Dr. David DeSteno

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, well, I 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.

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, oh, all right, well, it doesn't seem to be working in this experiment.

Any one experiment can fail for lots of reasons.