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

Huberman opens by introducing David DeSteno as 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. The framing of the episode is that many, perhaps most, people view science and religion as mutually exclusive, and that DeSteno is there to explain why that view is incorrect and to share data showing that religion and prayer have tremendous mental and physical benefits. A disclaimer is built into the introduction: DeSteno is not promoting religion, he is a scientist, and his stated approach is to study, in an unbiased way, how belief in God and religious practices can benefit individuals and groups. The announced range is wide - brain mechanisms that lead people to embrace faith, whether God's existence can be proven or disproven, miracles, the origin of life, the afterlife, the line between rituals and suspicions, what distinguishes religions from cults, the claim that more than 100 new religions surface every year while very few last, and data on when and how people lie for personal gain and on simple practices that convert liars into truth-tellers and make people more empathic overall.

Huberman states the apparent conflict plainly: science is supposed to be about disproving hypotheses, while religion, in most people's minds, is based on belief and faith in things that are difficult, though perhaps not impossible, to disprove; the attempt to prove or disprove the existence of God has been going on for many, many thousands of years. He then asks what we know for sure about the compatibility or lack of compatibility between science and belief in God, and stipulates up front that religion and belief in God are somewhat separable, a distinction that will carry real argumentative weight later in the conversation.

DeSteno's first move is to reject the premise that believing in God prevents embracing science, calling that wrong. He then reframes the existence question as not useful rather than not important: he concedes it has been debated for millennia, but says that as scientists we cannot prove it. His position is deliberately asymmetrical - he will not claim knowledge in either direction, and he directs his sharpest warning at the atheist side of the debate.

Any scientist who tells you they know for sure God doesn't exist, you shouldn't listen to.

The methodological reason is the logic of experimentation itself. DeSteno describes the scientist's craft as manipulating a variable and seeing whether it produces a change, with the implicit point that no such manipulation is available for God. His drug-trial analogy does the heavy lifting: a single experiment can fail for many reasons - people may not have taken their medication the right way, or the drug may work only for a certain type of people - so evidence is built up by trying again and again in different cases until a judgment about whether the drug works becomes reasonable. With God, he says, you cannot even run the experiment, which is the precise sense in which the familiar maxim about absence of evidence is, in this case, not a cop-out.

absence of evidence is not evidence of absence

He grounds this in his own laboratory practice: bring people in, balance gender, ideology, intelligence and other variables, create two groups, change the emotional state of one, and observe behavior. With God you cannot manipulate God, so you cannot infer causality about whether God exists or does not exist. He mocks the inference from unanswered prayer by asking whether anyone knows the mind of God, offering the possibilities that God only helps people God likes or only helps people on every third Tuesday. His own position is that he sees no empirical evidence that God exists, but that without an experiment to prove it the question is beyond the realm of science, and that continuing to litigate it only polarizes people into fundamentalists shouting that science is bad and hardcore new atheists saying religion is bad. He adds that most people live in the middle, accept that there could be something there, and do not experience tension - and that for a lot of history that was simply the default.

As counterexamples to any necessary conflict, he lists institutional and personal cases: the Catholic Church funds research and has an observatory to look at astronomical behavior; the Dalai Lama funds neuroscience to understand how the mind works; and Francis Collins, described as one of the great geneticists of our time and a believer, holds that God created the human mind so that we could learn about the wonders of God's creation and how the world works, so the two need not be in tension. Having set the existence question aside, DeSteno states his actual interest: the data showing that engaging with religion makes life better for people, and why that is.

Huberman restarts the question through the creation-versus-evolution exchange and the Big Bang, the latter informed by conversations with his father, a theoretical physicist. Each layer of explanation - who created evolution, what started the initial soup of things that combined into order, what started that - invites a further layer, so the person who is willing to stay in the argument longest and peel back the layers furthest does not win but is merely the last person standing in the argument. He notes that this has been debated formally for centuries, if not thousands of years, and that here we are in 2025 still debating it; his conclusion is that if it is merely a matter of who will peel back the layers furthest, we are never going to get to an answer.

He connects the stalemate to a resurgence in religious belief visible on X and social media alongside great interest in science and in belief in science, then asks the narrower question that motivates the rest of the discussion: is there some rational, or irrational, argument that one can choose to adopt or not adopt that at least gives an individual the sense that they have arrived at an answer for them. He lays out the two available stances - if it cannot be disproven then there is a possibility, and if there is a possibility there is a possibility; or unless you can prove it to me, forget it, I am not going to believe that - and observes that it becomes an endless cycle of humans arguing with humans, which is maybe what God wants.

DeSteno agrees that this is exactly why the question is not scientifically useful. Any finding, including evolution which he says we know is true, can be absorbed by saying that maybe that is the way God works; if every falsification is met with a carve-out explaining that God did it a different way, no strong case can ever be made and the debate becomes endless. The governing norm he invokes is falsifiability, and he contrasts it with his own undergraduate choice: he was drawn to questions about what it means to be a good person, how to flourish and how to find happiness, but chose psychology over a history of religions major because he could get data rather than merely argue.

scientists live by falsifiability. Can we falsify something?

His retrospective justification is that the things now found to make life better for people were intuited long ago by traditions that could not run randomized control trials. This produces the pivot on which the whole episode rests: religion is about belief but also about what you do, and there are lots of people - he names Jews who are atheists - who do not believe in God yet are deeply engaged in their practices, which tends to make life better. He says he can make a rational case for belief, and identifies the reasoning Huberman was hinting at as Pascal's wager, Pascal being one of the greatest mathematicians and philosophers.

religion is about belief, but it's also about what you do

DeSteno reconstructs the wager as he understands it: by nature of being born you are forced into the bet and have to play the game, and if there is even the smallest chance of everlasting life in a pleasurable way, that outweighs any joy you would have on Earth, so a more libertine lifestyle here pales in comparison. Pascal was Christian, so the god in question is the Christian God, and from decision theory the expected value of happiness is larger if happiness is infinite, leading Pascal to conclude you should believe in God. DeSteno immediately supplies the standard objections - what if I believe the probability of everlasting life is zero, or choose the wrong religion or the wrong god among the many on offer - and says Pascal realized the problem could be solved if religion also brought benefits in the here and now too.

The expected value of happiness is larger if happiness is infinite.

The here-and-now payoff is then given concrete numbers. Citing epidemiological data, DeSteno says that people who actually engage with faith - not merely say they believe in God - show, over a 15 to 20 year period, a 30 percent cut in all-cause mortality, a 25 percent cut in deaths due to cancer and cardiovascular disease, reduced anxiety and depression, and an increased sense of meaning and of life flourishing. He presents this as what launched his mission of trying to find and curate conversations between science and religion. The argumentative structure is worth noting: by anchoring the wager in measurable present-day benefits, the payoff no longer depends on the unprovable afterlife that the earlier chapters declared off-limits to science.

DeSteno's stance toward the epidemiology is blunt, but he immediately supplies its methodological vulnerabilities himself. The older studies were cross-sectional: compare people who go to services with people who do not, find that attendees are healthier, and infer that religion makes people healthier. The important alternative explanation is reverse causation - maybe the people who were really sick or really depressed cannot get out of bed to go to services - and he acknowledges that was always an issue.

You can't argue with those data.

The response is longitudinal work by an epidemiologist, Tyler VanderWeele of Harvard School of Public Health, following thousands and thousands of people over time as they become more religious, stop becoming religious, or leave the faith. DeSteno explicitly rules out a randomized control trial on ethical grounds: he cannot tell Huberman to stop believing in God tomorrow, or tell himself to start going to church. Following people through time is therefore the available design, and he says that is what VanderWeele finds. This is an important limitation to keep in view - the causal language of the 30 and 25 percent figures rests on observational longitudinal data rather than random assignment.

The second objection he entertains is that the health benefits are just community: if people joined a bowling club, invoking Robert Putnam's bowling alone analogy, they would get the same benefits. He grants part of it - being in community, joining clubs and having tighter social networks does make people healthier and happier - but reports that the effect size, which he glosses as how much bang for the buck you get, is larger for religious community. His inference, explicitly offered as his own reading, is that they are doing something in those communities and that it is the practices they do that matter. He begins extending the point to young adults, where he says anxiety and depression are increasing, but that segment is cut off mid-sentence.

Huberman then asks whether the effects are observed across Christianity, Judaism, Muslims, and the subdivisions within each. DeSteno is careful about both attribution and scope: these are not his data, they are data from Tyler VanderWeele and other folks, and while they have not examined every religion, when they do look across some faiths it is a pretty stable finding. Rather than a universal claim, this is an explicit boundary on how far the cross-faith conclusion can be pushed.

These aren't my data.

After a sponsor break, Huberman introduces a personal counterexample through an anecdote about a conversation with someone who said he was an atheist and offered what he called a celestial teapot as a rational argument for atheism. Huberman states his own position clearly - he believes in God, has since he was a kid, and does now - and corrects the name: it is called Russell's teapot, not the celestial teapot, and Russell was right. He says he is paraphrasing from something he pulled from the internet but verified as accurate to Russell's teapot, an attribution caveat that matters for how the quoted definition should be read.

The analogy, as he presents it, is that Russell's teapot was formulated by Bertrand Russell to illustrate that the philosophic burden of proof lies on the person making empirically unfalsifiable claims, as opposed to shifting the burden of disproof to others, applied specifically in the context of religion. If Russell were to assert, without offering proof, that a teapot too small to be seen by telescopes orbits the sun somewhere in space between the Earth and Mars, he could not expect anyone to believe him solely because his assertion could not be proven wrong. Huberman restates the operative principle: the burden of proof is on the person making the assertion, not on other people to carry a belief because it cannot be falsified.

the philosophic burden of proof lies on the person making empirically unfalsifiable claims

DeSteno's answer is that it depends on your philosophy of science, and he counterposes William James, the father of psychology, who had a real interest in religion and framed the issue differently through his notion of an overbelief. An overbelief is a belief for which evidence is lacking but which is not disconfirmed, and which nonetheless feels right and leads to positive outcomes; James held that if both criteria are true it is rational to embrace that belief, and that is how he came to embrace religion.

feels right and leads to positive outcomes

DeSteno refuses to rank the two philosophies: either can be valid, one is not more valid than the other, and the choice is based on your philosophy of science. He illustrates the limits of rational argument with the case made in Ross Douthat's book Believe and the fine-tuning argument - the parameters for gravity and other physical coefficients had to be tuned exactly right or life could never have evolved, and the probability against that is low - and its standard rebuttal that there can be hundreds of millions of other universes in the multiverse, so our case is not that weird. The exchange shows both philosophical frameworks doing genuine work while neither producing a decisive proof.