The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 15: Spirituality & Superstition

Humans have cognitive tendencies that make superstitious beliefs easy to generate—and hard to extinguish. By "spirituality" here I do not mean awe, contemplation, or reverence in a broad sense; I mean the more specific belief that hidden forces—fate, synchronicity, spirits, or nonphysical "energy"—are actively guiding events. Beliefs in spirits, ghosts, magic, luck, or fate are widespread across cultures. The specifics vary wildly—local spirits, protective rituals, sacred objects, gnomes, invisible dangers—but the underlying psychology is similar.

At its root is pattern-seeking. The mind craves meaning, and when the world is uncertain or painful it will often manufacture meaning rather than tolerate ambiguity. This is not a sign of low intelligence; it is ordinary cognition under stress. And it does not stop at pattern. We also read agency into the world, and imagine hidden minds behind ambiguous events. The anthropologist Stewart Guthrie argued that this is the seed of religion itself: we are built to see faces in clouds and a watcher in the rustling grass. If you mistakenly assume that the shadow of a tree branch swaying in the wind is a tiger stalking you, you will still be alive in the morning. But if you mistakenly assume that an actual tiger is just a shadow in the wind, you and your family might not survive the night. A mind tuned that way will find agents everywhere, including where there are none. When people feel a loss of control, the appetite for pattern intensifies—and coincidence is more readily treated as signal. Superstition can be emotionally satisfying precisely because it converts randomness into a story.

Once a few people begin to read events through a "hidden forces" framework, it spreads: it gives language to fear and hope, it confers a sense of specialness, and it offers the pleasure of explanatory closure. Coincidences become "signs." Ambiguous perceptions become "messages." A confusing life becomes a legible plot. A person has a strong feeling—dread, relief, attraction, foreboding—and the mind is tempted to treat that feeling as information about the outer world. A difficult decision feels as though it has been answered by "the universe." A run of bad luck starts to feel orchestrated. The step from "this feels meaningful" to "this is meaningful" is, for most of us, a short one.

And sometimes the belief helps, at least in the short term. A ritual, a talisman, or the conviction that one has "good energy" can reduce anxiety, steady the nerves, and make a person readier to act. In that sense superstition works a little like prayer, or placebo, or a pre-game routine: it changes the person's emotional state, and the changed state can genuinely improve performance or endurance. But—exactly as with the faith healing and the diets earlier in this book—that does not validate the explanation. It shows that belief can move mood, attention, and confidence. It does not show that a mystical force is operating in the background.

When Meaning Hardens into Causation

The trouble begins when a poetic interpretation hardens into a literal theory about reality. At that point there is no longer a harmless sense of wonder; there is a false model of causation. There is still no robust, independently replicated evidence that psychic forces, spirits, or nonphysical "energies" of this sort actually guide events—and there is no good reason to treat a strong feeling of destiny as evidence that destiny is real. Once such feelings are treated as evidence, judgment drifts away from probability, base rate, character, and consequence. A person stays in a bad relationship because it feels "meant to be." Someone avoids effective medical treatment because the illness is thought to be spiritual. Someone takes reckless risks because fate is presumed protective. Life planning gets worse when omens and vibes displace sober attention to what is actually happening.

There is a darker social risk as well. Once people begin to believe that invisible moral or spiritual contamination clings to persons, places, or groups, superstition becomes a license for prejudice. History offers grim examples of what happens when communities weaponize these causal illusions. The early modern European witch crazes, which claimed tens of thousands of lives, were driven in large part by the urge to assign occult causality to illness, infant mortality, crop failure, or misfortune. Medieval blood-libel accusations, and the pogroms—organized mob attacks on a minority—that swept Jewish communities during outbreaks of plague, drew on the same fantasy of hidden contamination: when the Black Death arrived with no visible cause, Jews were accused of poisoning the wells, and thousands were killed across Europe. In Strasbourg, on Valentine's Day 1349, much of the Jewish community was burned alive before the plague had even reached the town.

In parts of sub-Saharan Africa, people with albinism are still hunted, mutilated, and killed for body parts believed to hold ritual power. In modern, everyday life the same pathology is more banal but no less real: a neighbour is said to have "dark energy." A house is called cursed. A child is treated as spiritually tainted. A stranger is felt to be threatening in some occult way rather than simply unfamiliar. Once a group shares such assumptions openly, they stop being private quirks and coalesce into a moral atmosphere in which exclusion, suspicion, and even violence come to feel justified. This is how a private comfort slides into public harm.

Even so, the topic calls for sensitivity, and this is where I want to be careful. For the person immersed in these beliefs, the experience is not frivolous. It feels visceral, self-evident, woven into memory from early life, and reinforced for years by trusted friends, family, charismatic figures, chosen anecdotes, online communities, and a steady diet of "paranormal" documentaries that showcase the apparent hits and quietly discard the misses. When a belief has been stabilized by familiarity, repetition, and community, challenging it feels less like an intellectual correction than like an attack on lived experience. The humane response is not to mock the feeling. The feeling is real. What deserves challenge is the conclusion drawn from it.

As a psychiatrist, I often feel stuck in a state where the only possible response to stories of this type has to be gentle, non-judgmental curiosity. I say "stuck" because I have to withhold a powerful urge within myself to reach for some evidence-based argument that would move the person away from such beliefs. In a sense this entire book is like that, on a larger scale. But I know the argument would not help, so I bite my tongue—and perhaps write a blog article afterward rather than start a clinical debate. Empathy and trust are the more powerful forces, and any real possibility of an evidence-based conversation about these topics takes far more time, empathy, and trust than most of us realize.

A Psychiatric View

From a clinical standpoint, people genuinely differ in their proneness to unusual, mystical, or numinous experience—and this variation is not itself pathology. Some people reliably feel awe, presence, synchronicity, and "spiritual certainty"; others rarely do. The psychologists Auke Tellegen and Gilbert Atkinson gave this trait a name—absorption, the disposition to become deeply immersed in imaginative and perceptual experience—and it is linked to hypnotic susceptibility, vivid felt significance, and openness to anomalous experience.

A useful, imperfect metaphor is that some minds run with higher gain. Turn up the gain on a receiver and faint signals become audible—but so does the static, and past a certain point the receiver begins to pull voices out of pure noise. An absorptive, high-gain mind receives the world vividly and meaningfully, which is a gift; it also runs a greater risk of hearing signal in what is only noise. The brain's salience machinery is part of this story, though it is not reducible to dopamine alone. And this is where the ordinary shades, by degrees, into the clinical. Shitij Kapur's influential account of psychosis describes it as a state of aberrant salience: a dysregulated system stamps neutral events—a passing car, a stranger's glance—with a feeling of intense personal meaning, and the mind, doing what minds do, builds an explanation to fit. The delusion is not a failure of reasoning so much as reasoning applied, faithfully, to a feeling of significance that should never have been there.

Frank psychotic delusions are, in a strange way, often easier to help than large-scale systems of false belief. There is usually a more immediate biological cause, and a few weeks or months of medication will often make the delusions recede—sometimes vanishing entirely, without a trace. But beliefs that have grown over a lifetime, braced by community, probably never vanish, even if they can lose some of their grip when the conditions are right.

There is one more thread worth pulling, because it bears on how we treat people who hold these beliefs. Gordon Pennycook and his colleagues have shown that a more analytic cognitive style—the habit of stopping to check an intuition against probability—predicts weaker paranormal and religious belief, and, crucially, it does so even after controlling for raw intelligence, education, age, sex, and politics. It is not that believers are less able. It is that the disposition to interrogate a compelling feeling varies from person to person—and, unlike intelligence, that disposition can be taught. The problem is not a deficient mind; it is an intuition left unchecked, and checking is a skill.

Spirituality and Religion

Many members of organized religions look down on "superstition" and free-floating "spirituality." Yet in psychological terms—at the level of cognitive ingredients—the difference is often one of degree rather than kind. Organized religion formalizes these same human tendencies: it standardizes the stories, professionalizes the interpreters, and binds belief to group identity and obligation. "Spirituality" tends to keep the intuitions while loosening the institutional grip. But both draw on the same human appetite for meaning, comfort, narrative, and relief from uncertainty. The gain is turned up in both sanctuaries; one has simply built more architecture around it.

I think I have a "high gain" mind—not in the way a gifted poet or artist does (I wish I had that kind of talent), but in a way I enjoy. I am easily moved to awe and wonder. In an emotional moment I cry easily. I feel things strongly, and I love unconventional thoughts, which tend to flow freely. But I also seem to have another part of myself that keeps a hand on the amplifier—perhaps I inherited the two from each of my parents, in a way that balances out. And I think balance is the point, for all of us. We cannot, and should not, try to eradicate parts of ourselves; the task is to learn to hold them in some kind of equilibrium.

References

Calin-Jageman, R. J., & Caldwell, T. L. (2014). Replication of the superstition and performance study by Damisch, Stoberock, and Mussweiler (2010). Social Psychology, 45(3), 239–245. https://doi.org/10.1027/1864-9335/a000190

Two high-powered, preregistered attempts to replicate the well-known "lucky ball" golf experiment, in which activating a superstition supposedly improved performance. Neither found any benefit, and a small meta-analysis of the best-designed studies found no effect. Even the appealing claim that superstition helps performance does not survive rigorous testing.

Guthrie, S. E. (1993). Faces in the clouds: A new theory of religion. Oxford University Press.

Argues that religion is rooted in a pervasive human tendency to anthropomorphize—to read human-like agency into wind, shadow, and chance. Guthrie treats this not as a defect but as a sensible perceptual strategy: in an uncertain world, over-detecting agents is safer than missing a real one. His account is the intellectual forerunner of the agency-detection theories of religion later formalized by Justin Barrett and others.

Kapur, S. (2003). Psychosis as a state of aberrant salience: A framework linking biology, phenomenology, and pharmacology in schizophrenia. American Journal of Psychiatry, 160(1), 13–23. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.160.1.13

The landmark aberrant-salience account of psychosis. Kapur proposes that dysregulated dopamine signalling assigns exaggerated significance to neutral events, so that ordinary coincidences come to feel intensely and personally meaningful; delusions are the mind's attempt to explain that misplaced significance. 

Krummenacher, P., Mohr, C., Haker, H., & Brugger, P. (2010). Dopamine, paranormal belief, and the detection of meaningful stimuli. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 22(8), 1670–1681. https://doi.org/10.1162/jocn.2009.21313

A double-blind study using levodopa to probe how dopamine, paranormal belief, and the detection of meaning interact. The results were nuanced and in places counter-intuitive, and the authors are careful not to claim a simple causal chain. There is no simple "dopamine causes belief" story.

Levack, B. P. (2016). The witch-hunt in early modern Europe (4th ed.). Routledge.

The standard scholarly synthesis of the European witch trials of roughly 1450 to 1750. Careful regional accounting yields a consensus estimate near 45,000 executions out of perhaps 100,000 trials—genuinely "tens of thousands," but far below the wildly inflated figures of popular legend. 

Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. (2021). Independent Expert on the enjoyment of human rights by persons with albinism. United Nations. https://www.ohchr.org/en/special-procedures/ie-albinism

The UN mandate documenting the abduction, mutilation, and killing of people with albinism for body parts used in witchcraft-related ritual—more than six hundred reported attacks across some two dozen sub-Saharan African countries over a decade. The mandate and the accompanying Human Rights Council resolution frame these as ongoing, witchcraft-driven human-rights violations.

Pennycook, G., Cheyne, J. A., Seli, P., Koehler, D. J., & Fugelsang, J. A. (2012). Analytic cognitive style predicts religious and paranormal belief. Cognition, 123(3), 335–346. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2012.03.003

Across two studies, a more analytic cognitive style predicted weaker religious and paranormal belief even after controlling for cognitive ability, education, sex, age, and political orientation. Belief tracks thinking style—the disposition to check an intuition—more than raw intelligence, and for the hopeful corollary that such a disposition can be cultivated.

Tellegen, A., & Atkinson, G. (1974). Openness to absorbing and self-altering experiences ("absorption"), a trait related to hypnotic susceptibility. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 83(3), 268–277. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0036681

The paper that introduced "absorption," the stable disposition to become deeply immersed in imaginative and perceptual experience. The trait is repeatedly linked to hypnotic susceptibility, vivid felt significance, and proneness to anomalous experience.

← Chapter 14  |  Contents  |  Chapter 16 →

The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 14: Religion as a Business

We usually say that a church can operate "like a business." But the arrow points the other way. Religion solved the hardest problem in commerce—how to make people loyal, for life, often without paying them—thousands of years before there were corporations, and business has been trying to reverse-engineer it ever since. Companies speak of brand "evangelists," of "converts" and "the faithful"; they build "communities," stage "rituals," and dream of the customer who never checks a competitor. That is religion's vocabulary, borrowed by people who wish they could do what religion does and mostly cannot. So the interesting comparison is not that religion resembles a business. It is that religion is the master technology of human commitment, and business is the imitation.

Marketing has quietly learned from faith. There is branding: symbols worn on clothing, around the neck, stuck onto bumpers. There is loyalty to the brand and suspicion of rival brands. There is outreach and proselytization. And beneath it, an organized financial structure with work to be done and an aim of retaining members, expanding the fold, eliciting contributions of money and labour, and keeping morale high. Any marketing department would recognize the org chart. Few could reproduce the devotion.

Consider what business would most like to copy and can't: the initiation. In tribal, high-commitment groups—fraternities are the benign example, gangs the dark one—entry is often made deliberately costly. In a classic 1959 experiment, Elliot Aronson and Judson Mills found that people who endured a more embarrassing initiation to join a group afterward rated it more highly, not less. The mind justifies what it paid to enter; this is effort justification, and Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance explains why. Religions have always known it in practice. Prospective members are vetted, sit through instruction, and then make solemn, public commitments in a ritual—a wedding to the community. No loyalty program can manufacture that.

Sometimes the model is not mass-market but luxury. Rather than broad proselytization, the "product" is restricted, and only a select few gain entry. In some traditions you must attain advanced standing—often over years—before you may enter the most sacred buildings or take part in the deepest rituals; sometimes only men may occupy certain roles or spaces. The obstacle is the point. It heightens the allure and selects for people willing to give more time, money, and devotion. If everyone had a Rolex or a Gucci bag it would stop being special; exclusivity is much of what makes a thing feel high-end—and much of what makes an inner circle feel sacred.

Then there is the masterstroke, the one no corporation has ever managed to pull off cleanly: the elevation of belief itself—faith—into a virtue. Belief without evidence is not merely tolerated but praised. Imagine what a company would give for that. Customers would form loyalty to the brand without ever looking too closely at the reviews; doubt could be reframed as weakness, betrayal, or impurity; and the most credulous buyers would be the most honoured, their standing rising in proportion to how little they questioned. Businesses attempt versions of this and mostly fail, because a dissatisfied customer can always leave and a competitor is one click away. Religion made not-looking a sacrament.

I have watched a version of this from inside my own profession. At a former workplace, a great deal of effort went into "branding" for mental health, involving a great deal of money; later came the fancy new buildings and offices. But the heart of the work does not require branding, or grand architecture, or a marketing staff, or layers of corporate management. None of it was what a frightened person in a small room actually needs, which is simply to be listened to, and to be able to come back.

The same misplacement of substance appears in religion on a far grander scale, and the numbers can be staggering. Across history and around the world, religious institutions have amassed extraordinary wealth—in land, buildings, art, and investments—on a scale hard to square with the ordinary believer's image of humble stewardship. The Roman Catholic Church holds a patrimony of cathedrals, real estate, and priceless art accumulated over nearly two millennia; the Church of England is among the largest landowners in Britain; and a good many megachurches and television ministries have made their founders very rich. Precise figures are often impossible to obtain, because most religious bodies are under no obligation to disclose them—which is part of the point. The clearest documented case is recent, and it became clear only because the law forced it into the open: in 2023 the Securities and Exchange Commission penalized the investment arm of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Ensign Peak Advisors, for using shell companies to obscure an equity portfolio that public filings put at roughly thirty-two to thirty-eight billion dollars; a whistleblower had earlier estimated the fund at close to a hundred billion. It stands as an illustration rather than an outlier—the one instance where the curtain happened to be pulled back. And much of this wealth, across traditions, operates with significant tax advantage. In the United States, churches are automatically tax-exempt and, uniquely among nonprofits, need not file the public disclosures other charities must. In Canada, registered charities, many of them religious, pay no income tax while registered.

The sharpest warnings about all of this come from inside religion itself. The most famous is the line attributed to Jesus, and preserved in all three Synoptic Gospels: "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." It is worth sitting with the irony. The institution that built the near-hundred-billion-dollar fund venerates a founder who owned nothing, praised the poor, and told the rich they would struggle to enter heaven at all. That gap—between the carpenter of the Gospels and the portfolio in the filings—is not an argument against faith. It is a warning from inside the tradition, aimed by its own founder at exactly what was later built in his name. The camel and the needle were meant for precisely this.

References

Aronson, E., & Mills, J. (1959). The effect of severity of initiation on liking for a group. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 59(2), 177–181. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0047195

The classic effort-justification experiment: young women who underwent a more embarrassing initiation in order to join a discussion group afterward rated the group more favourably than those admitted easily. The result is counterintuitive—the higher the price of entry, the greater the reported liking—and it has been replicated many times since. 

Canada Revenue Agency. (n.d.). Charities and giving. Government of Canada. https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/charities-giving.html

The federal agency's guidance on the tax treatment of registered charities, a category that includes a large share of Canadian religious organizations. Registered charities pay no income tax while registered and may issue tax-receipted donations, though they must file an annual T3010 information return. 

Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford University Press.

The founding statement of cognitive dissonance theory: the mind experiences discomfort when its beliefs and actions conflict, and works to reduce that discomfort, often by adjusting the belief. Applied to group membership, it is the mechanism beneath effort justification—having sacrificed to join, a person values the group more highly to make the sacrifice feel worthwhile. 

Internal Revenue Service. (n.d.). Tax guide for churches and religious organizations (Publication 1828). U.S. Department of the Treasury. https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p1828.pdf

The federal tax guide for religious organizations in the United States. It explains that churches are automatically recognized as tax-exempt under §501(c)(3) without having to apply, and that they are uniquely exempt, among nonprofits, from filing the annual Form 990 that would otherwise make their finances public. 

U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. (2023, February 21). SEC charges the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its investment management company for disclosure failures and misstated filings (Press Release No. 2023-35). https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2023-35

The regulatory action behind this chapter's documented example of religious wealth. The SEC found that Ensign Peak Advisors, the investment arm of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, had used shell companies to obscure an equity portfolio reported in public filings at roughly thirty-two to thirty-eight billion dollars; a 2019 whistleblower complaint and subsequent reporting placed the total fund near a hundred billion. 

The saying "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God" appears in all three Synoptic Gospels: Matthew 19:24, Mark 10:25, and Luke 18:25.

← Chapter 13 | Contents | Chapter 15 →

The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 13: to be a scholar, you had to study theology

For long stretches of European history, many able people who wanted to study the biggest questions ended up studying religion. That was not always because religion had the best answers. Often it was because religious institutions controlled much of the schooling, the books, and the road to public influence. If you wanted literacy, training, status, or a respected voice in your community, religion was often the main gate you had to pass through.

Before the printing press, and before secular universities became common, the Church controlled many of the material conditions of scholarship: the copying of books, access to manuscripts, and much of the economic support that let a person read, write, and think rather than spend life in manual labour. In practice, to be a scholar was to be funded, housed, trained, or at least tolerated by a religious institution. That inevitably shaped what could be said, what could be explored, and how far a person could go.

This created a built-in bias. It was not just that highly capable people happened to like theology; it was that theology sat near the centre of educated life. If you wanted mentors, libraries, credentials, or a place to teach and write, you often had to work inside a religious setting, or at least learn to speak its language. In that kind of system, religion could borrow prestige from the educated people who passed through it.

When people saw a brilliant, educated, generous person who was also a priest, minister, or theologian, the inference was almost irresistible: if someone this thoughtful believes it, the religion itself must be true. But that does not follow. A person can be wise, morally serious, and deeply useful to society while still believing things that are false. Learning and talent do not make a doctrine true.

I am reminded of the profession I trained in myself. Psychiatrists of previous generations were educated in an environment where psychoanalysis was king. If you wanted to be a psychiatrist, you had to learn psychoanalytic theory, and perhaps even undergo psychoanalysis yourself; if you did not, you risked being seen as an outsider and suffering a professional disadvantage. The pendulum has since swung the other way, and biological psychiatry is the new king. Express guarded opinions about psychopharmacology, or emphasize longer-term psychotherapy rather than medication management, and you may suffer a similar disadvantage today. The bias runs deeper still: many thoughtful people would not want to enter psychiatry in the first place if they understood the profession to be dominated by writing prescriptions rather than offering therapy. So the field quietly fills with applicants and new members who fit the current orthodoxy—and then that orthodoxy looks, from the outside, like the consensus of the best minds, when in fact it is partly the product of who was drawn in and who was filtered out.

That filter has run through all of intellectual history, and it bends the record itself. In earlier centuries, if you were a serious thinker and openly challenged the religious system, you were not just risking an argument. You could lose your position, your audience, your safety, or even your life. So the historical record is not a fair contest in which every idea had the same chance to survive. People who stayed within accepted limits were more likely to keep teaching, keep publishing, and keep being remembered.

There is a famous illustration of the mistake this leads to. During the Second World War, the Allies studied the bombers that came back from raids, mapping the bullet holes to decide where to add armour. The holes clustered on the wings and tail, so that is where reinforcement seemed to belong. The mathematician Abraham Wald saw what everyone else had missed: they were only looking at the planes that returned. The holes showed where a bomber could be hit and still fly home. The places with no holes—the engines, the cockpit—were exactly where the missing planes had been struck, and those planes were not in the sample, because they were at the bottom of the sea. The armour belonged where the survivors showed no damage at all.

Intellectual history has the same problem, and it is the same filter that shaped my own profession, only vastly larger. We see the scholars who came back from the raid—who stayed inside the lines, kept their posts, and were remembered. We do not see the ones shot down: silenced, exiled, burned, or quietly never permitted to begin. When we notice how many learned people through history were religious, we are counting bullet holes on the planes that landed. The believers are the survivors. The doubters are the missing data.

Two famous cases show the boundary being enforced. Galileo used a telescope to study the sky and argued publicly that Earth moved around the Sun. Today that sounds ordinary; in his time it crossed powerful religious limits. He was put on trial in 1633 and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. Whatever one thinks about the details of the case, one lesson is clear: a scholar's standing and safety could depend on not going too far beyond approved belief.
Giordano Bruno, a Dominican friar and philosopher, shows a different version of the same pattern, though his case is often misremembered. Bruno did hold radical cosmological views—an infinite universe, countless inhabited worlds—but he was burned in Rome in 1600 chiefly for theological heresy: he had denied the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, and other core doctrines. The popular image of Bruno as the first martyr for science is therefore misleading; his astronomy was a secondary matter beside his religious unorthodoxy. But that correction, far from weakening the point, sharpens it. What killed Bruno was not a scientific theory but the crossing of religious boundaries—and it is precisely the power to set and enforce those boundaries, on pain of death, that shaped which ideas could be voiced and which thinkers survived to be remembered.

This pressure was never limited to astronomy. Reformers, translators, and other dissidents were punished severely in different times and places. Even when the issue was not a new scientific discovery, the deeper conflict was often the same: who gets to define truth, and what happens to you if you say otherwise in public?

Nor was Europe unique. In the Middle East and the wider Islamic world, serious learning often grew around mosques, religious schools, and scholars of law and scripture. In China, higher learning and public advancement depended on mastery of the Confucian classics and success in the imperial examination system. In India too, advanced learning grew around religious traditions, temple settings, monasteries, and learned priestly circles. The details differed from place to place, but the larger point holds: when one tradition controls the road to education and status, its ideas start to look far more intellectually established than they really are.

To be fair, religious institutions also preserved and passed on learning. They copied books, trained students, and kept scholarship alive through centuries when little else did; several of the world's great universities began in religious settings and still carry that identity. The story is not simple—but that is exactly why the bias is easy to miss. When the same institution both protects learning and sets the limits of belief, educated people will be overrepresented inside that system, and their presence will look like an endorsement.

You can still see a milder version today. Many excellent colleges and universities are sponsored by religious organizations and maintain very high academic standards, sometimes while also requiring students to take courses in religion, attend chapel, or absorb a moral outlook shaped by a faith tradition. The academic strength is real; so is the packaging. Strong education and religious commitment arrive bound together, and the binding makes the religion look more intellectually confirmed than it is.

There is a second modern echo, and it is closer to home. In many religious schools, seminaries, tightly bound communities, and other closed systems—including, in their own secular way, some professions and institutions—career paths and social acceptance can still depend on affirming the right beliefs. The penalties are softer now: not execution, but loss of job, status, community, and belonging. The pattern is the same. A belief system becomes part of the ticket into a valued world, and once it does, it will again look as though the best minds endorse it—when in truth some of the critics have left, gone quiet, or been pushed out.

So when we survey the long history of learning and notice how much of it was religious, we should remember what we are looking at. It is a photograph of the planes that came back. The missing ones—the heretics who were burned, the doubters who stayed silent, the students who never enrolled, and, in my own profession, the healers who would have practiced differently had the gate been shaped otherwise—left no holes for us to count. The correlation between deep learning and religious belief is real. It is just not the evidence for religion it appears to be.

References

de Ridder-Symoens, H. (Ed.). (1992). A history of the university in Europe: Vol. 1. Universities in the Middle Ages. Cambridge University Press.

The authoritative scholarly history of the medieval university, tracing how the institution that became the home of Western higher learning grew out of church and cathedral schools. It documents the Church's central role in the material conditions of scholarship—funding, libraries, licensing, and the right to teach. For centuries, the road to serious education ran through religious institutions.

Elman, B. A. (2000). A cultural history of civil examinations in late imperial China. University of California Press.

A definitive study of the civil examination system that, from 1315 to 1905, controlled access to office and status in imperial China by testing mastery of the Confucian classics. Elman shows how a single canonical tradition became the gateway to advancement, shaping what educated people studied and believed. 

Grant, E. (1996). The foundations of modern science in the Middle Ages: Their religious, institutional, and intellectual contexts. Cambridge University Press.

An argument that the religious and institutional conditions of the medieval West—above all the university, established around 1200—actively enabled rather than merely tolerated the later rise of science. Grant's account complicates any simple "conflict" story by showing the Church as a preserver and organizer of learning. The same institutions that set the limits of belief also kept scholarship alive.

Makdisi, G. (1981). The rise of colleges: Institutions of learning in Islam and the West. Edinburgh University Press.

A comparative history of the madrasa and the other institutions of medieval Islamic learning, centred on law and scripture, and their parallels with the later Western college. Makdisi traces how advanced learning in the Islamic world grew around religious foundations. 

Mangel, M., & Samaniego, F. J. (1984). Abraham Wald's work on aircraft survivability. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 79(386), 259–267. https://doi.org/10.1080/01621459.1984.10478038

The scholarly exposition that recovered Abraham Wald's wartime memoranda on estimating aircraft vulnerability from data on planes that returned. It explains his method for inferring where the missing, downed aircraft had most likely been hit—the reasoning now known as an early and classic treatment of survivorship bias. It is the source for this chapter's central analogy about counting only the survivors.

Numbers, R. L. (Ed.). (2009). Galileo goes to jail and other myths about science and religion. Harvard University Press.

The standard scholarly correction to the "conflict thesis," with specialists dismantling widespread myths one by one—including the claims that Galileo was imprisoned and tortured, that Bruno was the first martyr for science, and that the medieval Church suppressed scientific inquiry. 

Rowland, I. D. (2008). Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/heretic. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

The standard modern biography of Giordano Bruno, establishing that his condemnation and execution in 1600 turned chiefly on theological heresy—his denial of the Trinity and of Christ's divinity, among other doctrines—rather than on his cosmology. 

Wald, A. (1943). A method of estimating plane vulnerability based on damage of survivors (CRC 432). Statistical Research Group, Columbia University; reprinted 1980, Center for Naval Analyses.

Wald's original wartime memoranda, developed at the Statistical Research Group at Columbia University, presenting a statistical method for estimating which parts of an aircraft were most vulnerable using data only from planes that survived their missions. 

← Chapter 12 | Contents | Chapter 14 →

The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 12: Benefits of Unfounded Belief

"It worked for me."

Those four words may be the hardest thing in medicine to answer, because the person saying them is not lying—they really did improve. And sometimes the thing they improved on is an unfounded, or even fictional, belief system, which means the improvement now feels like proof. This is the self-deception Trivers describes, packaged differently—it's the psychoanalysis problem again: the theory was wrong, and the patients improved anyway.  

For example, some people latch onto an extremely rigorous diet with a spurious rationale, and yet end up stabilizing a prior eating problem, bingeing pattern, or weight problem. Often what makes the diet "work" is not the theory but the frame: the diet becomes a ritual, a commitment device, sometimes even a moral identity. Strong belief in the diet's narrative can increase adherence, especially when it is reinforced by "spiritual" practices, authoritative texts, a charismatic leader, and enthusiastic support from fellow adherents. The resulting improvement may have little to do with the supposed mechanism ("toxins," "energy," "impurity," and the like) and much to do with ordinary behavioural ingredients: reduced ultra-processed food, fewer calories, more routine, more attention to quantities and timing, and stronger social accountability. The distinguishing features of the theory may be fictional, while the behaviour change is real.

This should look familiar. It is Jerome Frank's four elements again, which I set out earlier—the confiding relationship, the healing setting, the theory that explains the suffering, the ritual both parties believe in—with faith consolidating them and a community standing around the whole affair. Some strict diets supply every one of them, in a kitchen. Whether the toxins are real is beside the point; the toxins were never doing the work.

In psychotherapy, patients' early positive expectations are associated with better outcomes, and placebo research shows that ritual and a warm practitioner relationship can produce real symptom change. In some settings, even open-label placebos—interventions people are told are inert—can still help. Benefit does not necessarily require the theory to be true. In some cases it does not even require deception.

It is tempting to treat these forays into unfounded belief as harmless whenever they produce visible gains. But there is a dark side, and much of it is similar to religion's dark side. Some dietary regimens are medically dangerous; some aggravate eating disorders; and some cultivate a loyalty to the framework that discourages critical thinking. Social media can intensify the problem, especially when health-focused communities reward purity, rigidity, and bodily control.

When a person's identity becomes fused with a belief system, they may reject better treatments even when those treatments are clearly indicated—especially if a setback is interpreted as evidence of insufficient "faith," insufficient purity, or insufficient devotion. This is the same closed loop I described with faith healing, where the person who is not cured is left to conclude that they did not believe hard enough. The harms here are not merely theoretical. In patients with curable cancers, complementary medicine use has been associated with greater refusal of conventional treatment and worse survival, with the excess mortality appearing to be mediated by delay or refusal of effective care.

These frameworks also often come packaged with community. People who join one cluster of unusual health beliefs can sometimes be pulled, by social gravity, into neighbouring clusters: new spiritual doctrines, anti-vaccine attitudes, conspiratorial styles of explanation, and monetized ecosystems of coaching, supplements, retreats, and memberships. The pattern is not inevitable, but it is real enough to take seriously.

We mostly hear from the success stories. The people for whom the diet failed, or harmed them, or simply became an expensive obsession, rarely become public evangelists. The community's narrative therefore skews toward "miracles," while the quiet attrition and collateral damage remain largely invisible.

Finally, just as in religions, the next step is often proselytizing. People who believe they have found salvation—whether dietary, medical, or spiritual—tend to recruit. They may pressure friends and family to "convert," and disparage outsiders as ignorant, impure, or closed-minded. In the context of fad diets and alternative medicine, that can do real harm to public health.

So the point is not that unfounded belief never helps. It often does—but it helps through the same common human machinery that makes religion work: structure, community, ritual, meaning, and the confident expectation of a cure. And it smuggles in risks that are easy to deny and hard to reverse once the belief has become an emblem of belonging. The deepest problem is the one we started with: the benefit is real, and it gets misread as proof that the belief was true all along. It never was—and it never had to be.

References

Constantino, M. J., Vîslă, A., Coyne, A. E., & Boswell, J. F. (2018). A meta-analysis of the association between patients' early treatment outcome expectation and their posttreatment outcomes. Psychotherapy, 55(4), 473–485. https://doi.org/10.1037/pst0000169

A meta-analysis pooling many clinical samples, finding that patients who begin therapy with more optimistic expectations about their treatment tend to achieve modestly better outcomes. The association is consistent, though not large. It is one of the more direct pieces of evidence that expectancy is an active ingredient rather than a bystander.

Johnson, S. B., Park, H. S., Gross, C. P., & Yu, J. B. (2018). Complementary medicine, refusal of conventional cancer therapy, and survival among patients with curable cancers. JAMA Oncology, 4(10), 1375–1381. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamaoncol.2018.2487

A cohort study of patients with four curable cancers—breast, prostate, lung, and colorectal—finding that those who used complementary medicine were more likely to refuse at least one component of proven conventional treatment, and had roughly double the risk of death. The excess mortality was statistically mediated by that refusal. The authors are careful to note that the data show what the refusal cost, not why patients refused.

Kaptchuk, T. J., Kelley, J. M., Conboy, L. A., Davis, R. B., Kerr, C. E., Jacobson, E. E., Kirsch, I., Schyner, R. N., Nam, B. H., Nguyen, L. T., Park, M., Rivers, A. L., McManus, C., Kokkotou, E., Drossman, D. A., Goldman, P., & Lembo, A. J. (2008). Components of placebo effect: Randomised controlled trial in patients with irritable bowel syndrome. BMJ, 336(7651), 999–1003. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.39524.439618.25

A randomized controlled trial in irritable bowel syndrome that experimentally separates the placebo response into three layers: assessment and observation, a therapeutic ritual, and a warm, attentive patient–practitioner relationship. Each layer added incremental symptom relief, with the relationship contributing the most. Ritual and relationship do real work independent of any specific mechanism.

Kaptchuk, T. J., Friedlander, E., Kelley, J. M., Sanchez, M. N., Kokkotou, E., Singer, J. P., Kowalczykowski, M., Miller, F. G., Kirsch, I., & Lembo, A. J. (2010). Placebos without deception: A randomized controlled trial in irritable bowel syndrome. PLoS ONE, 5(12), e15591. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0015591

A randomized controlled trial testing "open-label" placebos—pills the patients were explicitly told were inert and contained no active medication. Even so, the placebo group improved more than those given no treatment at all. The result suggests that the benefit of ritual and expectation need not require deception, which complicates any simple account of what a placebo is.

Trivers, R. (2011). The folly of fools: The logic of deceit and self-deception in human life. Basic Books.

An evolutionary theory of deception and self-deception, arguing that the most effective deception often begins with deceiving oneself, because sincere belief makes the performance more convincing. A chapter applies the logic directly to religion. It explains why a genuinely felt benefit hardens so readily into the conviction that the underlying theory must be true.

Ward, C., & Voas, D. (2011). The emergence of conspirituality. Journal of Contemporary Religion, 26(1), 103–121. https://doi.org/10.1080/13537903.2011.539846

The paper that coined the term "conspirituality" for the convergence of alternative spirituality and wellness culture with conspiracy belief. The authors trace how these once-separate worlds increasingly overlap, particularly online. Joining one cluster of unusual health beliefs can pull a person toward neighbouring ones.

← Chapter 11 | Contents | Chapter 13 →

The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 11: Evolution

In elementary school and high school, I never heard a science teacher mumble a word about evolutionary theory, much less introduce a lesson about it. The church community I grew up in would not touch this issue, except perhaps to condemn it with furrowed brows. Even in university at the time, in the late 80s, evolution was left out of my introductory biology class.

I am so grateful to have discovered evolutionary biology, mostly on my own in my early 20s. It reminded me of studying astronomy or physics or mathematics—there is an awe and wonder that comes from understanding how the universe is made, and another layer that comes from appreciating the brilliant reasoning that allowed us to understand the formation of stars, the laws of motion, and the origins of all life on Earth.

It's understandable why my church elders were silent: evolution explains the origins and diversification of life in a way that directly contradicts literal religious or mythological accounts of creation. It is certainly possible to remain religious while accepting evolution—many people do—but for some believers, evolutionary biology feels like an unacceptable affront to faith, because it replaces a story of intentional design with a story of natural processes unfolding over vast time.

There are experts in evolutionary science who can explain this far better than I can. Still, I want to set aside space for it in my own voice, because the basic logic is not hard to understand, the evidence is overwhelming, and the emotional resistance to it often has very little to do with evidence and a great deal to do with identity, belonging, and sacred narrative—topics I have already been discussing.

What follows is a tour through the core mechanism of natural selection, a few common misunderstandings, the idea of speciation, and then several side corridors that matter for this essay: cultural evolution, sexual selection, and the uncomfortable fact that even religiosity itself is shaped not only by culture, but also by temperament, inheritance, and biology.

Selection

Natural selection is the central guiding principle of evolutionary theory. The logic is profoundly simple. It requires only that we accept three basic facts:

1) Organisms vary (physically, physiologically, behaviourally).

2) Some variation is heritable (traits are influenced by DNA, even though environment matters enormously too).

3) Some traits affect reproductive success—not in a morally loaded sense of “deserving,” but in the literal sense that some variants leave more surviving offspring than others.

If a heritable trait increases the probability of leaving more surviving offspring in a particular environment, then over generations the population will contain more of that trait. If a trait reduces reproductive success, it tends to diminish. That’s it—natural selection is differential survival and reproduction acting on inherited variation, repeated over time.

You can see the basic logic everywhere, from selective breeding in crops and animals (“artificial selection”), to antibiotic resistance in microbes, to the obvious family resemblance in both physical and psychological traits among human relatives. None of this requires the belief that genes are the only cause of traits. It requires only the admission that heredity is a major contributor. A point worth emphasizing, because it is often misunderstood, is that natural selection is not about “improvement” in any moral or progressive sense. It is simply a filter that favours whatever works well enough in a local environment at a given time.

Mutation

DNA replication is highly accurate, but not perfect. Across generations there are small changes—mutations—introduced into genetic material. “Mutation” here does not mean “bad.” It simply means “change.” Most mutations are neutral, many are harmful, and a few are beneficial in a given environment. Sexual reproduction adds still more variation by shuffling existing variants into new combinations, so evolution does not work only with brand-new mutations but also with new mixes of old genetic material.

Mutations do not happen because the organism needs them. A bacterium under stress does not somehow produce the exact helpful mutation it would most like to have. At the deepest level, whether a particular copying error happens in a particular cell at a particular moment is still a fundamentally accidental event. But that does not mean every part of the genome is equally likely to change. Some kinds of DNA changes happen more often than others, and some parts of the genome have a higher probability of experiencing mutations than others. Mutation is fundamentally random in origin, but statistically biased in pattern, and those biases affect what raw material natural selection gets to work with.

When small genetic changes happen to produce a trait that improves survival or reproduction in a particular environment—say, a slightly different beak shape that lets a bird get food more efficiently—those variants will, on average, become more common. They become more common for a very simple reason: the creatures carrying the useful variant survive better and leave more offspring. Over many generations, the accumulation of such changes can produce substantial transformations, including changes in complex organs and behaviours. Darwin’s finches in the Galápagos remain a famous entry point into this idea because long-term field work and later genetic work showed how ecological pressures can shape beak traits across populations.

The Time Scale of Evolution

One reason evolution feels counterintuitive is that large organisms reproduce slowly relative to a human life. Big evolutionary changes can take thousands or millions of years, just as major geological or astronomical processes do. We do not watch a canyon form in a single afternoon, and we do not watch a star age in real time, but the evidence for those processes is still decisive. Evolution is similar: long processes are inferred from converging lines of evidence. Fossils are one line of evidence—imperfect, but immensely powerful. Fossilization is rare and biased toward certain environments and tissues, so the record will always be incomplete. Still, the overall pattern—order in time, branching diversification, and transitional forms—fits evolutionary predictions very well. Comparative anatomy, fossils, biogeography, embryology, and genetics all point to the same branching story.

Common Ancestry and Cousins

A cliché misunderstanding goes like this: “Evolution says humans descended from chimpanzees.” That is not what evolutionary biology claims. Humans and chimpanzees are not ancestor and descendant; they are cousins. And “cousin” is not just a metaphor here. It is literally the right genealogical idea: two living lineages sharing an older common ancestor. In ordinary family language, we talk about first cousins or second cousins. Chimpanzees are obviously not that kind of close cousin; if one insisted on stretching the family language into absurd distances, they would be something like our three-hundred-thousandth cousins. Current genetic evidence places the human–chimpanzee split on the order of about 6 million years ago.

The same logic generalizes outward. Every living thing on Earth is, in the broad genealogical sense, our cousin. For me, this is not depressing at all. It is a source of awe—a kind of cosmic kinship. If a reader wants a visual sense of this, it is worth looking up one of the modern phylogenetic tree charts online, such as OneZoom. The exact dates of particular branching points are still being refined, but the branching structure itself is already known very well. And the scale is staggering. Humans and mice last shared a common ancestor around 90 million years ago. Mammals and birds last shared a common ancestor on the order of 310 million years ago. Humans and fish share a common ancestor on the order of 430 to 450 million years ago. We are talking about tens to hundreds of millions of years, not a few thousand.

Speciation

Over the short term, evolution often looks like shifting trait frequencies within a species. Over the long term, divergence can accumulate until populations become reproductively isolated—meaning they can no longer interbreed successfully under natural conditions. That is speciation.

Speciation is not always a sharp on/off switch. In nature it often behaves more like a continuum. The Ensatina salamander example is a real case, and it is useful because it makes that idea vivid. Around California’s Central Valley, populations of these salamanders spread in a rough loop. Neighbouring populations along the loop can still interbreed with the populations beside them. But by the time the two far ends of the loop meet again in Southern California, they have changed enough that they no longer interbreed successfully with each other, or do so only rarely. A simple analogy would be a circle of people, each speaking a dialect just a little different from the dialect of the person next to them. Each person can understand the neighbours on either side, but the person across the circle sounds incomprehensible. Ring species work something like that, except the differences are genetic and reproductive rather than linguistic. That is the point: species boundaries can emerge gradually, not by magic and not all at once.

One thing I want to state explicitly, because people often get confused here: even if a behaviour or trait has evolved, that does not mean it is morally right, or that we should accept it. Evolution describes how traits spread. It does not tell us what we ought to value.

Compromise, Not Perfect Design

Evolution also does not produce perfect design. It modifies what already exists. That is why living bodies so often look less like clean engineering and more like a history of workable compromise. Humans are full of such compromises. In adult humans, the passage for food and the passage for air share anatomy in the throat, which is one reason choking is even possible. Our spines and backs also show the costs of walking upright. The human spine has an S-shape that helps us balance over our hips and walk efficiently on two legs, but it also turns a structure inherited from four-legged ancestors into a vertically loaded column. The result is chronic stress on the lower back, high rates of disc degeneration, herniated discs, sciatica, and persistent back pain. Human childbirth is unusually difficult because pelvic form, fetal growth, and the evolution of large brains create a tight compromise. It is not as though the body is simply poorly designed. The point is that evolution works with inherited materials and trade-offs, not with fresh blueprints.

The vertebrate eye is another striking example. The retina is effectively wired backward: light has to pass through layers of neural tissue before it reaches the photoreceptors. Where the optic nerve exits the eye there is a literal blind spot, because that patch contains no photoreceptors. And because light must travel through the retinal layers first, the vertebrate eye needs compensatory tricks just to reduce scattering and preserve image quality. Müller cells help act like optical fibers to guide light through this awkward arrangement. The design also forces a trade-off between a clear optical path and the blood supply the retina needs. The system works, but it is hardly what a tidy engineer would draw from scratch. It also comes with structural vulnerabilities: the retina can detach, and when it does, vision can be permanently damaged. The octopus, whose camera eye evolved independently, ended up with a more direct setup. Its retina is everted rather than inverted, so the nerve fibers are routed behind the photoreceptors and there is no comparable blind spot.

Our jaws and teeth tell a similar story. Over time, human faces and jaws have become smaller without tooth size shrinking in perfect proportion. The result is a mismatch between tooth size and available arch space. Softer and more processed diets appear to worsen the problem by reducing the chewing demands that help stimulate jaw growth. As a result, many modern humans grow jaws that are simply too small for the full dental package they still carry, leading to orthodontic problems such as crooked teeth, and impacted wisdom teeth.

The broader point for me is simple: evolved traits are not always functionally ideal. Some have to be restrained, some have to be accommodated, and some have to be counterbalanced by culture. If we want to become more humane, we need rules, norms, education, medicine, and institutions that limit certain inherited tendencies, compensate for the problems they create, and cultivate better ones.

Cultural Evolution

A parallel kind of evolutionary logic shows up in culture. Dawkins coined the term “meme” for cultural units that replicate, but the broader point matters more than the label. Ideas, phrases, rituals, fashions, and institutions can spread, vary, compete, split, and disappear.

Language evolution is a very good example. Languages branch and drift. Over time, groups can become mutually unintelligible—they become different language “species.” Linguists can reconstruct family trees and infer common ancestors in ways that are strikingly analogous to biology. Proto-Indo-European—the distant ancestor of languages as varied as English, German, Greek, Russian, Persian, and Hindi—existed about six to eight thousand years ago. English, German, and Dutch are much closer cousins inside the Germanic family, with a common ancestor a little over two thousand years ago. French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian are cousin languages that began diverging from Latin roughly fifteen hundred to two thousand years ago. And the same logic extends beyond Europe. Mandarin and Cantonese are also cousins. Their shared recognizable ancestor lies in Middle Chinese, something over a thousand years in the past. What begins as a dialect can, given enough time and separation, harden into a clearly distinct language.

Language divergence does not require millennia only. Some changes become obvious in just the last few centuries. Afrikaans, for example, diverged from colonial Dutch over roughly the last three to four hundred years after Dutch settlement at the Cape in 1652. Even before a speech form is officially labelled a separate language, strong regional varieties can become difficult for outsiders to follow. There are strong accents within Canada, such as Newfoundland English, that can be difficult for other Canadians to understand. Mutual understanding can erode gradually long before people agree on where to draw the boundary.

While Mandarin and Cantonese are cousins, English and Mandarin are not. As I've been learning Mandarin these past few years, I've discovered what it's like to appreciate a language that shares no traceable ancestry with English at all. Somewhere far enough back there probably is a common ancestor—the ancestors of every non-African population left Africa in a single wave around sixty thousand years ago, and every human population has language. But we will never find it. The comparative method reaches back perhaps eight thousand years before the trail goes cold, because words are not copied like genes; they are replaced, one by one, until nothing recognizable survives. This is where the analogy to biology breaks. Life keeps its records in a molecule that copies itself faithfully for billions of years. Language has no direct record at all before the age of writing, and it evolves so quickly that it erases its own history.

Religions also behave this way. Doctrines split. Schisms occur. New denominations form. We see this clearly in Christianity: the East–West Schism of 1054 formalized the great split between Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christianity; the Reformation is conventionally dated to 1517; and those Protestant branches splintered further into Lutherans, Calvinists, Anabaptists, Anglicans, Methodists, Baptists, Pentecostals, and countless smaller groups. This fragmentation is not just ancient history. In the United Methodist Church, more than 7,600 U.S. congregations left between 2019 and the end of 2023, roughly a quarter of the denomination’s earlier U.S. total.

Buddhism diversified too. One line of early Buddhism led to Theravada, while Mahayana arose later as another major descendant branch around the beginning of the Common Era. Islam experienced its defining Sunni–Shia split in the struggles over succession after Muhammad’s death. The family-tree metaphor is not perfect, but it is illuminating: religions do not descend from heaven as finished products. They branch, drift, quarrel, and split inside history.

Psychologically, that has an important implication: people often treat their own local, historically contingent version of a faith as if it were timeless and universal, when in reality it carries the fingerprints of geography, conflict, institutions, inheritance, and politics.

Sexual Selection

Another important evolutionary idea is sexual selection: traits can spread not because they help survival directly, but because they affect mating success. The peacock’s tail is the classic case—beautiful, costly, cumbersome, and yet selected because it becomes desirable within the mating preferences of the species. Darwin understood that biology is not only about staying alive long enough to reproduce; it is also about courtship, display, preference, and attraction. Richard Prum has argued, persuasively in my view, that sexual selection can include a genuinely esthetic component: preferences themselves can become evolutionary forces, and traits can spread because they are found attractive, not merely because they advertise some practical advantage.

None of which makes us peacocks. But human mate choice does attend to looks, voice, movement, confidence, style, humour, conversation, and perhaps aspects of intelligence itself. Some theorists—notably Geoffrey Miller—have argued that traits such as humour, creativity, artistry, music, and parts of intelligence may have been shaped at least partly by sexual selection because they function as displays: they can signal mental agility, creativity, or the ability to hold another person’s attention. The evidence is mixed and the details are debated, but the idea is serious. 

Temperament, Inheritance, and Religion

Religiosity itself is not only cultural. Which particular religious group a person belongs to is largely a cultural and family-transmitted matter. But the broader tendency to be religious at all—to find religion important, compelling, consoling, or identity-defining—shows a meaningful inherited component. Twin research repeatedly suggests that adult religiosity has a moderate hereditary component, but the size depends a great deal on what exactly is being measured. Broadly speaking, estimates often land from the high 20s into the low 60s. More outward or socially enforced measures tend to sit lower, while more inward, identity-heavy, or conversion-like dimensions can sit higher. And when researchers say that some dimension of religiosity has a heritability of 60%, they do not mean that 60% of one person’s religion is “caused by genes.” They mean that, in the population being studied, about 60% of the variability between people on that trait is statistically associated with genetic variability.

What matters more here than raw ability is cognitive style. Some people are more comfortable sitting with analytical doubt and ambiguity; others are more drawn to certainty, authority, and the reassurance of a shared communal answer. Neither style is a measure of intelligence or its absence. (Meta-analyses do report a modest average negative association between intelligence-test scores and religiosity, but the effect is small, appears to have weakened over time, is substantially explained by education, and tells us nothing about any individual believer—a great many brilliant people are religious.)

A trait dimension that is relevant here is schizotypy—not a disorder, but a normal spectrum of personality involving vivid imagination, unusual perceptions, openness to magical ideas, and a strong tendency to find patterns. Most religious people sit nowhere near the high end of it. But someone who is more prone to unusual inner experiences, and to sensing hidden connections, may be more likely to interpret those experiences as messages, revelations, or signs coming from outside the self. Schizotypy itself appears to be moderately heritable, often estimated in roughly the 30% to 50% range, and higher levels of its unusual-experiences dimension are repeatedly associated with stronger paranormal belief.

Moral psychology belongs here too. As the psychologist Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues have documented, some people are more temperamentally drawn to moral themes like loyalty, authority, and purity; others prioritize harm reduction and fairness more strongly. These inclinations appear to be at least partly heritable as well, though the size of that effect is debated. Religions, especially organized and more traditional ones, tend to be associated with stronger emphasis on loyalty, authority, and purity, with less emphasis on harm reduction and fairness. That is one reason some people feel deeply at home in religious cultures while others experience them as alienating.

None of this makes religiosity a defect or a symptom. It makes it one more dimension of the ordinary variation in human temperament—as deeply rooted in our nature as personality, taste, or political disposition. That, in a sense, is the deepest point of this chapter: the religious impulse is not an alien intrusion into human life but a natural product of the same evolutionary and developmental forces that shaped everything else about us.

Conclusion

Once a person really absorbs the logic and evidence for evolution, as I did in my early 20s and beyond, it becomes difficult to look at literal creation myths in the same way again. For me, this shift does not drain the world of meaning. It opens the door to a deeper, steadier awe: reverence for reality as it actually is.

References

Alford, J. R., Funk, C. L., & Hibbing, J. R. (2005). Are political orientations genetically transmitted? American Political Science Review, 99(2), 153–167. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055405051579

A landmark twin study, drawing on more than ten thousand twin pairs, showing that political and social attitudes carry a substantial heritable component while party identification does not. The pattern mirrors what has been found for religion: the broad disposition is partly inherited, but the particular affiliation is learned within the family. It helped launch the study of the genetics of political temperament.

Claridge, G. (Ed.). (1997). Schizotypy: Implications for illness and health. Oxford University Press.

The standard scholarly treatment of schizotypy as a normal, continuously distributed feature of personality rather than a disease category. It assembles the evidence that traits such as unusual perceptions, magical thinking, and openness to anomalous experience vary across the whole population. Some temperaments are more inclined to read inner experiences as messages from beyond the self.

Dagnall, N., Denovan, A., Drinkwater, K., Parker, A., & Clough, P. (2016). Toward a better understanding of the relationship between belief in the paranormal and statistical bias: The potential role of schizotypy. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 1045. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01045

A study of 254 volunteers testing which dimension of schizotypy best predicts paranormal belief, using the Oxford–Liverpool Inventory alongside the Revised Paranormal Belief Scale. Of the four schizotypy factors, Unusual Experiences—perceptual aberrations and magical thinking—showed the strongest association with paranormal belief, while the negative dimension showed none at all. The authors also found that paranormal belief mediated the relationship between unusual experiences and errors in judging randomness, and they caution that self-selection by people already interested in the paranormal may inflate the association.

Dawkins, R. (1976). The selfish gene. Oxford University Press.

The landmark popular statement of the gene-centred view of evolution, which reframes organisms as vehicles built by genes to propagate themselves. It also introduced the term "meme" for a unit of culture that replicates, varies, and competes much as a gene does. 

Franze, K., Grosche, J., Skatchkov, S. N., Schinkinger, S., Foja, C., Schild, D., Uckermann, O., Travis, K., Reichenbach, A., & Guck, J. (2007). Müller cells are living optical fibers in the vertebrate retina. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(20), 8287–8292. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0611180104

A study showing that the vertebrate retina is optically "inverted"—light must pass through layers of neural tissue before reaching the photoreceptors—and that specialized Müller glial cells act as living optical fibers guiding light through this awkward arrangement. The finding is sometimes offered as evidence that the eye is well engineered after all. But the human eye uses a compensatory workaround for a suboptimal inherited design that still leaves a blind spot and a vulnerability to retinal detachment. The octopus's independently evolved eye has neither problem.

Graham, J., Haidt, J., & Nosek, B. A. (2009). Liberals and conservatives rely on different sets of moral foundations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96(5), 1029–1046. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0015141

The core empirical statement of moral-foundations theory, showing that liberals and conservatives draw on partly different moral intuitions: conservatives weight loyalty, authority, and purity more heavily, while liberals emphasize harm and fairness. These "binding" foundations tend to be elevated among the more religious. Some temperaments feel at home in traditional religious cultures while others find them alienating.

Grant, P. R., & Grant, B. R. (2014). 40 years of evolution: Darwin's finches on Daphne Major Island. Princeton University Press.

A synthesis of four decades of field research on the finches of Daphne Major in the Galápagos, the modern successor to Darwin's own observations. Year-by-year measurement shows ecological pressures—drought, food supply, competition—reshaping beak size and shape across generations, evolution observed almost in real time. 

Koenig, L. B., McGue, M., Krueger, R. F., & Bouchard, T. J., Jr. (2005). Genetic and environmental influences on religiousness: Findings for retrospective and current religiousness ratings. Journal of Personality, 73(2), 471–488. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6494.2005.00316.x

A twin study finding that the heritability of religiousness is moderate but strongly age-dependent: genetic influence is weak in childhood, when shared family environment dominates, and rises substantially by adulthood. The result helps explain why estimates of the heritability of religiousness vary so widely across studies. The broad tendency to be religious carries a real inherited component.

Kumar, S., Stecher, G., Suleski, M., & Hedges, S. B. (2017). TimeTree: A resource for timelines, timetrees, and divergence times. Molecular Biology and Evolution, 34(7), 1812–1819. https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msx116

A description of TimeTree, a public database that synthesizes thousands of molecular studies into consensus estimates of when evolutionary lineages diverged. It is the source of the divergence-time figures used in this chapter—human and chimpanzee, human and mouse, mammal and bird, human and fish. The exact dates continue to be refined, but the branching structure they describe is already well established.

Lewis Center for Church Leadership. (2024). Twenty-five percent of churches disaffiliated from the United Methodist Church. Wesley Theological Seminary. https://www.churchleadership.com/leading-ideas/twenty-five-percent-of-churches-disaffiliated-from-the-united-methodist-church/

The final tally of congregations that formally left the United Methodist Church between 2019 and the end of 2023, reporting that roughly a quarter of U.S. congregations disaffiliated. The report also compares the characteristics of departing and remaining churches.

Linney, Y. M., Murray, R. M., Peters, E. R., MacDonald, A. M., Rijsdijk, F., & Sham, P. C. (2003). A quantitative genetic analysis of schizotypal personality traits. Psychological Medicine, 33(5), 803–816. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291703007906

A twin study of 733 female twin pairs using the Oxford–Liverpool Inventory of Feelings and Experiences, the standard instrument for measuring schizotypy across the general population. Heritability was estimated at roughly 50% for most dimensions and lower—about 37%—for delusional ideation, with the best-fitting models attributing the remainder to individual rather than shared family environment. The positive and negative components of schizotypy proved relatively independent genetically, which suggests the trait is not a single inherited quantity but a cluster of partly separate ones.

Miller, G. F. (2000). The mating mind: How sexual choice shaped the evolution of human nature. Doubleday.

An argument that distinctively human traits—humour, art, music, creativity, and aspects of intelligence—were shaped partly by sexual selection, functioning as displays that advertise the qualities of the mind producing them. Miller treats courtship, not only survival, as a major engine of human mental evolution. 

Prum, R. O. (2017). The evolution of beauty: How Darwin's forgotten theory of mate choice shapes the animal world—and us. Doubleday.

A modern revival and defense of Darwin's largely neglected "esthetic" theory of mate choice, which holds that preferences themselves can become evolutionary forces. On this view, a trait such as the peacock's tail spreads because it is found beautiful, not merely because it signals some practical advantage. Biology is not only grim survival calculus but also a matter of attraction, display, and taste.

Rosindell, J., & Harmon, L. J. (2012). OneZoom: A fractal explorer for the tree of life. PLoS Biology, 10(10), e1001406. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001406

A description of OneZoom, an interactive, zoomable map of the evolutionary tree of life designed to make the scale of common ancestry vivid and explorable. It renders the whole of life as a single connected structure a reader can navigate. 

Smith, K. B., Alford, J. R., Hibbing, J. R., Martin, N. G., & Hatemi, P. K. (2017). Intuitive ethics and political orientations: Testing moral foundations as a theory of political ideology. American Journal of Political Science, 61(2), 424–437. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12255

A twin analysis testing whether the individual moral foundations are the stable, heritable dispositions that moral-foundations theory implies. The authors found considerable instability in moral foundations over time and only limited evidence of heritability for the separate foundations. The paper represents one side of an unsettled debate, set here against Zakharin and Bates (2023), which reaches a stronger conclusion.

Wake, D. B. (1997). Incipient species formation in salamanders of the Ensatina complex. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 94(15), 7761–7767. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.94.15.7761

The classic analysis of the Ensatina salamanders as a ring species: populations spread in a loop around California's Central Valley, each able to interbreed with its neighbours, until the two ends of the ring meet in the south and no longer interbreed successfully. It is one of the clearest natural demonstrations that species boundaries can form gradually rather than all at once. 

Zakharin, M., & Bates, T. C. (2023). Testing heritability of moral foundations: Common pathway models support strong heritability for the five moral foundations. European Journal of Personality, 37(4), 485–497. https://doi.org/10.1177/08902070221103957

Two twin studies testing the heritability of the moral foundations with models designed to separate genuine genetic influence from measurement error. Unlike Smith and colleagues, the authors find significant heritability for both the "binding" and the "individualizing" moral domains. The paper represents the other side of the current debate over how far moral temperament is inherited.

Zuckerman, M., Silberman, J., & Hall, J. A. (2013). The relation between intelligence and religiosity: A meta-analysis and some proposed explanations. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 17(4), 325–354. https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868313497266

A meta-analysis of sixty-three studies finding a modest negative association between intelligence and religiosity—a mean correlation of about −.24 for religious belief in the main samples. The authors propose several explanations, including a tendency for more intelligent people to resist conformity and to prefer analytic over intuitive thinking. Later re-analyses report that the association has weakened over time and is substantially explained by education.

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