I opened up the Washington Post this morning to see an article titled, what science says about the power of religion and prayer to heal. OK, I’ll bite. What does science say about the power of religion? The author begins with a little anecdote that says it all.
As a medical intern, I once treated a young woman with metastatic breast cancer, whose sparkling blue eyes looked up at me every morning with hope. I did as much as possible for her medically, but unfortunately, her cancer spread further. She developed ongoing fevers and nausea, and soon rarely glanced at me when I entered her room. Most of the days, she lay on her side, fatigued, her face turned to the wall.
She was Catholic, and one day, I noticed that a priest had started visiting her. A week later, when I entered the room, she looked up at me again and smiled. I sensed that she felt a renewed connection to something beyond her.
Sadly, she died a month later, but had seemed far less despondent. Her priest had offered her something that I could not.
Jesus, that’s grim. Noticing that a dying patient smiled at him once after a priest visited her is quite possibly the weakest, most pathetic evidence for the power of religion that I’ve ever heard. The patient died! Not only was she beyond the reach of prayer, but beyond the reach of medicine.
Oh, but we’re supposed to believe that fostering a positive outlook is a benefit. Why? Where’s the benefit? The best the author can do is tell us that polls show that 72% of Americans believe in the power of prayer…but that’s just telling us that a majority of Americans are gullible. Show me something that says it improves health outcomes, doctor!
He gives us four things that religion does.
But evidence suggests that having strong spiritual or religious beliefs, however defined, can assist psychologically in fighting, and coping with, illness. Here are some of the ways prayer and faith can affect patient health.
Brain changes: Neuroscience research shows that strong religious or spiritual beliefs are associated with thicker parts of the brain, providing neuronal reserves that can buffer against depression and despair.
Purpose: Religion and spirituality, broadly defined, provide a sense of meaning, purpose and hope.
Meaning: Many patients come to find or construct their own sources of meaning. It may be through traditional faith or a belief in art, poetry, science, mathematics, nature or the universe. As one patient, who said he was “not religious,” once told me, “I believe in the Third Law of Thermodynamics: Energy can neither be created nor destroy; it merely goes on in another form.”
Social support: Religious and spiritual groups also commonly provide valuable social support and interactions. Such a group doesn’t need to be religious. It could be a yoga group, a book club, or a Facebook discussion group about Harry Potter.
I have a sense of “purpose,” but I am not religious. He undermines his statements about “meaning” and “social support” by mentioning that you don’t need religion to have them, so why demand that people follow a delusion to get them? By the way, that statement about the Third Law of Thermodynamics is not your salvation; if my house were to burn down, it’s no consolation to suggest that my home goes on as heat, gas, and ash.
But it’s his first claim that irritated me, this idea that religion/spirituality is associated with “thicker parts of the brain” that can provide “neuronal reserves that can buffer against depression and despair”. WTF? How does that work?
That’s the only part of the article that includes a link, so I followed it to see what evidence he’s got. It leads to a systematic literature review published in the Harvard Review of Psychiatry, and it is a godawful hodgepodge of random results coupled to wishful thinking. It summarizes the observations made in EEG, PET scans, and fMRI to try and find a consistent, meaningful effect of religiosity on brain activity or morphology. It fails. It’s full of tables like this one.
You tell me: what does “greater posterior alpha” or “negative association between left medial orbitofrontal cortex volume and neurofeedback performance” mean in the sense of providing a benefit to the subject? Study after study is listed, and they all show different patterns of differences. These are all studies of religion/spirituality that, I would guess, are all looking for correlations of something, anything with religious belief, and they all publish whatever parameter they fish up. Never mind that religious experiences are diverse, or that the development of the brain is a complex process that is going to provide all kinds of spurious variations. You put people in complicated, sensitive machines, and you can get a number out. That’s publishable!
But what about that claim of neuronal reserves
that made my spidey sense tingle? Here’s the bit where the Harv Rev Psych article talks about it. I’ve emphasized the words that represent guesswork.
Taken together, it is reasonable to speculate that these brain regions represent access to a neural reserve that likely results from the process of neuroplasticity. A greater neural reserve could, in turn, support an enhanced cognitive reserve that enables R/S people to cope better with negative emotions, more readily disengage themselves from excessive self-referential thinking (e.g., rumination), and ultimately be more resilient in the face of various psychopathologies.
They have no evidence for any of that. Saying that something is a result of “neuroplasticity” is meaningless — I’d go so far as to say that most of the variation in the brain is from neuroplasticity. The existence of a “neural reserve” is hypothetical and not demonstrated at all. You can’t just point to a thickened chunk of cortex and call it a “reserve”! They then go on to suggest that these “reserves” enable religious/spiritual people to cope with negative emotions and be more resilient, phenomena that were not evaluated in any of the studies!
That paragraph was pure, unadulterated bullshit. You don’t need a Ph.D. in neuroscience to see that — it’s an unsubstantiated collection of wishful thinking that should not have passed peer review. The whole paper is a tremendous amount of work, sifting through a huge literature that is shot through with delusional vagueness, trying to extract a few reliable, useful interpretations, and not finding any. The paper does not find evidence of neuronal reserves that can buffer against depression and despair
, but that does not stop the WaPo writer from claiming positively that it does.
I am once again confirmed in my expectation that any attempt to justify religion with science is only going to produce bad science.
I’d like to see a scientific study done comparing the power of prayer to the power of a chocolate sundae. Religious vs. delicious.
I believe the Third Law of Thermodynamics is actually that any substance approaches its contstant-entropy ground state as itd temperature approaches absolute zero.
PZ already pointed this out.
Most of the time, most of us create our own meaning and purpose in our lives.
I’m not seeing that religion provides a lot of hope.
Hope for what? That you don’t get sent to Hell and be tortured forever by a cosmic sadist? Oh, and sorry about your mom, who was a Buddhist. Wrong religion and she ended up in the bad afterlife.
What meaning? You can become a suicide bomber and take the shortcut to heaven.
Or, if you are a fundie xian, adopt their package of hates. Prepackaged variety pack, hate the gays, Trans, atheists, nonxians, Democrats, children, women, education, Darwin, and science.
This writer can write about the benefits of religion if he wants.
A more accurate accounting would also consider the harms that religion causes, which are numerous.
Religion can be harmful as well, as pointed out by a whole lot of other writers.
I wonder how many of those studies compared participants with a positive experience with religion with those with a negative experience with religion. I suspect the typical study probably goes for a binary, comparing the religious with the non-religious. Because plenty of people have religious experiences that lead to depression and despair.
based on some of the literature i’ve been reading for a project, it’s funny seeing how the brain regions being implicated in religiosity (according to this review) are the same regions i’ve seen being brought up in studies about human sexual responses, including violent and fetishistic ones, almost as though each section of the brain is involved in a lot of different shit and can’t really be boiled down to a single recognizable function, and furthermore that brain regions are interconnected and affect each other in a variety of ways of course there IS evidence that specific brain regions may be involved in certain responses, but we’re nowhere near being able to directly discern what causes/encodes what in the nervous system because the system in question is complicated as fuck. it’s even more complicated when you’re studying abstract ideas like “religion” that don’t really have a distinctive or useful
also the “limitations of current research” section is quite funny to read. they straight up say a bunch of the studies they used for the review have questionable methodology and that they’re nowhere near a solid grasp of how “religiosity” works neurologically
“buffer against depression and despair”
Morphine and some other good drugs help with this a little bit.
Religion can be very pernicious. If your god tells you that feeling even the slightest bit of sinful thought condemns you for eternity and that he’s very disappointed in you because he sacrificed his own son for you ungrateful PoS, how can you ever develop a healthy sense of self worth? Or maybe that one time you missed one of the five prayers for Allah and now he hates you because you used that time for something else and therefore do not respect and love him anymore. And know what? Best to compensate for that self-loathing with unbridled narcissism and toxic masculinity.
If you want a person to think of happier things when in a bad situation, there are alternatives to religion (happy memories, pets, edifying secular story etc.), so I wouldn’t even give it that.
People with strong religious beliefs are thicker? I can believe that.
“Remember, when you are dead, you do not know you are dead. It is only painful for others. The same applies when you are stupid.” – Ricky Gervais
Give them another chance. If religious items can be seen having an effect on vampires they are not entirely useless.
And if you are going on a quest and already have a magician, a dwarf and a warrior you need a priest as supplement to cure magic-induced poisoning.
“Belief” is a slippery concept. How many fervent Believers advocate eliminating the police department because God can do it better?”
Other models of religious behavior are just as valid. For example, “for you to feel good does everyone have to be in their proper place in the hierarchy”?
Look at the image at the top of this article:
https://brucegerencser.net/2021/10/domestic-violence-in-the-ifb-church/
That sums it up better than anything else I’ve seen. God as domestic abuser.
I suppose that for some people, believing they are going to heaven makes the dying process easier on them and their families. And they’ll never even know they were wrong. But whatever benefit comes from religion, the harm it inflicts is so much greater that it’s not even a close question whether we’d be better off without it.
Almost no one. Some religions offer very harsh punishment for wrongdoers – up to and including an eternity of torture in the afterlife. And yet, they still want to punish people here on Earth while they are still alive.
If thickening means a beneficial reserve, does that mean that religion will also give you hardening of the arteries? It will get you sooner into heaven, or at least death. That’s the essence of the religious benefit.
Good grief!
I once read an article about a guy who laughed his cancer away. After he got his diagnosis, he rented all the Charlie Chaplin movies he could find and had a good old laughfest every day. If I ever get seriously sick, that’s what I plan to do. Will it really help? Probably not, but at least it’s one of the best ways to die that I can think of.
VOODOO! It’s like Nornan Vincent Peale on steroids. Yes, a positive attitude is somewhat helpful, but, religion is just a fantasy version of ‘thoughts and prayers’. The physical medical world won’t be helped by any ‘magic mental crystals’.
Why is thicker better?
Narcissistic individuals are likely to have thicker self-referential brain regions. Or thinner ones for inhibiting the same.
Same for aggression areas and habitual aggression probably.
Maybe it’s bad that the religious have thicker areas here somehow. There are depression worthy things that we aren’t dealing with as a society. Maybe those parietal and occipital regions show the grifting vulnerability?
Or maybe their visual and world assembly regions just get used differently in the pews.
I noticed reduced activity in the anterior cingulate cortex.
That could be inhibiting the religious resistance to in-group criticism too. So many possibilities when I’m just putting whatever I want in.
Put another way, it’s too thick and so inhibiting in-group criticism. That was the made up bullshit I was going for. I think I messed it up. I’m probably done.