With these acknowledgments firmly in mind, I have to come back to my conclusion: the literal supernatural claims at the core of the world's religions are not true. Many sacred stories 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. Some of the parallels are strikingly close: the flood narratives of Mesopotamian texts such as Atrahasis and the Epic of Gilgamesh—a divinely sent deluge, a chosen man, a vessel, the release of birds to find dry land—clearly prefigure the later biblical flood story. Others are real but looser: traditions of extraordinary or divinely marked birth, and narratives of divine descent, death, and return that some readers compare with resurrection themes, though here the parallels are more debated and should not be overstated. Even the moral ideas often presented as uniquely Christian have deep pre-Christian pedigrees. The command to love one's neighbour appears already in the Hebrew Bible (Leviticus 19:18); versions of the ethic of reciprocity appear in Confucius's Analects and in the Indian epics; 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 carry 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 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.
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, in proportion to the 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.
The pattern is so consistent it is almost a law. When Cecilia Payne showed in her 1925 doctoral thesis that the stars are made mostly of hydrogen, the most eminent astronomer of the day pronounced the result "clearly impossible" and pressed her to disown it in her own dissertation—then published the same conclusion himself four years later. She later wrote, with painful honesty: "I was to blame for not having pressed my point. I had given in to Authority when I believed I was right." When Barry Marshall proposed that bacteria, not stress and acid, caused most peptic ulcers, the medical establishment met him with disbelief and ridicule, until he resorted to swallowing a culture of Helicobacter pylori himself to prove it. 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 here is the decisive difference, and it is the heart of this book's argument. Unlike religion, science contains formal mechanisms for correction. Claims are published so that others can attack them; experiments are repeated; and—most tellingly of all—the reward structure is inverted relative to dogma. In a religion, the person who overturns the central doctrine is a heretic, to be silenced or expelled. In science, the person who overturns the reigning consensus wins the Nobel Prize. Payne and Marshall were not excommunicated; they were, in the end, honoured. The system resisted them, as systems run by human beings always will—but the system was built to be changed by evidence, and eventually it was. That capacity for self-correction, more than the truth or falsity of any single claim, is what most sharply distinguishes a scientific worldview from a dogmatic one.
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 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.
References
Heidel, A. (1949). The Gilgamesh epic and Old Testament parallels (2nd ed.). University of Chicago Press.
A foundational comparative study of the Mesopotamian flood traditions (the Gilgamesh and Atrahasis epics) alongside the Genesis flood narrative. It documents the close structural parallels—the divinely sent flood, the warned and chosen survivor, the great vessel, the sending out of birds to find land—that establish the biblical account as part of a much older Near Eastern literary tradition.
Norenzayan, A. (2013). Big Gods: How religion transformed cooperation and conflict. Princeton University Press.
Argues that belief in moralizing, omniscient, punitive "Big Gods" co-evolved with large-scale agricultural societies, helping to extend trust and cooperation among strangers far beyond the small groups in which human psychology evolved. Central to the chapter's claim that organized religion functioned as social "glue" enabling cooperation at unprecedented scale.
Festinger, L., Riecken, H. W., & Schachter, S. (1956). When prophecy fails: A social and psychological study of a modern group that predicted the destruction of the world. University of Minnesota Press.
The classic field study of a group whose apocalyptic prophecy failed, documenting how disconfirmation paradoxically intensified belief and proselytizing. It illustrates the chapter's claim that belief systems often respond to threatening evidence by "doubling down"—a tendency that operates with special force when identity and social belonging are at stake.
Kuhn, T. S. (1962). The structure of scientific revolutions. University of Chicago Press.
The landmark account of how science changes through "paradigm shifts" rather than purely cumulative reason, with established communities resisting anomalies until the weight of evidence forces a wholesale reconfiguration. It frames the chapter's history-of-science examples and supports the distinction between resistance to new ideas (common to all human institutions) and the formal capacity for self-correction (distinctive of science).
Wootton, D. (2006). Bad medicine: Doctors doing harm since Hippocrates. Oxford University Press.
A history of medicine's slow, often resisted progress, including the prolonged rejection of germ theory and effective therapies. It supplies historical depth to the chapter's claim that even empirical, life-and-death fields revise their core beliefs reluctantly, against the friction of professional identity and sunk cost.
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