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. 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 because religions sometimes align themselves with reasoned moral progress—but that alignment is not consistent, and it is not intrinsic to the supernatural doctrines. In many historical cases, religious dogma has instead been mobilized to resist social progress (e.g., abolition, women’s equality, some medical advances).
Democracies with the lowest rates of religious belief have the highest prosperity, happiness, and lowest crime rates, while many areas of the world with high religious participation have very high crime rates. But it is necessary to be careful about making causal conclusions about this: there are major confounds, and “religion” is not a single variable that behaves consistently across cultures. Still, the overall point remains: religion is not a dependable moral technology that reliably makes societies kinder or safer.
I have reviewed this book in more detail previously in this blog: https://garthkroeker.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-history-and-psychology-of-violence.html
4. Robert Trivers, The Folly of Fools — 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: a soldier who no longer fears death because of fervent belief in an afterlife 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 is reframed as divinely endorsed.
5. Books about cognitive biases, such as Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. (Here’s my review: Garth Kroeker: “The Lazy Controller”…)
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 common biases and patterns that bolster religious beliefs:
Ad hominem attacks against people who challenge religion. One of the first victims of this was Charles Darwin himself, who was subject to various criticisms of his character, integrity, etc. 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: dismissing evidence not because of its quality but because you dislike the person delivering it; and conversely, embracing weak evidence because you like the messenger.
Availability cascade: repeated exposure makes an idea feel more believable simply because it becomes easier to recall.
Confirmation bias: selectively collecting “hits” and ignoring “misses.” That is, paying attention to evidence that supports your position, while ignoring or failing to look for evidence that challenges your position.
Anchoring: remaining rooted to your previous beliefs.
Sunk cost fallacy: “I’ve invested my whole life in this—how could it be wrong?”
"Pascal's Wager" -- the reasoning is as follows: if you believe (in some particular religion), and the religion is true, then you get an eternal reward (Heaven); if you don't believe, but the religion is true, you get infinite punishment (Hell); if you believe, but the religion is not true, there is no significant loss; if you don't believe, and the religion is not true, there is also no significant loss. Therefore, one could reason that the most rational choice would be to espouse the religious belief, since there is potential infinite gain, potential avoidance of infinite loss, with no apparent downside. Or another way of putting it is "why take the chance of being wrong, and miss out on Heaven?" But this reasoning is preposterously invalid: first of all, one could apply this idea to any arbitrary belief system (including any of many world religions), which feature a concept of infinite rewards or punishments. Which one of these religions should one follow, or perhaps all of them? But an implicit requirement in many of these religions is that you must renounce all others! One could deploy similar reasoning to require belief in a magical rabbit in orbit around the moon, who would allow you to get into Heaven and to avoid Hell. Or a belief in the literal Santa Claus, flying through the world at Christmas to deliver gifts. Or belief in Bertrand Russell's "Eternal Teapot," orbiting the Sun between Earth and Mars. Furthermore, as I discuss elsewhere in this post, it is a poor moral foundation to base decisions and beliefs only on a reward or punishment paradigm, i.e. being motivated either by fear or potential personal profit; this type of selfishness is contradictory to the moral messaging of all religions. Furthermore, if a deity values sincerity, then choosing to believe only because of a profit or loss analysis would be seen as shallow, selfish, and hypocritical. One could understand through perusal of any religious text, that the character of a deity would surely be one to reward intellectual integrity, honesty, virtue, and willingness to doubt as opposed to blind obedience under threat. Also, the statement "no apparent downside" (of belief) is clearly not true (much of the rest of this post is all about this): there are psychological, social, moral, intellectual, and political consequences, for both short and long term scales of time, and for both individuals and communities.
Some groups intensify these dynamics by describing dissent as “of the Devil,” or by explicitly training members to refute challenges rather than genuinely engage with them. And religion contains a great deal of magical thinking and story bias: being persuaded by narratives irrespective of evidence, and personifying causation (“Someone must be behind this…”), a deeply human habit that shows up in all cultures.
6. Books about tribal psychology, such as The Power of Us by Jay Van Bavel and Dominic Packer. (See my review: Garth Kroeker: The Power of Us…)
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, entire cities). Oddly, the divine help rarely involves settling disputes peacefully.
7. 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 behavior by quoting isolated lines of dialogue, while denouncing all other films as blasphemy. We easily do this with Greek mythology ("Zeus" doesn’t literally exist), but many people refuse to do it with modern mythologies.
8. Determined, by Robert Sapolsky. (See my review: Garth Kroeker: Determined…)
Sapolsky marshals a mountain of evidence that behavior 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. Or it resembles a marble run constructed with disasters built in: some marbles tumble into fire, others glide safely home, and the design was known from the outset.
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.
9. The Battle for God, by Karen Armstrong.
A history of fundamentalism that is very engaging and full of illuminating case examples. Armstrong emphasizes the social and political conditions under which fundamentalism tends to surge—often as a reaction to disorientation, rapid cultural change, and perceived threats from modernity. For many readers, it is clarifying to see fundamentalism as a historical phenomenon with identifiable causes, rather than as a timeless “pure” form of faith.
10. The philosophical works of Bertrand Russell, particularly those in which he discusses religion.
11. Works reviewing controlled studies on paranormal claims (psychic ability, ghosts, etc.).
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, 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 hits and forgetting misses), motivated interpretation, and the cognitive biases that flourish in emotionally charged settings. A well-known meta-analytic critique of the ganzfeld ESP literature concluded that it did not offer a replicable demonstration of psi.
If you want a careful academic overview of the cognitive correlates of paranormal belief, a systematic review reports associations with intuitive thinking styles and several reasoning vulnerabilities.
12. Books about evolutionary psychology, such as Spent by Geoffrey Miller. (See my review: Garth Kroeker: Spent…)
Useful for thinking about status, mating displays, consumption, and the ways our evolved social psychology can drive behavior that we dress up in “rational” language after the fact.
13. 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.
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.
14. Astronomy Today (intro astronomy textbook) and other good introductory astronomy texts.
An intro textbook about astronomy is genuinely thrilling—even just aesthetically (nebulae and galaxies are beautiful). 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.
One small point about human religious behavior, deriving from ancient practice, is the spatial language: “God above.” People sometimes literally look upward. But “up” points in different directions depending on where you are on Earth; and it changes minute by minute as the Earth rotates, orbits the sun, and as the solar system moves through the galaxy. It is a pre-Copernican spatial metaphor, entangled with the older intuition that “up is good, down is bad.”
Of course, “looking upward” is often figurative—but many people do take it quite literally. If one were going to take the gesture literally, it would be just as “valid” to look downward, or inward into one’s own body. You could try to salvage the “up” idea by defining God’s location as “opposite to the orientation of the local gravitational field,” but even that implies God is more located in some places than others. If God is omnipresent, shouldn’t God be as present in the depths of the planet—or in our own bodies—as in the sky?
A related embodied metaphor shows up in some fundamentalist worship styles: people in an entranced state reach forward with their hands during songs or prayer—eyes half-closed, rocking, repeating sacred phrases—emotional intensity magnified by the synchrony of peers. This can be understood as a normal human ecstatic gesture (an ability present in all cultures, with or without religion). But the gesture still implies a spatial location of God—reaching out to take God’s warmth with one’s hands, as though God were physically located just ahead, perhaps in the front of the building.
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. 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. Increasingly, they also point to the scale of human-caused ecological damage—habitat loss, pollution, and the accelerating loss of biodiversity.
2. 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 BBC geology series such as Earth: The Biography (2008). This matters here because many forms of dogmatic faith make specific claims about origins and timescales that simply do not survive contact with the evidence.
3. 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.
4. Alice Roberts’ 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.
5. The Cambridge historian Christopher Clark has made accessible historical work available in lecture/documentary form, including material on European history 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.
6. 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 heliocentrism does. It’s simply a lucid way of seeing how biological systems actually work.
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 and regularities—and those regularities can be studied.
7. 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 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.
There are many examples of charlatanism in religious history and in the 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. That said, it would be unfair (and inaccurate) to imply that everyone who works in these roles is a deliberate fraud. Some may sincerely believe 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.
But 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 behavior), 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.
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—because these beliefs are not literally true. At best they can be understood as a kind of mythic construct: not to be taken as history or physics, but as poetic narrative, figurative teaching, or a focus for moral reflection.
Some dogmatic beliefs may contain wise reflections about morality or justice. But when people treat dogma as literal fact—or as rigid moral law—it often leads to narrow or rigid moral reductionism. Furthermore, some particular religious stories, even if understood as metaphors, can be brutal and totally contradictory to other aspects of the religion’s doctrines, so it can be quite a stretch to find a plausible “beneficial” figurative interpretation.
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.
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.
It is morally superior—and practically necessary—for a person to reason about complex situations beyond simply following an external instruction or fearing punishment. Safety and success in life often depend on being able to think flexibly about moral issues, including resisting instructions from potentially malevolent or unreliable authority figures. Rule-following is not the same thing as conscience. (And in severe antisocial or psychopathic traits, the problem is often not a lack of knowing rules, but a shallowness in guilt, empathy, or concern—one more reason that rule-following alone is not enough.)
Imagine being with someone for whom the main reason they are not assaulting you or stealing from you is strict obedience to an external rule, a scripture passage, or fear of punishment—would you feel comfortable with this person’s character? Deep moral development—the kind most people would want for themselves and require in close relationships—involves reasoning about why an action is right or wrong, balancing desires with social consequences, short-term impulses with long-term outcomes, and recognizing that rare exceptions can exist (for example, stealing medicine to save a starving child). Humans are capable of this kind of moral reasoning irrespective of religious belief, 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 focus on the fragment over the whole is emblematic of the broader failure of dogmatic thinking. By reducing complex, ancient literature to a repository of isolated rules, we trap ourselves in a state of arrested moral development—clinging to the certainty of the 'instruction manual' rather than doing the hard work of empathy and reason. We remain the child obeying the parent out of fear, rather than the adult navigating the world with conscience. When we trade the nuance of reality for the rigidity of dogma, we do not just stunt our own growth; we lay the groundwork for collective intolerance and harm.
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—resigned, defeated—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 a very large fraction of 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 bought tickets and got nothing. As with lotteries, one is not well-advised to build one’s planning—medical, psychological, or moral—around the hope of an exception.
There are also some predictable cognitive and statistical illusions at work here. One is selection bias: the “success 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.
On a slight tangent, there are also poetic references in religious texts to the beauty and serenity of nature—for example, 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” (a 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.
