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 almost everyone, whatever their religious or political leanings, would warm to 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. A world arranged by a benevolent designer for the good of its creatures would not, one imagines, have planned for parasites, famine, and the slow death of the weak. The age of the Earth’s rocks unsettles only the literalist; the sheer quantity of undeserved suffering in nature is the deeper challenge to any account of a benevolent design. These documentaries are also a good background for understanding evolution as the process that has shaped the history of life—rather than the work of a designing hand. Increasingly, they point to the scale of human-caused ecological damage too—habitat loss, pollution, and the accelerating loss of biodiversity.

For people raised in literalist traditions, geology is often where the age of the Earth becomes impossible to set aside: it 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 five-part BBC series Earth: The Power of the Planet (2007), broadcast in the United States the following year as Earth: The Biography. This matters here because many forms of dogmatic faith make specific claims about origins and timescales—such as a young Earth only a few thousand years old—that are very hard to reconcile with the geological record.

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 is not that science has all the answers. It is that science has built machinery for noticing when it is wrong—and uses it. That is what distinguishes it 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 serious history partly because it complicates the tidier stories that religious apologetics sometimes tell. 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 leave us disheartened 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 cannot bear close scrutiny, then the honest next step is to offer people good places to do that scrutiny.

References

Al-Shamahi, E. (Host). (2025). Human [TV series]. BBC Studios; PBS. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/series/human

Attenborough, D. (Narrator). (2006). Planet Earth [TV series]. BBC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Earth_(2006_TV_series)

Attenborough, D. (Narrator). (2016). Planet Earth II [TV series]. BBC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Earth_II

Attenborough, D. (Narrator). (2020). David Attenborough: A life on our planet [Film]. Silverback Films; Netflix. https://www.netflix.com/title/80216393

Attenborough, D. (Narrator). (2023). Planet Earth III [TV series]. BBC Studios Natural History Unit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Earth_III

Clark, C. (Host). (2017). The story of Europe [TV series]. ZDF. https://www.zdf-studios.com/en/program-catalog/international/unscripted/history-biographies/story-europe

Hawking, S. (Writer & Host). (2010). Into the universe with Stephen Hawking [TV series]. Darlow Smithson Productions. https://www.discovery.com/shows/into-the-universe-with-stephen-hawking

Neeson, L. (Narrator). (2001). Evolution [TV series]. WGBH/NOVA; Clear Blue Sky Productions. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/

Roberts, A. (Host). (2009). The incredible human journey [TV series]. BBC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incredible_Human_Journey

Sagan, C. (Host). (1980). Cosmos: A personal voyage [TV series]. PBS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmos:_A_Personal_Voyage

Shubin, N. (Host). (2014). Your inner fish [TV series]. Tangled Bank Studios; PBS. https://www.pbs.org/show/your-inner-fish-program

Stewart, I. (Host). (2007). Earth: The power of the planet [TV series]. BBC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth:_The_Power_of_the_Planet

Tyson, N. deG. (Host). (2014). Cosmos: A spacetime odyssey [TV series]. Fox; National Geographic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmos:_A_Spacetime_Odyssey

← Chapter 8 | Contents | Chapter 10 →

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.

Religious history has no shortage of examples. The clearest case is Peter Popoff, who through the 1980s filled arenas by calling out strangers' names, addresses, and ailments—knowledge he attributed to God, and which brought his ministry more than half a million dollars a month. In 1986 the professional conjurer James Randi had an associate scan the radio frequencies at one of the meetings. What came through was Popoff's wife, Elizabeth, reading aloud into a transmitter from the prayer cards the audience had filled out on the way in, feeding an earpiece hidden in her husband's ear. Fraud was not the worst of it: the scanner also caught her and her aides laughing at the appearance of a man with advanced testicular cancer. Randi played the tape on The Tonight Show. Popoff first claimed NBC had hired an actress to impersonate his wife on a doctored tape; then he conceded the radio existed, but said almost everybody knew about it. Popoff declared bankruptcy the following year. He was back on television within a decade, and is selling Miracle Spring Water still.

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 and self-help spiritual milieu who 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, the 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. Hay’s own best-selling You Can Heal Your Life is the clearest example: its long appended list assigns a specific emotional cause to nearly every ailment—cancer to long-held resentment, arthritis to habitual criticism. Such claims are not merely 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. As Susan Sontag argued in Illness as Metaphor, written while she was herself being treated for cancer, to read disease as a verdict on the patient's character is a cruelty that shames the sick. 

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.

References

Ehrenreich, B. (2009). Bright-sided: How the relentless promotion of positive thinking has undermined America. Metropolitan Books.

A cultural critique of the American positive-thinking industry, written with reportorial bite. Ehrenreich—drawing in part on her own treatment for breast cancer—traces how the demand to “stay positive” shades into a doctrine in which illness becomes a failure of attitude and recovery a reward for cheerfulness. Her central charge maps directly onto this chapter: positive-thinking culture quietly relocates responsibility for disease onto the patient, and can crowd out realism, grief, and sober medical decision-making. (Published in the United Kingdom as Smile or Die.)

Hay, L. L. (1984). You can heal your life. Hay House.

The foundational text of the modern affirmations movement, which has sold tens of millions of copies. Hay pairs genuinely humane self-acceptance exercises with a metaphysics of disease: an appended list assigns a specific emotional or mental cause to nearly every ailment—cancer to long-held resentment, arthritis to criticism—and the book asserts that releasing such feelings can dissolve even serious illness. 

 

Hyman, R. (1977). “Cold reading”: How to convince strangers that you know all about them. The Zetetic (now the Skeptical Inquirer), 1(2), 18–37.

The classic analysis of cold reading by a psychologist who was himself a practicing mentalist. Hyman dissects the techniques—high-probability guesses, strategic ambiguity, attentive reading of feedback, and skillful use of the client’s own disclosures—by which a reader can appear to possess uncanny knowledge of a stranger.  

Randi, J. (1987). The faith healers. Prometheus Books.

A documented investigation, with a foreword by Carl Sagan, of prominent faith-healing ministries. Randi, a professional conjurer, exposes the stagecraft behind apparent miracles—most famously the televangelist Peter Popoff, whose seemingly divine knowledge of audience members’ names and ailments was being transmitted to a concealed earpiece by his wife from information gathered on prayer cards. Randi’s effort to trace people supposedly cured turned up no verifiable healings. 

 

Shermer, M. (2002). Why people believe weird things: Pseudoscience, superstition, and other confusions of our time (Rev. and expanded ed.). Henry Holt.

A wide-ranging examination of why belief in the implausible is so common, by the founder of the Skeptics Society. The expanded edition adds the chapter most relevant here, “Why Smart People Believe Weird Things,” whose thesis Shermer compresses into a memorable line: intelligent people are often especially skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for reasons that were not intelligent. 

 

Sontag, S. (1978). Illness as metaphor. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

A landmark essay, written while Sontag was herself undergoing cancer treatment, against the habit of treating disease as a sign of the sufferer’s character or psychology. She argues that “psychologizing” illness—casting cancer as the disease of the repressed or the emotionally blocked—is a form of victim-blaming that can shame patients and steer them away from effective treatment. 

 ← Chapter 7 | Contents | Chapter 9 →

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 or figurative teaching about morality. 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. American slavery is a historic example: the pro-slavery preachers referred to the household codes that instruct slaves to obey their masters, or to the story of Paul sending a runaway slave back to his owner. They correctly observed that neither testament condemns slavery. The abolitionists had to argue from a broader perspective of the text—the Exodus, the neighbour, the claim that in Christ there is neither slave nor free. Both sides were literate, devout, and certain. The historian Mark Noll calls this a theological crisis: a culture that had staked everything on the Bible's plain sense discovered that the plain sense would not settle the question. The war settled it. Interpretation of the Bible did not. 

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, a process described by psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg: 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! In fairness, this is not how most thoughtful believers actually live: for them the rule is a scaffold for conscience rather than a substitute for it, and the two grow up together. My worry is narrower—it is about what happens when the rule is asked to carry the whole weight, and reflection on it is treated as disobedience. 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. It is hard to maintain that every specific word in a religious text—let alone every translation choice or manuscript tradition—is a flawless, literal directive. Most people therefore focus on the next higher levels of organization: a verse, which is the most common unit studied in sermons or religious meetings; or a chapter, which gathers a few dozen verses into what feels like a self-contained unit.  

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. My childhood home was periodically a venue for these Bible studies. During the discussion, the analysis often 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. These divisions were decided by editors, rather than being features of the earliest manuscripts. The chapter divisions we now take for granted date to around the early thirteenth century—the work of Stephen Langton, later Archbishop of Canterbury—and the verse numbers are later still, introduced by the Paris printer Robert Estienne in 1551. The oldest manuscripts have none of this scaffolding: no chapters, no verses, no punctuation, no "John 3:16," not even spaces between the words. The grid we read through was laid down by editors, centuries after the texts themselves.

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.

References

Curry, O. S., Mullins, D. A., & Whitehouse, H. (2019). Is it good to cooperate? Testing the theory of morality-as-cooperation in 60 societies. Current Anthropology, 60(1), 47–69. https://doi.org/10.1086/701478

A large cross-cultural test of the hypothesis that morality consists of solutions to recurrent problems of cooperation. Surveying the ethnographic record of sixty societies, the authors find that seven cooperative behaviours—helping kin, helping one’s group, reciprocating, being brave, deferring to legitimate authority, dividing disputed resources fairly, and respecting prior possession—are regarded as morally good wherever they appear, in all regions of the world. The findings give empirical weight to the claim that shared moral intuitions, including versions of the Golden Rule, are what one would expect from a cooperative social species rather than evidence of a single divine origin.
 

de Waal, F. B. M. (2006). Primates and philosophers: How morality evolved (S. Macedo & J. Ober, Eds.). Princeton University Press.

Drawing on decades of primate research, de Waal argues against “Veneer Theory”—the view that morality is a thin cultural overlay on an otherwise selfish animal nature—and contends instead that the building blocks of human morality (empathy, reciprocity, consolation, a rudimentary sense of fairness) are continuous with the social instincts of other primates. Based on his Tanner Lectures and including critical responses from philosophers such as Christine Korsgaard, Philip Kitcher, and Peter Singer, the volume supports the argument that moral capacities arise naturally in social species rather than requiring a supernatural source.
 

Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review, 108(4), 814–834. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.108.4.814

An influential challenge to rationalist accounts of morality, including Kohlberg’s. Haidt argues that moral judgments are usually produced by rapid, automatic intuitions, with conscious reasoning arriving afterward as post hoc justification—the “emotional dog” wagging its “rational tail.” The paper complicates any picture of mature morality as primarily deliberative, but it equally undercuts rigid rule-following: the empathic and reactive intuitions Haidt describes are precisely what a fixed list of commandments cannot encode.
 

Kohlberg, L. (1981). Essays on moral development, Vol. 1: The philosophy of moral development. Harper & Row.

The foundational statement of Kohlberg’s stage theory of moral reasoning, which describes development as a movement from a preconventional level (in which right action is whatever avoids punishment or serves self-interest), through a conventional level (conformity to social rules and roles), to a postconventional level (reasoning from general ethical principles that can stand in judgment over particular rules and authorities). The framework supplies the vocabulary for the distinction at the heart of this chapter—between morality as obedience to an external rule and morality as principled reasoning—though it has been criticized for privileging abstract justice reasoning and for the gap between moral reasoning and moral conduct.
 

Metzger, B. M., & Ehrman, B. D. (2005). The text of the New Testament: Its transmission, corruption, and restoration (4th ed.). Oxford University Press.

The standard scholarly handbook on New Testament textual criticism. Among much else, it documents that the familiar apparatus of chapter and verse is a late editorial imposition: chapter divisions are generally credited to Stephen Langton in the early thirteenth century, and the verse numbers of the printed New Testament to Robert Estienne in 1551; the earliest manuscripts were written without these divisions, and indeed without punctuation or even spaces between words. This supports the observation that verse boundaries are an artifact of editors rather than a feature of the original texts, and that reading “by the verse” can fragment what was composed as continuous argument.
 

Neusner, J., & Chilton, B. D. (Eds.). (2008). The golden rule: The ethics of reciprocity in world religions. Continuum.

An edited volume in which scholars examine formulations of the Golden Rule across Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Greco-Roman philosophy, attending both to the shared core and to the genuine differences among them. It documents the near-universality of reciprocity ethics that the chapter invokes. 
 

Noll, M. A. (2006). The civil war as a theological crisis. University of North Carolina Press.

A historical study, by a leading evangelical historian, of how American Christians on both sides of the slavery question appealed to the same Bible with equal confidence—pro-slavery writers citing the household codes and scripture’s apparent toleration of slavery, abolitionists appealing to the broader arc of liberation and the command to love one’s neighbour. Noll argues that the impossibility of settling the dispute “by the Bible alone” constituted a genuine crisis for scriptural authority. The episode is perhaps the clearest historical illustration of the claim that one sacred text can be marshalled to defend opposite moral conclusions.
 

← Chapter 6 | Contents | Chapter 8 →

The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 6: Faith Healing

In more dramatic religious healing practices—such as "faith healing"—the nonspecific factors I discussed earlier are especially prominent: the awe of a crowd, intense emotions, and a strong attachment to a charismatic leader on a stage. Faith healing, much like hypnosis, can appear particularly effective for problems with a substantial functional component: symptoms that fluctuate with stress, attention, expectation, and social reinforcement—dissociative phenomena, functional seizures, and other presentations in which meaning and arousal shape the experience of illness. In such settings, a sudden "cure" can let a person feel validated and publicly endorsed by the community—their distress reframed as something meaningful, even sacred or chosen, rather than as ordinary misfortune—which can temporarily lift self-esteem and social standing. This is not to say the symptoms were imaginary: functional symptoms are genuinely experienced, and often disabling. Dramatic healing events change the meaning, the attention, and the social frame around suffering.  Unfortunately, these dynamics are easily exploited by charlatans, and one does not have to look far to find examples.

I have to digress—for a very lengthy moment—about the word functional.  The older term was psychosomatic, and it has been mostly retired.  "Psychosomatic" suggests that there is a psychological cause, that the mind made the body create the symptom.  Sometimes this could be the case: many people with functional symptoms do have psychological factors in play; the evidence for this is that psychological treatments alone can relieve the physical problems.  But this is not true for everyone.  Many patients have no identifiable trigger, no trauma, no underlying depression, and in this case the word psychosomatic carries an accusation—you are doing this to yourself—which is cruel when it is wrong.  And it frequently is wrong.  Medicine has been confidently mistaken about this label before.  Peptic ulcer disease was for decades thought to be psychosomatic: stress, acid, and a driven personality.  But then, as I described earlier, Marshall and Warren discovered that ulcers were actually caused by a bacterial infection!  

The current term is functional, meaning a disorder of function rather than structure:  the hardware is intact, but the signalling has gone wrong.  The shift is not a denial that psychology matters—it is a refusal to require it.  Diagnosis no longer depends on hunting for a stressor; it rests on positive physical signs.  In functional leg weakness, for instance, the leg that cannot be pressed down on command will press down perfectly well, by itself, the moment the patient is asked to lift the other one.  The pathway works.  But what fails is the access to it.  The term functional could sound like a polite evasion or even a euphemism for psychosomatic, but it has an advantage: it says what is happening without insisting on a particular cause.  

Causation for functional problems runs across a wide range, and much of it is simply unknown.  At one end there are cases where psychological factors are evident—the old vocabulary of somatization and conversion, where distress that has no other outlet arrives in the body.  At the other end are patients in whom no one has ever found anything of the kind, and where the mechanism is a genuine mystery: something has gone wrong with prediction, attention, and the brain's model of the body.  There is also another category of cases—the factitious, where symptoms are produced or faked for the sake of the sick role and the care that comes with it; and outright malingering, where the payoff is money, drugs, or an escape from something.  But these cases are not functional; they are in a separate category altogether.  

But let's get back to the stage: at a faith healing event, different people might have different problems. Someone with a functional gait disorder might genuinely walk.  Someone who has felt comfortable in a sick role might be willing to take on the role of a healed person.  Some people might have been paid to throw down a crutch.  And others might have some combination of these problems, since categorization is not necessarily tidy—labels that look crisp in a textbook might blur in a real person under a spotlight, with a crowd roaring and a preacher's hand on her forehead.  Not every problem is one thing.  The question "Was it a miracle?" cannot be answered from the stage—not because miracles have been ruled out, but because we do not even know what was wrong.  

Most people with severe medical problems who pursue faith healing will not experience remission, because many illnesses are not primarily functional 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. 

The danger is worst when faith healing replaces medicine rather than accompanying it.  One review found 172 U.S. child deaths between 1975 and 1995 after parents refused care on religious grounds—most of them children who would very likely have lived with ordinary treatment.  An adult is capable of weighing the risks or benefits of his or her own convictions.  A child cannot.  

Most of the healings invoked as miracles involve serious organic disease, and there, what looks like a cure is almost always something else. Placebo and context effects are real, but limited. They can change pain, fatigue, nausea, breathlessness, and the felt sense of being cared for. They do not shrink tumours, reverse sepsis, or repair a severed nerve—a ritual can change the experience of illness without changing the disease.

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 close to half did not survive childhood. 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, with the miracle-giver doing nothing for the massive public health problems while singling out some lucky individual.

Miracle stories are a little bit like discussing lottery winners: if miracles truly occur, they are extremely rare, and the narrative focus on the "winner" distracts from the millions who hoped, prayed, suffered, and received nothing. And some of these millions had problems that could have been solved through simple interventions, nothing magical required. As with lotteries, one would be unwise 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 afterward 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.

Before accepting a miracle claim, ask for the medical equivalent of a chart: the diagnosis beforehand, objective evidence after, independent verification, what treatment was already underway, how long the improvement lasted, and how many others at the same event were not healed.  

The same selective attention 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.

I can't help but mention a passage from a sweet, delightful children's book, which was made into a movie I enjoyed with my own children many times:  E.B. White's Charlotte's Web.  In the story, the whole valley is marvelling at the words a spider spun into her web and calling them a miracle.  The old country doctor gently points out that everyone has missed the real marvel: nobody, he says, noticed that "the web itself is a miracle."  He cannot explain how a spider learned to spin at all—how a creature taught by no one produces something so intricate and exact—and that, he suggests, is the thing worth our astonishment.  The web, the bird, the lily, the human eye, the sheer fact of a universe that has produced creatures able to wonder about it—these are astonishing enough without being pressed into service as supernatural signs.  The error was never in feeling awe; awe is the correct response to nature. The error is in mistaking the ordinary, ubiquitous miracle of the world for a rare and personal exception to it.  

References

Asser, S. M., & Swan, R. (1998). Child fatalities from religion-motivated medical neglect. Pediatrics, 101(4), 625–629. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.101.4.625

A review of 172 child deaths in the United States between 1975 and 1995 in families that relied on faith healing instead of medical care. In 140 of the cases, survival rates with standard medical treatment would have exceeded 90%, and a further 18 had expected survival above 50%. The study documents the lethal consequences of substituting religious ritual for effective treatment, particularly for children, who have no voice in the decision.

 
Barnett, A. G., van der Pols, J. C., & Dobson, A. J. (2005). Regression to the mean: What it is and how to deal with it. International Journal of Epidemiology, 34(1), 215–220. https://doi.org/10.1093/ije/dyh299

A widely cited methodological review of regression to the mean—the statistical tendency for unusually high or low measurements to be followed by ones closer to the average. Because people typically seek dramatic interventions when their symptoms are at their worst, any subsequent improvement can be misread as a treatment effect (or a miracle) when it is simply the expected return toward baseline.
 

Espay, A. J., Aybek, S., Carson, A., Edwards, M. J., Goldstein, L. H., Hallett, M., LaFaver, K., LaFrance, W. C., Jr., Lang, A. E., Nicholson, T., Nielsen, G., Reuber, M., Voon, V., Stone, J., & Morgante, F. (2018). Current concepts in diagnosis and treatment of functional neurological disorders. JAMA Neurology, 75(9), 1132–1141. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamaneurol.2018.1264

A consensus review of functional neurological disorders (FND)—genuine and often disabling conditions such as functional movement disorders and psychogenic non-epileptic seizures. It documents the field's shift away from the term "psychogenic" and away from requiring a psychological stressor for diagnosis, emphasizing that the symptoms are real and shaped by attention, expectation, and prediction rather than feigned. Relevant to why suggestion-rich settings can genuinely influence such symptoms.

 
Kaptchuk, T. J., & Miller, F. G. (2015). Placebo effects in medicine. New England Journal of Medicine, 373(1), 8–9. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMp1504023

A concise overview presenting placebo responses as genuine biopsychosocial effects of expectation, conditioning, and context on the experience of symptoms—rather than mere imagination or spontaneous fluctuation. Useful for understanding how expectation and suggestion can produce real symptomatic change in conditions sensitive to those factors.
 

Volk, A. A., & Atkinson, J. A. (2013). Infant and child death in the human environment of evolutionary adaptation. Evolution and Human Behavior, 34(3), 182–192. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2012.11.007

A synthesis of infant and child mortality across 20 hunter–gatherer and 43 historical pre-industrial populations, estimating that approximately 27% of infants died within the first year of life and approximately 47.5% of children died before reaching puberty. Provides the demographic background against which ancient miracle claims must be read.

White, E. B. (1952). Charlotte's web. Harper & Brothers.

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The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 5: Nonspecific Factors

In the previous chapters I argued that religion confers real benefits; the harder question is why. A large part of the answer is that many of those benefits flow not from the literal truth of any doctrine, but from the psychological and social frame in which the doctrine is delivered.

Many styles of psychotherapy have evolved over the past century and a half, and most began with strong, sometimes dogmatic theories about the causes and cures of psychological suffering. Their arrival was, on balance, a gift: at last there was a serious, systematic attempt to relieve mental illness. Psychoanalysis is the clearest example. It came equipped with an elaborate and frankly poetic body of doctrine—its own compelling "scripture" in the writings of Freud and his successors—locating the roots of suffering in childhood experience and the relationships within the family. Many of its specific causal claims have not survived as literal explanations: the Oedipal theory of neurosis, the reading of dreams as disguised wishes awaiting decryption, the confident reconstruction of long-forgotten trauma. And yet patients plainly got better. How?

After twenty-five years of practice, I am more convinced than ever that the most valuable things I offer are not techniques at all, but continuity, attention, and still being there next year. To sit, regularly and over months or years, with a kind, curious, attentive person whose entire professional purpose is to take your inner life seriously is therapeutic for a great many conditions. Even when the therapist's causal theory is mistaken, or the interpretations are too speculative or too sure of themselves, the patient still receives steady, non-judgmental attention, a dependable relationship, and a structured space in which to reflect. The wrapper, it turns out, does much of the work that the contents were given credit for.

Once we notice this, we can lay healing practices along a kind of spectrum, ordered by how literally true their stated theory is—and then watch the benefit travel the whole length of it, indifferent to whether the theory is true. Good psychotherapy sits at the honest end and makes no supernatural claim. Psychoanalysis sits a little further along: a sincere theory whose central causal claims turned out to be mostly wrong. Keep going and we arrive at the frankly false. Some people consult psychics, mystics, or faith-healers and come away comforted and genuinely helped. I do not believe any paranormal force is operating in the room. At best the "healer" supplies a reassuring frame, social fluency, confidence, and close attention; reads accurate cues, spoken and unspoken; and delivers the result with something close to psychotherapeutic skill when rapport is strong. The Barnum (or Forer) effect supplies the rest: a description vague enough to fit almost anyone can feel amazingly specific. Under controlled conditions the pattern is consistent: well-designed studies of psychic phenomena fail to find effects that replicate. When Daryl Bem published apparent evidence for precognition in a leading journal in 2011, independent laboratories ran pre-registered replications and found nothing—an episode that established not the supernatural but the value of the machinery that caught it.

Dream analysis is another good example. People have tried to find meaning in dreams for thousands of years, and this tradition got a big scholarly boost in the Freudian era.  For some people, having a dream interpreted feels illuminating. But a dream is an ambiguous object, stitched together from the day's residue, old memories, present worries, and a good deal of the brain's own nocturnal noise. In 1977 the Harvard psychiatrists Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley proposed what they called the activation-synthesis hypothesis: that the forebrain, jolted by essentially random signals rising from the brainstem during REM sleep, weaves a story. They aimed the argument squarely at Freud, and it largely retired the idea that a dream is a disguised wish awaiting decryption. Because the material feels so personal, almost any reading of it can feel true, including readings that contradict one another. There is no master key. What helps is not the dream's hidden message but the act of reflection it invites.  

This is a well-studied pattern in my own field. The established therapies tend toward similar outcomes whenever the relationship and the frame are strong—so consistently that for the better part of a century researchers have argued over whether the specific techniques matter at all. The question remains contested: there is good evidence that specific methods carry real weight for particular situations. While the shared frame does most of the heavy lifting, specific tools can be best for certain problems—exposure for anxiety disorders being the best case. The genuine dark side appears when a theory hardens into dogma: when people are taught to misunderstand the sources of their own suffering, are left more ashamed and confused than when they arrived, and blame themselves for failing to improve—never suspecting that the framework itself might be at fault.

The psychiatrist Jerome Frank saw all of this, and saw further. In Persuasion and Healing he set psychotherapy alongside religious healing, shamanic ritual, and the whole history of culturally sanctioned help, and asked what they shared. He found four things. Each offers a confiding relationship with a helper. Each provides a healing setting, a place marked off from ordinary life. Each supplies a theory that explains the sufferer's distress and what to do about it. And each prescribes a ritual that both parties believe in. Notice what is absent from that list. The theory has to be believed. It does not have to be true.

Religion supplies all four, abundantly. The minister, priest, rabbi, or imam is the confiding relationship. The church, temple, or mosque is the healing setting. What better place to meditate, to have quiet contemplation, or even to focus on awe and wonder, than a beautiful religious building? The doctrine is the theory: it explains why you suffer, what it means, and what is being asked of you. Elements of this doctrine are presented regularly, through sermons, scripture passages, or prayers. Every style of religion has its own rituals: prayer habits, lighting candles, fasting, baptisms, even a regular schedule of "appointments" such as Sunday services.  Faith consolidates these four elements.  It's a powerful form of positive expectancy, comforting believers with constant confidence that help is on its way.  

Religion adds a social element lacking in most styles of therapy—the helper is embedded in a community, so the confiding relationship is surrounded by dozens of other supportive peers.  The community supplies kind and stable group involvement; warm, altruistic mentors; a commitment to values that reach beyond selfishness or materialism; and sermons that can carry useful moral reflection regardless of their supernatural premises. And almost all of it is supported by beautiful music—in a religious service not only can you enjoy music as a listener, but you can help create it through participation in choirs or congregational singing. These factors can be psychologically powerful—whether or not the doctrinal claims are literally true.

This raises a hard question—one I will come back to later in the book. If the real benefits of religion come from the frame, and not from the beliefs being true, then someone who begins to doubt their faith may have far less to lose than they fear. But there is a challenging side to this. Can the benefits of religion survive once the belief itself is gone? Does the warmth of the community, the comfort of ritual, the sense of belonging, still hold when a person no longer believes the supernatural story behind it? I think it's possible, but it's not easy.

References

Bem, D. J. (2011). Feeling the future: Experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100(3), 407–425. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0021524

A widely publicized series of nine experiments reporting statistically significant evidence for precognition, published in a leading social-psychology journal. Its prominence, and the controversy it provoked over statistical practice, made it a catalyst for the wider movement toward preregistration and replication in psychological science. Subsequent studies failed to replicate these findings (see Ritchie et al. below).

 
Forer, B. R. (1949). The fallacy of personal validation: A classroom demonstration of gullibility. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 44(1), 118–123. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0059240

The original demonstration of what is now called the Barnum or Forer effect: individuals rate generic, near-universally applicable personality descriptions as strikingly accurate portraits of themselves. A foundational result for understanding why vague but personal-seeming statements—from horoscopes to cold readings—feel uncannily specific.

 
Frank, J. D., & Frank, J. B. (1991). Persuasion and healing: A comparative study of psychotherapy (3rd ed.). Johns Hopkins University Press.

A landmark comparative analysis arguing that psychotherapy, religious and shamanic healing, and other culturally sanctioned forms of help share a common structure: an emotionally charged, confiding relationship; a healing setting; a rationale or myth that explains the sufferer's distress; and a ritual or procedure that both parties believe in. One of the most direct scholarly statements of the thesis that the frame, rather than the specific theory, carries much of the therapeutic effect.

Hobson, J. A., & McCarley, R. W. (1977). The brain as a dream state generator: An activation-synthesis hypothesis of the dream process. American Journal of Psychiatry, 134(12), 1335–1348. https://doi.org/10.1176/ajp.134.12.1335

The paper that introduced the activation-synthesis hypothesis: that dreaming begins with essentially random signals arising in the brainstem during REM sleep, which the forebrain then synthesizes into narrative by matching them against stored memory. 

Ritchie, S. J., Wiseman, R., & French, C. C. (2012). Failing the future: Three unsuccessful attempts to replicate Bem's "retroactive facilitation of recall" effect. PLoS ONE, 7(3), e33423. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0033423

Three preregistered, independent attempts to reproduce the central precognition result reported by Bem (2011); all failed to find the effect (combined n = 150; combined p = .83, one-tailed). Frequently cited as an illustration of scientific self-correction and of the importance of replication before striking anomalous findings are accepted.

 
Rosenzweig, S. (1936). Some implicit common factors in diverse methods of psychotherapy. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 6(3), 412–415. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1939-0025.1936.tb05248.x

The paper that introduced the "common factors" hypothesis: the argument that diverse psychotherapies achieve broadly comparable results because they share active ingredients beyond their distinctive techniques. Reaches its conclusion in four pages and remains among the most-replicated observations in the field.

Tolin, D. F. (2010). Is cognitive-behavioral therapy more effective than other therapies? A meta-analytic review. Clinical Psychology Review, 30(6), 710–720. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2010.05.003

A meta-analysis of randomized comparisons (26 studies, N = 1,981) reporting that cognitive-behavioural therapy was superior to psychodynamic therapy at post-treatment and follow-up, but not superior to interpersonal or supportive therapies. The nuanced result is cited on both sides of the equivalence debate: method can matter, but not uniformly across comparison treatments.

 
Wampold, B. E., & Imel, Z. E. (2015). The great psychotherapy debate: The evidence for what makes psychotherapy work (2nd ed.). Routledge.

The major contemporary defense of the "contextual" model of psychotherapy, marshalling meta-analytic evidence that relationship and expectancy factors account for a substantial share of outcome variance relative to specific techniques. Widely regarded as the modern empirical case for the common-factors position.
 

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