it is a precarious foundation for morality.
Real moral development requires more than rule-following. It requires thinking about why an action is right or wrong, taking other minds seriously, weighing short-term impulse against long-term consequence, and recognizing that rules sometimes conflict or require exceptions. A person may have to resist an authority figure rather than obey one. That is not moral failure; sometimes it is moral maturity.
Rule-following is not the same thing as conscience. If the main reason a person is not stealing from you or assaulting you is fear of divine punishment or obedience to an external rule, that is not especially reassuring! Most people want something deeper in themselves and in those closest to them: judgment, empathy, guilt, restraint, and the ability to reason through difficult cases. Rare exceptions do exist. Stealing food to save a starving child is not the same thing as theft or greed. Humans are capable of this kind of moral reasoning whether they are religious or not, and there are good reasons why it emerges naturally in social species and cooperative cultures.
I do have to acknowledge that some religious texts contain inspired statements about moral reasoning—for example, the Sermon on the Mount, with its emphasis on kindness, love, and humility. But many of these ideas are not unique to Christianity. Variations of the Golden Rule—the ethic of reciprocity—appear across many traditions: Confucian, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic, and others. This is not evidence of divinity; it is what we would expect in human societies grappling with the same recurring problems of cooperation, conflict, and conscience.
The treatment of religious texts as perfect moral instruction manuals is problematic on many levels. Even within traditions that claim “inspiration,” it is hard to maintain that every specific word—let alone every translation choice or manuscript tradition—is a flawless, literal directive. Most people therefore focus on a higher level of organization: a verse (a numbered unit), which is the most common unit studied in sermons or religious meetings.
Many churches have a kind of “book club” format in which small groups meet in someone’s home—refreshments served—to discuss a particular passage, often guided by published interpretations consistent with the group’s existing style of thinking. Sometimes the analysis stops at the verse level, partly out of practicality. It is complicated to integrate a theme across an entire text like the Bible, with its many books, authors, genres, and historical layers. For each theme or figure of speech present in one verse, there may be dozens of resonant passages elsewhere, sometimes in widely disparate parts of the text, and contradictions—either direct or qualitative—are not difficult to find.
But, as with studying literature, it is a narrow way to understand a text to focus only on its most granular fragments. Much meaning in literature comes from a more holistic analysis: genre, context, narrative arc, tension, voice, contrast. Likewise, if you look at a photograph, it would not make sense to divide it into tiny sections and analyze each separately as though the whole image were nothing but a pile of fragments. It is often inconvenient to do holistic analysis in most sermons or study sessions, so many communities stop at the verse level—or at best, a short passage. And it matters that these verse divisions were decided upon by editors, rather than being features of the earliest manuscripts.
This preference for the fragment over the whole reflects one characteristic failure of dogmatic thinking. By turning complex ancient literature into a storage box of isolated rules, people can avoid the harder work of empathy, judgment, context, and reason. Dogma is attractive partly because certainty feels safe, and shared certainty binds a group together. But the cost is high. When we trade nuance for rigidity, we do not just limit our own moral growth; we also make collective intolerance and cruelty easier to justify.
Some dogmatic beliefs may contain wise reflections about morality or justice. At best they can be treated as mythic narratives—not history or physics, but poetic story, figurative teaching, or a prompt for moral reflection. But once people treat dogma as literal fact—or as rigid moral law—it often produces a narrow and flattened morality. Furthermore. some religious stories are so brutal, or so sharply at odds with other parts of the same tradition, that even a charitable metaphorical reading can feel strained.
One can often find, in the same religious text, stories or teachings that contradict each other—sometimes directly, sometimes in subtler ways. Because of this, many individuals end up “picking and choosing” passages to bolster a pre-existing stance on almost any subject. There is a name for this in religious studies—proof-texting—and it is one of the main ways dogma becomes both rigid in tone and flexible in application.
One of the clearest signs of the problem is that the same sacred text can be used to defend opposite moral conclusions. Christians have quoted the Bible to defend hierarchy, exclusion, and harsh punishment; others have quoted it to argue for equality, mercy, and liberation. That alone should make us cautious about treating scripture as a self-interpreting moral manual.
Many people feel that their guidance regarding right and wrong—their foundation of morality—comes from religion or religious texts. People may consider the Ten Commandments to be an obvious moral guide. Yet thinking about morality this way reminds me of the moral development of children. At an early stage, a child may feel morality is dictated by a rigid external rule: “don’t take that cookie,” or “you’ll be punished if you take that cookie.” In this stage, the reason not to take the cookie is not understanding, empathy, or principle, but obedience and fear of punishment. That may keep order, but it is a precarious foundation for morality.
Real moral development requires more than rule-following. It requires thinking about why an action is right or wrong, taking other minds seriously, weighing short-term impulse against long-term consequence, and recognizing that rules sometimes conflict or require exceptions. A person may have to resist an authority figure rather than obey one. That is not moral failure; sometimes it is moral maturity.
Rule-following is not the same thing as conscience. If the main reason a person is not stealing from you or assaulting you is fear of divine punishment or obedience to an external rule, that is not especially reassuring! Most people want something deeper in themselves and in those closest to them: judgment, empathy, guilt, restraint, and the ability to reason through difficult cases. Rare exceptions do exist. Stealing food to save a starving child is not the same thing as theft or greed. Humans are capable of this kind of moral reasoning whether they are religious or not, and there are good reasons why it emerges naturally in social species and cooperative cultures.
I do have to acknowledge that some religious texts contain inspired statements about moral reasoning—for example, the Sermon on the Mount, with its emphasis on kindness, love, and humility. But many of these ideas are not unique to Christianity. Variations of the Golden Rule—the ethic of reciprocity—appear across many traditions: Confucian, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic, and others. This is not evidence of divinity; it is what we would expect in human societies grappling with the same recurring problems of cooperation, conflict, and conscience.
The treatment of religious texts as perfect moral instruction manuals is problematic on many levels. Even within traditions that claim “inspiration,” it is hard to maintain that every specific word—let alone every translation choice or manuscript tradition—is a flawless, literal directive. Most people therefore focus on a higher level of organization: a verse (a numbered unit), which is the most common unit studied in sermons or religious meetings.
Many churches have a kind of “book club” format in which small groups meet in someone’s home—refreshments served—to discuss a particular passage, often guided by published interpretations consistent with the group’s existing style of thinking. Sometimes the analysis stops at the verse level, partly out of practicality. It is complicated to integrate a theme across an entire text like the Bible, with its many books, authors, genres, and historical layers. For each theme or figure of speech present in one verse, there may be dozens of resonant passages elsewhere, sometimes in widely disparate parts of the text, and contradictions—either direct or qualitative—are not difficult to find.
But, as with studying literature, it is a narrow way to understand a text to focus only on its most granular fragments. Much meaning in literature comes from a more holistic analysis: genre, context, narrative arc, tension, voice, contrast. Likewise, if you look at a photograph, it would not make sense to divide it into tiny sections and analyze each separately as though the whole image were nothing but a pile of fragments. It is often inconvenient to do holistic analysis in most sermons or study sessions, so many communities stop at the verse level—or at best, a short passage. And it matters that these verse divisions were decided upon by editors, rather than being features of the earliest manuscripts.
This preference for the fragment over the whole reflects one characteristic failure of dogmatic thinking. By turning complex ancient literature into a storage box of isolated rules, people can avoid the harder work of empathy, judgment, context, and reason. Dogma is attractive partly because certainty feels safe, and shared certainty binds a group together. But the cost is high. When we trade nuance for rigidity, we do not just limit our own moral growth; we also make collective intolerance and cruelty easier to justify.
The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 6: Faith Healing
In more dramatic religion-based therapeutic interventions—such as “faith healing”—the common (nonspecific) factors I discussed earlier are especially salient, magnified further by the awe of a crowd, intense emotions, and a strong attachment to a charismatic leader. Faith healing, much like hypnosis, can appear particularly effective for problems with a substantial functional or psychosomatic component: symptoms that fluctuate with stress, attention, expectation, and social reinforcement (for example, dissociative phenomena, psychogenic seizures, factitious disorders, and other mind–body presentations where meaning and arousal shape the experience of illness). In such settings, a sudden “cure” can allow a person to save face and feel validated—endorsed by the community—rather than being left with a banal story of life stress and misfortune. Their experience may even be framed as sacred or chosen, which can temporarily boost self-esteem and social standing. Unfortunately, these dynamics are easily exploited by charlatans, and one does not have to look far to find examples.
Most people with severe medical problems who pursue faith healing will not experience remission, because many illnesses are not primarily psychosomatic and are not particularly amenable to community support, suggestion, or adrenaline-soaked collective emotion. Yet devout people may then conclude that they did not have sufficient faith, or that they were not worthy of divine intervention. Or they may conclude that it is God’s will for them to continue suffering, while others, for reasons no one can explain, receive a miracle.
Similarly, miracle stories in religious texts—blindness cured, paralysis reversed, even the dead raised—are awe-inspiring if taken literally. But they should be read against the background rate of suffering in the ancient world. In pre-modern settings, roughly a quarter of newborns died within the first year of life, and nearly half of all children did not survive to adulthood. Maternal death in childbirth was also far more common. In such a world—saturated with infection, malnutrition, injury, and loss—miraculous healing would have had to be common and broadly distributed to register as a genuine explanation of reality. Instead, what we mainly have are vivid stories about rare exceptions (or legendary claims) in a sea of ordinary, relentless suffering.
This is why miracle stories are a little bit like discussing lottery winners: if miracles truly occur, they are extraordinarily rare, and the narrative focus on the “winner” distracts from the millions who hoped, prayed, suffered, and received nothing. As with lotteries, one is not well-advised to build one’s medical, psychological, or moral planning around the hope of an exception.
There are also some predictable cognitive and statistical illusions at work here. One is selection bias: the “miracle stories” are the ones that get put on stage, recorded, and retold, while the far more numerous failures quietly disappear. Another is regression to the mean: many symptoms fluctuate naturally, and people are most likely to seek dramatic interventions when they are at their worst—so improvement afterwards can look like a miracle even when it is simply the usual swing back toward baseline. Base-rate neglect adds to the distortion: a vivid testimony feels more compelling than the boring, brutal fact that most people do not improve. And then motivated reasoning does the rest: once someone has publicly declared faith, donated money, and staked identity and relationships on the story, it becomes emotionally costly to admit that nothing supernatural happened. The narrative hardens, not because the evidence is strong, but because the social and psychological incentives are.
The same selectivity appears in religious appeals to nature. For example, there are many Biblical references to birds, with the insinuation that they live joyfully and are fed through divine providence. This is an attractive image, but it reflects a limited understanding of biology. Wild creatures face high mortality from starvation, disease, and predation. Birdsong has natural functions—communication, territory, mating—not simply the expression of joy or a benevolent performance for human listeners. Similarly, “lilies of the field” (another symbol of divine providence) have a difficult existence shaped by competition, pathogens, drought, and chance: the blooming lilies that catch our eye do not reveal the many that did not survive. In other words: nature is beautiful, but it is not reliably gentle—and any spirituality that wants to use nature as moral reassurance has to be honest about what nature actually does. The same selective gaze that romanticizes birds and flowers can romanticize miracle claims as well: it fixes on the striking exception and looks away from the background rate of suffering.
Most people with severe medical problems who pursue faith healing will not experience remission, because many illnesses are not primarily psychosomatic and are not particularly amenable to community support, suggestion, or adrenaline-soaked collective emotion. Yet devout people may then conclude that they did not have sufficient faith, or that they were not worthy of divine intervention. Or they may conclude that it is God’s will for them to continue suffering, while others, for reasons no one can explain, receive a miracle.
Similarly, miracle stories in religious texts—blindness cured, paralysis reversed, even the dead raised—are awe-inspiring if taken literally. But they should be read against the background rate of suffering in the ancient world. In pre-modern settings, roughly a quarter of newborns died within the first year of life, and nearly half of all children did not survive to adulthood. Maternal death in childbirth was also far more common. In such a world—saturated with infection, malnutrition, injury, and loss—miraculous healing would have had to be common and broadly distributed to register as a genuine explanation of reality. Instead, what we mainly have are vivid stories about rare exceptions (or legendary claims) in a sea of ordinary, relentless suffering.
This is why miracle stories are a little bit like discussing lottery winners: if miracles truly occur, they are extraordinarily rare, and the narrative focus on the “winner” distracts from the millions who hoped, prayed, suffered, and received nothing. As with lotteries, one is not well-advised to build one’s medical, psychological, or moral planning around the hope of an exception.
There are also some predictable cognitive and statistical illusions at work here. One is selection bias: the “miracle stories” are the ones that get put on stage, recorded, and retold, while the far more numerous failures quietly disappear. Another is regression to the mean: many symptoms fluctuate naturally, and people are most likely to seek dramatic interventions when they are at their worst—so improvement afterwards can look like a miracle even when it is simply the usual swing back toward baseline. Base-rate neglect adds to the distortion: a vivid testimony feels more compelling than the boring, brutal fact that most people do not improve. And then motivated reasoning does the rest: once someone has publicly declared faith, donated money, and staked identity and relationships on the story, it becomes emotionally costly to admit that nothing supernatural happened. The narrative hardens, not because the evidence is strong, but because the social and psychological incentives are.
The same selectivity appears in religious appeals to nature. For example, there are many Biblical references to birds, with the insinuation that they live joyfully and are fed through divine providence. This is an attractive image, but it reflects a limited understanding of biology. Wild creatures face high mortality from starvation, disease, and predation. Birdsong has natural functions—communication, territory, mating—not simply the expression of joy or a benevolent performance for human listeners. Similarly, “lilies of the field” (another symbol of divine providence) have a difficult existence shaped by competition, pathogens, drought, and chance: the blooming lilies that catch our eye do not reveal the many that did not survive. In other words: nature is beautiful, but it is not reliably gentle—and any spirituality that wants to use nature as moral reassurance has to be honest about what nature actually does. The same selective gaze that romanticizes birds and flowers can romanticize miracle claims as well: it fixes on the striking exception and looks away from the background rate of suffering.
The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 5: Non-specific Factors
To explain what I mean by “nonspecific factors,” I’d like to share an analogy from psychiatric practice. In the previous chapter I emphasized that religion can provide real benefits. One reason is that many benefits come not from the literal truth of a doctrine, but from the psychological and social frame in which the doctrine is delivered.
Many styles of psychotherapy have evolved over the past 150 years, and many of them began with strong, sometimes dogmatic theories about the causes and cures of psychological suffering. The advent of these styles was, on balance, beneficial: at least there was a serious, systematic attempt to help people with mental illness. Psychoanalysis is a good example. It was originally developed with an elaborate and sometimes poetic set of beliefs—its own compelling “scripture,” in the original writings of Freud and others—about the origins of mental health problems, with a heavy emphasis on childhood experiences and family relationships. Over time, many specific psychoanalytic claims have not held up well as literal causal explanations (or have proven far more exaggerated than their founders believed), and yet many people clearly benefited from psychoanalysis. How could this be?
Part of the answer is that the benefit often comes from the frame more than the theory. Visiting a kind, curious, intelligent person to discuss your problems in a professional setting, regularly and frequently, over months or years, can be tremendously helpful for many psychiatric problems. Even if a therapist holds mistaken beliefs about causation, or offers interpretations that are too speculative or overconfident, the overarching experience can still be one of patient, non-judgmental, empathic attention, along with a steady relationship and a structured space to reflect.
Something similar can happen when people visit psychics, mystics, or faith-healers. Some people come away impressed, comforted, and genuinely helped. I don’t believe this is because paranormal powers are operating in the room. Rather, at best, the “healer” may provide a comforting frame, strong social skills, confidence, gentle curiosity, and careful attention; they may pick up accurate insights from verbal and non-verbal cues; and they may communicate these ideas using techniques that resemble psychotherapy, especially when rapport is strong. There is also the Barnum (Forer) effect, in which statements feel uniquely personal and profound even though they are broad enough to apply to almost anyone. And in more controlled research settings, claims of psychic phenomena have not produced results that are reliably replicable and widely accepted, with apparent “hits” often attributable to ordinary psychological mechanisms, biases, and statistical pitfalls.
Dream analysis provides another example. There is elaborate psychoanalytic reasoning about meaning contained in dreams, and for some people this can feel helpful. But dreams are, in many ways, an unusually intimate and ambiguous data source: they borrow from daily events, memories, anxious themes, problem-solving efforts, and emotional concerns. Because dreams feel so personal, interpretations can easily feel meaningful—even when different interpretations contradict each other. I don’t believe there is a single “correct” interpretation of a dream in the way one might decode a message with a key. Dream material can be a useful framework for reflection, but the usefulness comes from the reflective process, not from dreams being literal guides.
Most psychotherapy styles share these nonspecific factors, and many bona fide approaches end up with broadly similar effectiveness when the relationship and the therapeutic frame are strong. At the same time, some specific techniques do add value in particular contexts—especially methods that directly help people change patterns of thinking and behavior and face feared situations in a structured way (an idea most explicit in CBT, but not absent from other traditions). The dark side, though, is when a therapeutic theory becomes so rigid that people misunderstand the causes of their suffering, become more confused or ashamed, or blame themselves when they don’t improve—concluding that they “failed” rather than noticing that the framework itself may be flawed.
Religions often contain many of these same nonspecific factors: kind and stable group involvement; loyal community ties; warm, altruistic mentors; regular devotional practices; a commitment to values that often reach beyond selfishness or materialism; and sermons that can contain useful moral reflections regardless of their supernatural premises. All of this is often couched in moving music, meaningful ritual, architecture that evokes reverence, and a peer group with shared language and shared life. These factors can be psychologically powerful—whether or not the doctrinal claims are literally true.
Many styles of psychotherapy have evolved over the past 150 years, and many of them began with strong, sometimes dogmatic theories about the causes and cures of psychological suffering. The advent of these styles was, on balance, beneficial: at least there was a serious, systematic attempt to help people with mental illness. Psychoanalysis is a good example. It was originally developed with an elaborate and sometimes poetic set of beliefs—its own compelling “scripture,” in the original writings of Freud and others—about the origins of mental health problems, with a heavy emphasis on childhood experiences and family relationships. Over time, many specific psychoanalytic claims have not held up well as literal causal explanations (or have proven far more exaggerated than their founders believed), and yet many people clearly benefited from psychoanalysis. How could this be?
Part of the answer is that the benefit often comes from the frame more than the theory. Visiting a kind, curious, intelligent person to discuss your problems in a professional setting, regularly and frequently, over months or years, can be tremendously helpful for many psychiatric problems. Even if a therapist holds mistaken beliefs about causation, or offers interpretations that are too speculative or overconfident, the overarching experience can still be one of patient, non-judgmental, empathic attention, along with a steady relationship and a structured space to reflect.
Something similar can happen when people visit psychics, mystics, or faith-healers. Some people come away impressed, comforted, and genuinely helped. I don’t believe this is because paranormal powers are operating in the room. Rather, at best, the “healer” may provide a comforting frame, strong social skills, confidence, gentle curiosity, and careful attention; they may pick up accurate insights from verbal and non-verbal cues; and they may communicate these ideas using techniques that resemble psychotherapy, especially when rapport is strong. There is also the Barnum (Forer) effect, in which statements feel uniquely personal and profound even though they are broad enough to apply to almost anyone. And in more controlled research settings, claims of psychic phenomena have not produced results that are reliably replicable and widely accepted, with apparent “hits” often attributable to ordinary psychological mechanisms, biases, and statistical pitfalls.
Dream analysis provides another example. There is elaborate psychoanalytic reasoning about meaning contained in dreams, and for some people this can feel helpful. But dreams are, in many ways, an unusually intimate and ambiguous data source: they borrow from daily events, memories, anxious themes, problem-solving efforts, and emotional concerns. Because dreams feel so personal, interpretations can easily feel meaningful—even when different interpretations contradict each other. I don’t believe there is a single “correct” interpretation of a dream in the way one might decode a message with a key. Dream material can be a useful framework for reflection, but the usefulness comes from the reflective process, not from dreams being literal guides.
Most psychotherapy styles share these nonspecific factors, and many bona fide approaches end up with broadly similar effectiveness when the relationship and the therapeutic frame are strong. At the same time, some specific techniques do add value in particular contexts—especially methods that directly help people change patterns of thinking and behavior and face feared situations in a structured way (an idea most explicit in CBT, but not absent from other traditions). The dark side, though, is when a therapeutic theory becomes so rigid that people misunderstand the causes of their suffering, become more confused or ashamed, or blame themselves when they don’t improve—concluding that they “failed” rather than noticing that the framework itself may be flawed.
Religions often contain many of these same nonspecific factors: kind and stable group involvement; loyal community ties; warm, altruistic mentors; regular devotional practices; a commitment to values that often reach beyond selfishness or materialism; and sermons that can contain useful moral reflections regardless of their supernatural premises. All of this is often couched in moving music, meaningful ritual, architecture that evokes reverence, and a peer group with shared language and shared life. These factors can be psychologically powerful—whether or not the doctrinal claims are literally true.
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