David DeSteno

And that's how they ensure things are going well.

And so the danger when we extract some of these practices from their original containers is that maybe they don't work as well, or maybe there's even some danger to it.

I mean, if you think about religion today,

as a spiritual technology, something that moves hearts and minds, it can move it for good or it can move it for bad.

We've all seen religion harnessed to justify lots of acts of violence.

And so I think we have to be careful about how we extract things.

No, I think that's right.

And kind of my mission is to actually –

show that there is a wisdom to a lot of these practices that we can study scientifically, but in no way to suggest that those higher elements aren't there.

You know, the psychologist William James is the father of modern psychology.

he studied religious experience a lot and ultimately the people asked him, you know, do you believe there's something greater?

He struggled with that.

Then he came down to this notion of, of what he called an over-belief and the over-belief logical argument goes like this.

If there's something that I can do for which there is no hardcore data, and I'm paraphrasing here, but

it feels true intuitively, and it leads to better positive outcomes, then it's logical to believe in it and to follow it.

What's the harm?

And so, you know, for me, that rings true.

It is, we don't know if God exists.

If God exists, I'm sure it's in a form that none of us can conceive of.

And there's certainly no empirical test that we can apply to it.