Science & Health Benefits of Belief in God & Religion | Dr. David DeSteno

**Andrew Huberman** (0:00)
Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.
I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. David DeSteno. Dr. David DeSteno is a professor of psychology at Northeastern University, and an expert on the science of morality, religion, and the health benefits of belief in God and religion. Many people, perhaps most people, actually, view science and religion as mutually exclusive. Today, Dr. DeSteno explains why that view is actually incorrect. And he also shares the data showing that religion and prayer have tremendous mental and physical benefits. We discuss the brain mechanisms that often lead people to embrace faith in God and religion. And we attempt to tackle some of the big questions that often come up around science and religion. For instance, can the existence of God actually be proven? Can it be disproven? If not, how should we think about miracles, the origin of life, and the afterlife? So small questions like that. We also discuss where the line between rituals and suspicions resides, and what distinguishes religions from cults. He also shares that despite the fact that more than 100 new religions surface every year, that was surprising to me, very few are able to last. That was not surprising. He also shares amazing data on when and how people lie for personal gain, and the simple practices that convert liars into truth-tellers and that make people more empathic overall. To be clear, Dr. DeSteno is not promoting religion. He's a scientist and his approach is to study in an unbiased way how belief in God and religious practices can benefit individuals and groups. Thanks to him, it's a remarkable conversation that I also believe is important, especially in this time of rapidly evolving AI technology and social media. I learned a ton speaking with him about science, God and religion, and I'm certain that you will too. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr. David DeSteno. Dr. David DeSteno, welcome.

**David DeSteno** (2:13)
Thanks for having me, Andrew.

**Andrew Huberman** (2:14)
For so many people, the idea of science and religion or science and God are opposite one another, and maybe even mutually antagonistic to one another, depending on who you're talking to and how it's framed. That makes sense, I think, to a lot of people, religious or not, just because on the face of it, science is supposed to be about disproving hypotheses and religion in most people's minds is based on belief and faith in things that are difficult to disprove. Not impossible, perhaps, but difficult to disprove. People go back and forth trying to prove the existence of God, trying to disprove the existence of God. This is going on for many, many thousands of years. To start, I just want to know, what is your view on the compatibility of science and let's just say belief in God, because religion and belief in God are somewhat separable, and we'll get into that, but to keep things simple, what do we know for sure about the compatibility or lack of compatibility between what we call science and a belief in God?

**David DeSteno** (3:22)
To me, the question of belief in God, and you're right, it gets in the way of this because people will say, well, if I believe in God, then I can't embrace science, and I think that's wrong, but let me start at the beginning and say, why think the question of does God exist isn't a useful question? It doesn't mean it's not an important question. As you said, people have been debating this for millennia, but it's not useful because as scientists, we can't prove it. But any scientist who tells you they know for sure God doesn't exist, you shouldn't listen to. The reason I say that is oftentimes we, you and I, as scientists, live by the data. We run experiments. And what's behind any experiment is we try to manipulate a variable and we see if it produces a change. When you're talking about God, you can't do an experiment. And so I'll say the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. People hear that a lot and it sounds like a cop-out. But in this case, it's not really. So if I'm testing a new drug, I can have people take the drug and see if it combats a pathogen. And if it doesn't combat a pathogen, I can say, all right, well, it doesn't seem to be working in this experiment. Any one experiment can fail for lots of reasons. Maybe people didn't take their medication the right way. Maybe it only works for certain type of people. And so you can try it again and again in different cases. And you can kind of build up a sense of, is there evidence here that this drug works or doesn't over time? And if it doesn't in any case, you might say, maybe there's nothing there. With God, you can't even run the experiment. So I'm a psychologist, and so most of what I do is I bring people into my lab. I study how emotions change their behavior. And so I'll bring people in and I'll create two groups. I'll balance gender and ideology and intelligence and all of those things. And to one of them will change their emotional state, and I'll see if it'll do something. With God, you can't run an experiment. You can't manipulate God if God exists. People say, oh, Dave, I prayed for X, Y, and Z, and it didn't come true. So therefore, God must not exist. And I'm like, well, do you know the mind of God? Maybe God only helps people God likes. Maybe God only helps people on every third Tuesday. I don't know. And if I can't manipulate something about the mind of God, then I can't infer causality if God exists or doesn't exist. And so I think this question of does God exist is one science can't answer. I mean, I'm happy to say as a scientist, I see no empirical evidence that God exists. But without being able to run an experiment to prove it, it's beyond the realm of science. And all it does is polarize us, right? It polarizes people into the camps that you're saying. But I think most people, the ones on X, are fundamentalists who are shouting science is bad, or hardcore new atheists who are saying religion is bad. I think most people live in the middle somewhere, and most people accept the view that there could be something there, and they're not in tension. And I think for a lot of history, that was, I mean, the Catholic Church funds research. They have a wonderful observatory to look at astronomical behavior. The Dalai Lama funds neuroscience, right, to understand how the mind works. And so we had Francis Collins on the show one of the great geneticists of our time. And for him, there's no tension. He says, God, he's a believer. God created the human mind so that we could learn about the wonders of God's creation and how the world works. They don't need to be in tension. So for me, I like to put that question to the side. What I'm interested in is the data that we'll talk about that shows engaging with religion makes life better for people.