Dr. David DeSteno

There are lots of religions out there of the wrong God.

And what Pascal realized at the time was that you could solve this problem if religion also brought benefits in the here and now too.

And what we're seeing is it does exactly that.

So let me give you an example.

Epidemiological data show that people who engage with religion, not just say, I believe in God, but actually engage with faith, over a 15 to 20-year period, it cuts all-cause mortality by 30%, cuts death due to cancer and cardiovascular disease by 25%, reduces anxiety and depression, increases people's sense of meaning and feeling that their life is flourishing.

This is what brought me to my kind of mission today of trying to find and curate conversations between science and religion.

You can't argue with those data.

Now, for a long time, people would say those studies were done cross-sectionally, right?

And so you would say, you'd look at people who are going to services and people who are not, and you'd find people are healthier when they go to services.

So you could say, oh, religion makes people healthier.

But there was an important alternative, right?

Maybe the people who were really sick or really depressed can't get out of bed to go to services, right?

So that was always an issue.

Now there's wonderful work by an epidemiologist, Tyler VanderWiel from Harvard School of Public Health.

He follows thousands and thousands of people longitudinally because you can't run a randomized control trial.

I can't say, Andrew, tomorrow, if you believe in God, I want you to stop.

Or, you know, Dave, tomorrow you don't believe in God, start going to church.

Ethically, you can't do that.

But what you can do is follow people through time as they become more religious or stop becoming religious, leave the faith, et cetera.

And that's what he finds.