The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 10: Reading List & Discussion

Here is a list of recommended books, with discussion:

1. The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins.

An absolutely devastating critique of religious belief from a scientific point of view, with a particular focus on the harmful aspects of religion. Dawkins is at his best when he is clear, fierce, and empirically grounded. But he sometimes falls short in affirming the psychological and sociocultural causes and benefits of religion—benefits that can exist even when the supernatural claims are false.

2. Other books by Richard Dawkins, including The Ancestor’s Tale and The Selfish Gene.

These are excellent introductions to genetics in general and evolutionary biology in particular, with wonderful case studies highlighting specific organisms and biological systems. For example, it is incredibly interesting to understand the genetics of bee reproduction and how this influences the behavior and social organization of bees. The classic “birds and bees” talk really should be updated to include this.

These books also showcase Dawkins as one of the great science communicators, and they demonstrate that evolutionary biology can be wonderfully interesting. It has always bothered me that university students can obtain science degrees—sometimes even in biology—without ever reading books like these. Another very good book about the history and texture of genetics is She Has Her Mother’s Laugh, by Carl Zimmer.

3. Religion Explained, by Pascal Boyer.

This is one of the most important books for the whole thesis of the present book. Boyer is not mainly asking whether religion is true; he is asking why certain kinds of religious ideas are so easy for human minds to generate, remember, and transmit. Gods, spirits, ancestors, invisible agents, taboos, and rituals do not have to be imported into human culture from some supernatural realm. They arise very naturally from ordinary cognitive tendencies—our readiness to detect agency, infer intentions, remember striking stories, monitor threats, and think about social obligations. Religion, in this view, is not evidence of revelation. It is evidence of the structure of the human mind.  

4. In Gods We Trust, by Scott Atran.

A very important book in the cognitive and evolutionary study of religion. Atran helps show that religion is not simply a “belief system” in the abstract, but something that grows out of ordinary human cognition and then becomes woven into kinship, coalition, morality, identity, and emotional life. This is helpful because many religious people imagine skepticism as though it were merely a refusal to accept a few doctrines. But religion is usually much more socially and psychologically embedded than that.

Atran is denser and more scholarly than some of the other authors on this list, but he is worth the effort. He helps explain why religion is persistent, why it is so often resistant to contradiction, and why sacred ideas can motivate extraordinary loyalty and sacrifice.  

5. Big Gods, by Ara Norenzayan.

A very useful book for thinking about the social success of religion. Norenzayan explores the idea that belief in morally interested, watchful supernatural beings may have helped large societies sustain cooperation among strangers. Even if one grants this in part, it does not rescue the truth of the supernatural claims. It simply shows that false beliefs can sometimes have functional social effects. That distinction is central to the argument of this book: a belief can be adaptive, comforting, socially useful, and still not be true.

One can debate the exact historical sequencing of all this, but the core psychological and sociological point is extremely useful. If people feel watched, judged, and morally monitored—even by an invisible being—they may behave differently. Religion may therefore function, in some settings, as a kind of supernatural social surveillance system.  

6. Modes of Religiosity, by Harvey Whitehouse.

Especially useful for thinking about ritual. Whitehouse argues that religions often cluster around two broad patterns. In one, there are rare, emotionally intense, highly memorable rituals that bind small groups very tightly. In the other, there are frequent, repetitive, lower-arousal practices that support larger, more orderly, more bureaucratic communities. Once one sees this, many religious differences stop looking mysterious. They look more like different cultural technologies for shaping memory, commitment, group identity, and social structure.

This book is particularly relevant to chapters in this book about sacrifice, prayer, behavioural restrictions, shepherding, and common knowledge. It gives a very helpful vocabulary for thinking about why certain rituals are dramatic and painful while others are routine and repetitive. Both can serve group cohesion, but in very different ways.  

7. When God Talks Back, by Tanya Luhrmann.

One of the best books for understanding how religious experience becomes subjectively real. Luhrmann is not trying to prove that God exists; she is trying to understand how people come to experience God as vivid, intimate, personal, and responsive. This is a very important distinction. If one wants to understand religion properly, it is not enough to say that believers are mistaken. One must also understand how prayer, inner speech, imagination, attention, social reinforcement, and expectation can combine so that an invisible relationship feels emotionally real.

This book is especially valuable because it helps one understand believers without condescension. It is possible to reject the supernatural claims while still taking the psychology seriously. In fact, if one is going to criticize religion, one should understand it well enough to see how normal and human many of its experiences actually are.  

8. The Better Angels of Our Nature, by Steven Pinker.

A brilliant, ambitious book about violence through history and why it has declined over long time scales. Pinker explores multiple drivers—state formation, commerce, literacy, cosmopolitanism, and what he calls an “escalator of reason,” strongly associated with Enlightenment-style thinking.

This is relevant to religion not only because religion is one factor among many in the history of violence, but because Pinker directly challenges the idea that religion has been a uniquely reliable force for peace or moral progress. He gives religion partial credit in some cases, but he also points to crusades, inquisitions, witch hunts, wars of religion, sanctified cruelty, slavery defended from scripture, and the recurrent use of sacred certainty to intensify conflict. The broader point is not that religion causes all violence. It is that religion is not a dependable moral technology that reliably makes societies kinder or safer. When religion does align itself with humane progress, that alignment is not always intrinsic to the supernatural doctrine itself; often it is belated, partial, and entangled with wider secular developments. Some historians dispute parts of Pinker’s data and causal interpretation, but the book is still extraordinarily important and stimulating.  

9. The Folly of Fools, by Robert Trivers—especially the chapter on religion.

Trivers, one of the great evolutionary biologists of the past generation, argues that deception can confer survival advantages in the natural world. He goes further: the most effective deception often requires some degree of self-deception, because sincere belief makes the performance more convincing.

Applied to religion, the idea is that collective self-deception can bring real psychological comfort and social cohesion, while also creating vulnerability to manipulation. Leaders can channel the group toward intergroup conflict, persecution of outsiders, or financial exploitation—bolstered by moral certainty and a belief that “God is on our side.”

A related point about religion and self-deception concerns the afterlife. A soldier who no longer fears death because of fervent belief in Heaven may be more willing to fight; and, at worst, may feel fewer qualms about killing or about the suffering of civilians, if the entire moral narrative has been reframed as divinely endorsed. The same logic can be extended far beyond the battlefield. Once earthly suffering is downgraded as temporary, and eternal reward is made the real currency of value, almost any cruelty can be redescribed as necessary, justified, or trivial in the larger cosmic accounting.

10. Books about cognitive biases, such as Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.

This is relevant to religion because many religious beliefs are stabilized by well-described biases. Ingroup loyalty can produce “belief bubbles,” in which people preferentially consume ideas that support their faith and avoid exposure to ideas that challenge it. Beliefs become intertwined with identity and group safety, so a logical challenge can feel like an attack rather than a discussion.  Some other cognitive biases include the following: 

Ad hominem attacks against people who challenge religion. A famous target of this was Charles Darwin—a gentle, humble, family-oriented man, with a patient style of meticulously gathering and weighing evidence—who was subject to various criticisms of his character, integrity, and motives as part of a technique to discredit his ideas. Another variant of this is to label religious critics with a term meant to be derogatory, such as “liberal.” For some people, the term “liberal” is associated with an almost venomous loathing, as though this is one of the worst things a person could be.

Reactive devaluation. Following ad hominem attacks, there is the further step of dismissing evidence not because of its quality, but because one does not like the person expressing it. Conversely, evidence is embraced irrespective of its quality because one likes the messenger, knows the messenger well, or feels loyalty to that person because of past positive experiences.

The availability cascade. Various religious ideas can seem more believable or persuasive simply because of repeated exposure, sometimes over a lifetime. These ideas are easier to call to mind, more salient in memory, and this can fool people into thinking they are more accurate or more obviously true, irrespective of evidence.

Confirmation bias. This is when one looks for evidence in a biased way, collecting individual items that support a previous position, while not attending to—or even being aware of—evidence against that position.

Anchoring. This is the tendency to stick to an original position. One becomes “rooted” to a baseline stance—in this case, religious belief—and later judgments remain biased toward that starting point even in the face of dissonant evidence.

The sunk cost fallacy. This is sticking to an original position even when there is strong evidence against it, with the reasoning that one has invested so much time, effort, identity, and devotion into the belief that it feels like too much of a loss to let it go.

11. Books about tribal psychology, such as The Power of Us, by Jay Van Bavel and Dominic Packer.

One of the core causes of religion is its tribal nature. Tribalism is an innate human tendency to form groups we value and protect—almost always at the expense of outsiders. The origin stories of many religions contain an implicit tribalism: one chosen group receives the “true” revelation, while the rest of humanity is left out unless it is successfully converted.

Even the best missionary efforts cannot reach everyone—and historically there have been delays of centuries or millennia—so the theological structure often implies that billions of people are excluded from salvation or relegated to punishment for reasons having nothing to do with character. This contradicts the spirit of justice and universal benevolence many religions claim to endorse. Many texts also describe divinely endorsed violence against outgroups—neighbouring tribes, rival cities, entire peoples. Oddly, the divine help rarely involves settling disputes peacefully.

12. Joseph Campbell, especially The Power of Myth and Myths to Live By.

These were favorites of mine in young adulthood, though they can feel a little dated now. Campbell was a great storyteller with a strong interest in comparative mythology. He saw myths as sources of poetic insight about history, humanity, and morality—insights that evaporate if you insist on literalism.

After reading Campbell, I came to see that “it’s just a myth” doesn’t have to be insulting. A myth is not a historical account, but it is a portrait of a culture and its evolving moral imagination. Of course, myths are also edited over generations and often carry ideological agendas—sometimes to justify the power structures of the day. Taking a myth literally is like watching a great movie and then treating it as a documentary and instruction manual, policing behaviour by quoting isolated lines of dialogue, while denouncing all other films as blasphemy. We easily do this with Greek mythology, but many people refuse to do it with modern mythologies.

13. Determined, by Robert Sapolsky.

Sapolsky marshals a mountain of evidence that behaviour has many deterministic causes: genetic influences over long time scales, brain changes due to childhood experience, hormonal fluctuations, and immediate environmental conditions. “Free will” is at minimum far less free than most people assume, and for some individuals—given their biology and life history—following certain moral rules will be far harder than for others.

This connects to a classic problem in religious dogma: the tension between an all-knowing, all-powerful deity and meaningful human freedom. If a deity knows the entire future with certainty, it begins to resemble a fixed script—God watching a movie whose ending was known all along, including who ends up rewarded or punished. A religious apologist may hand-wave and say that human logic does not apply to divine matters, but once you do that consistently, you also weaken the very logic by which the religion argues for itself.

14. The Battle for God, by Karen Armstrong.

A history of fundamentalism that is very engaging and full of illuminating case examples. Armstrong’s key point is not simply that fundamentalists are ignorant or backward. Her point is that fundamentalism is, in important ways, a modern reaction to modernity—a kind of militant piety or panic in response to rapid, disorienting social change. She emphasizes the clash between older religious ways of making meaning and a new world dominated by scientific rationality, secular institutions, modern states, and aggressive cultural change. She is also very good on the way fundamentalist movements often turn religion into a quasi-rational system of certainties, as though sacred myth had to be defended in the language of science, politics, and ideology.  

This is particularly relevant to Darwin, modern science, and women’s rights. In the Protestant world especially, fundamentalism became deeply bound up with resistance to biblical criticism, Darwinian evolution, liberal theology, and secular education. Later, these same movements often fused with backlash against women’s rights, sexual liberalization, abortion rights, and other social changes seen as attacks on a divinely ordained hierarchy. When a belief system is predicated on absolute certainty and a rigid, divinely ordained order, a ballot box for a woman, a secular classroom, or an evolutionary biology textbook can feel not like progress but like an existential threat to the cosmic order. Armstrong is especially useful because she shows that fundamentalism is not a timeless, “pure” form of faith. It is a highly modern response to the painful transformation of modern life.  

15. The philosophical works of Bertrand Russell, particularly those in which he discusses religion.

Russell remains one of the clearest philosophical critics of religion. He is especially good at exposing bad arguments that have survived mainly because they are old, emotionally resonant, or repeated with confidence. There is also something refreshing about reading someone who is sharp, logical, unsentimental, and completely unintimidated by sacred tradition.

16. Works reviewing controlled studies on paranormal claims—psychic ability, ghosts, miracles, and related subjects.

This includes James Randi’s work over many years, and skeptically oriented psychologists such as Richard Wiseman, who has written and spoken extensively about how “paranormal” experiences can arise from priming, suggestion, environmental factors, memory distortion, coincidence, and cultural expectation.

The fairest claim here is not that every study has always been negative, but that after decades of investigation, paranormal claims have not produced a robust, reliably replicable body of evidence. Many “hits” are better explained by coincidence, selection effects, remembering the hits and forgetting the misses, motivated interpretation, and the cognitive biases that flourish in emotionally charged settings.

17. Books about evolutionary psychology, such as Spent, by Geoffrey Miller.

Useful for thinking about status, mating displays, consumption, and the ways our evolved social psychology can drive behaviour that we later dress up in rational language. Human beings are very good at post hoc moralizing and self-justification. Religion often provides an especially elegant vocabulary for motives that are much more ancient and much less noble than they appear on the surface.

18. Scholars in archaeology, Ancient Near East history, the history of religious texts, and philosophy.

Look for scholars with strong credentials and serious methods, as you would in any discipline. Bart Ehrman is an excellent place to start. One should be acquainted with scholarship on the origins and editorial histories of religious texts: multiple versions, translation issues, theological agendas, and the ways texts absorb and transform motifs across cultures. Richard Elliott Friedman, Israel Finkelstein, Neil Silberman, and Mark S. Smith are all very useful in this regard.

A caution: as with many polarized topics, there are also plenty of apologists—sometimes persuasive, sometimes contemptuous of contrary evidence—who can reproduce the very dynamics they claim to be rising above.

19. Astronomy Today and other good introductory astronomy texts.

An introductory astronomy textbook is genuinely thrilling—even just aesthetically. I think everyone should understand how planets, stars, and galaxies form, what they are made of, the time scales involved, and the astonishing reasoning that has helped us understand the universe.

A modern cosmic perspective does more than show that many old cosmologies were factually wrong. It shows how provincial they were. Many religious worldviews were formed in a pre-Copernican mental universe. Once one has learned even a little astronomy, it becomes much harder to take ancient sky-centered metaphors as literal descriptions of reality.

This list is obviously selective. But these are among the books and research traditions I would most want a reader to have in mind while reading the rest of this book.

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The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 9: Video Recommendations

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.
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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.

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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.

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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.  

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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.

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The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 4: The Main Thesis

With these acknowledgments in mind, I still have to state my main thesis plainly: the literal supernatural claims at the core of religions are not true. Many sacred stories appear to have, at most, an idealized or embellished relationship to actual figures or events; many others are best understood as products of the same mythic and literary world as the cultures around them. 

We see recurring motifs across civilizations: flood narratives in Mesopotamian texts such as Atrahasis and Gilgamesh that strongly resemble later biblical flood storytelling; traditions of extraordinary or divinely marked birth; and narratives of divine descent, death, restoration, or return that later readers sometimes compare with resurrection themes, though the parallels are not always neat. Even the moral ideas often presented as uniquely Christian have deep pre-Christian pedigrees. The command to love one’s neighbour is already in the Hebrew Bible; versions of reciprocity appear in Confucian and Indian traditions; and the psychological logic of non-retaliation emerges in multiple moral traditions long before Christianity. Christianity did not invent moral grammar from nothing; it inherited, recombined, amplified, and ritualized themes that human cultures had been discovering for a very long time.

All religions contain stories that can have moral lessons and often reflect the history of cultural groups striving to improve justice, security, morality, happiness, and harmony in their civilizations, while reflecting on human foibles. Modern religions are not very much different from other historical mythologies, such as Greek, Roman, or Egyptian mythology: they have profoundly shaped culture, and they continue to give us interesting, thoughtful stories, but they are not generally treated as literal truths. The fact that religious narratives can be psychologically helpful, ethically suggestive, or aesthetically beautiful does not make their supernatural claims true; it makes them powerful cultural creations, which is a different category.

It is also worth noticing that while religion is ancient, many features of large-scale organized religion—public priesthoods, written canons, institutional authority, standardized doctrine, and state alignment—intensified alongside agriculture, cities, and larger political structures. In such settings, religion can function as social “glue”: a way to unify large groups, encode shared identity, and establish norms for how people should behave together in communities far larger than anything most hunter-gatherer minds evolved to manage.

Not surprisingly, many sacred texts contain themes of intergroup conflict, invasion, conquest, boundary maintenance, and rules for cooperation—stories shaped by the political pressures, environmental constraints, and moral agendas of their times, repeatedly revised and reinterpreted, and naturally inclined to aggrandize the moral standing of the home tribe. In that way, religions can function like other art forms—literature, theatre, poetry, film—sometimes illuminating human experience, sometimes acting as tools of persuasion, and sometimes sliding into outright propaganda.

People become deeply attached to religious beliefs through powerful psychological forces. Most of all, there is longstanding commitment—often beginning in childhood—bolstered by parents, friends, admired community figures, and the sheer comfort of familiarity. It is as though roots form around a belief system, growing deeper over time, intertwined with identity, memory, and the need for coherence. Weakening those roots can feel like a threat to one’s sense of self, one’s social safety, and one’s personal integrity. For many, it would also be embarrassing—or even humiliating—to admit that something they have honored for decades might be false or misguided; so the mind protects itself by doubling down on prior commitments.

We see versions of this phenomenon far beyond religion, including in medicine and science.  Many people like to imagine that scientists change their views rationally according to evidence. But even among highly educated experts, new frameworks are often resisted when they threaten status, identity, professional sunk costs, or a lifetime of being “the one who knows.” History is full of examples: the Copernican move toward a Sun-centred system; the germ theory of infectious disease; the slow acceptance of plate tectonics; the bacterial role of Helicobacter pylori in peptic ulcer disease; Boltzmann’s atomic theory and statistical mechanics; Cecilia Payne’s early demonstration that stars are composed primarily of hydrogen (and helium); and the recognition of prion diseases as a genuinely new kind of infectious process. 

In each case, the evidence did not simply land on neutral minds; it collided with human psychology—pride, fear, loyalty, identity, and the discomfort of having to revise one’s story about reality.  But unlike religion, science contains formal mechanisms for correction.  

At times, the advent or widespread adoption of a new religion has been followed by improvements in a society’s stability. But the reasons for this, as I will argue, often have less to do with the truth of any particular doctrine, or the real existence of any divinity with imagined powers, and more to do with what I would call “nonspecific factors”: the social technology of shared rituals, shared identity, shared moral language, mutual aid, and coordinated behavior—effects that can be psychologically and culturally potent even when the beliefs are false.



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