Proving God's Existence With Science (w/ Dave Desteno)

♪ Come, Pamir ♪ How does God work? The question of does God exist is kind of a useless question. And I will say, if you had asked me 25 years ago, if I believed in God, I'd say, "No, it's all nonsense." If you ask me now, I'll say, "Hey there, it's me, Rain Wilson, and I want to dig into the human experience. I want to have conversations about a spiritual revolution. Let's get deep with our favorite thinkers, friends, and entertainers about life, meaning, and idiocy. Welcome to the SoulBoom podcast. Dave, welcome to SoulBoom. Thanks for having me on. You are a scientist of spiritual psychology. How do you sum up what you do? I wouldn't quite say it that way. Spiritual tools with database spiritual tools to make your life better. How do we sum this up? That's fair. I would say what I'm interested in is how we live a good life. And what I've come to realize over a lot of time as a scientist is there's a lot of wisdom in these spiritual traditions that we are ignoring at our own peril. It's almost as if you wrote a book called SoulBoom why we need a spiritual revolution. And it almost as if you host a podcast called SoulBoom. Well, I'm glad you wrote the book because mine would not nearly be as funny as yours. And I do hope host a podcast called How God Works, which is a book called How God Works. And I have a book called How God Works where we explore the science behind all of it. Let's start right there. Yeah. How does God work? You know, I think the title in some ways is a little too cute by half because when I tell people the title of the book is How God Works, they think I'm going to proselytize to. Yeah. And that's not at all what we're doing. It sounds like something that would be found in a really kitschy Christian bookstreet. Yeah, they think I'm going to go jolastine on them and try and convince them. But really what it is is an attempt to understand how and why religion shapes people's lives. And let me, if you don't mind, I'll give you a little bit of the backstory because that might make it clearer. Okay. Back story is good, but before we go there, how does God work? How does God work? I think the one thing that I've learned in doing this is that the question of does God exist or how God, in the way we think of God works, is kind of a useless question. And I say that because scientists can't prove that there is a God. There is no proof of God's existence. There's no test for the fingerprint of God. Maybe God only helps people He likes. Maybe God only helps people on every second Tuesday. I don't know. And if we don't know the mind of God, we can't predict. And there's no proof that God doesn't exist. And there's no proof that God doesn't exist, which is what I try to remind my colleagues. Even Richard Dawkins, if you push him really hard, will say, well, I can't be sure God doesn't exist. And so my argument for scientists like me is let's not really start debating about whether God exists because it's not in our toolbox to be able to find that answer. I try and stay out of those conversations. They're very popular on YouTube, but I try and set those aside. But my more interested in your title, so how does God work? How does God work in your life, in your brain, and for your well-being? So to understand that, we have to understand what all the spiritual practices that people engage in, and whatever route they're on to follow God or to approach God, how those affect your mind and body. And the way I look at it is, you can think of spiritual practices whether we're talking meditation, cultivating gratitude, cultivating forgiveness, engaging in transcendent experiences. We can talk about all the benefits those have, but throughout history, spiritual traditions have found ways to work on our minds and bodies, to bring these experiences to life in us. And I can't tell you whether they're the gifts of a divine creator as kind of a how-to manual for living a better life, or if they're the results of people figuring stuff out, I don't think that matters. What I can tell you is that people who engage with religion, not saying I believe God exists or I don't, not self-identifying as Christian Jew or Shermuzlum, but people who engage with religious practices, live longer, healthier, happier lives. Over a 15-20-year period, you'll see a 30% reduction in all told mortality. You'll see 25% reductions in cancer and cardiovascular disease. Greater meaning, greater joy, less depression, less anxiety. And so as a scientist, now is that a member of an organized religion, or could you be spiritual and not religious and kind of play around in that sandbox of your choosing, a little schmorgasbord buffet of spiritual practices and get the same outcome? This we don't know. We do know that meditation kind of works in a secular way, although even done in a secular way. People think, you know, sitting home at my office, when you say that, you mean you could be completely irreligious, no belief in God, no kind of spiritual community whatsoever, and just get an app, and you could just meditate because it calms your mind. Even if you just engage with that without any kind of religious fruit for on the edges, there is some benefit. There is some benefit. But what we don't know is how much more benefit there is if you do it the right way. I mean, meditation traditionally was done in community and a song got together. Isn't it more powerful in community? I've heard like the effects of meditation. Are the effects that have been studied are more powerful when you do it in a group? Yeah. What we know is people do it in a group. Their heart rate synchronized, their breathing synchronized. It becomes a much more embodied, powerful experience in the odds of having a transcendent experience as a result of it go up. But the real benefit is, you know, about 20% of the time people meditate, if they're doing it on their own without a teacher guiding them, who has wisdom in the practices, it can go bad. Sometimes it brings up experiences that are difficult for you to deal with. What I like to say is being spiritual is at the heart of all religions if you do them right. And by spiritual, I mean kind of connecting with that transcendent feeling. But the traditions themselves have guardrails to help you get these practices and keep you safe. We see the same thing with psychedelics, you know, 20% of psychedelic strips go really badly. 8% result in needing mental health counseling because if you don't have some here, those stories, yeah, if you don't have someone, I'll take a talk, you hear like, I saw the portal of light and it's changed my life. And it can. But if you don't have the guide with you to kind of help you make sense of it and to make you feel supremely safe when you're doing this, it can go badly. I love you're writing so much and I've listened to a bunch of your podcasts and you were speaking about this on another pod and I thought it was just fascinating that. And it's a point that I've that you made much more articulately than me and it's this whole psychedelic phenomenon is that if you're looking at the Amazonian tribes that are using, let's say, I wasca. I wasca is a part of a totality, right? There is like sacred prayer. There's connection with nature. There's there's gratitude. There's community. There's a shaman life. There's a mystical connection to all being and nature day in and day out 365 days a year. There's there's rituals here and there's gatherings for this reason here and there's song and there's and so the isca ceremony is just one part of the paragraph of the totality of the spiritual experience of that tribe. So talk about like cultural appropriation. It's kind of like I'm not going to do all the the hard stuff, which is the day in day out, communing with the spirits of the jungle and listening to my shaman and engaging with my tribe and hunting and growing yams or whatever they do. I'm going to just take the drug this part and I'm just going to go to a motel in Costa Rica and do it. You know what I mean? Right. And that's our that's our hubris in the sense of thinking we can find that one kind of biochemical element and extract out of that set of scaffolding that it had. Right. I have had kind of a lame relationship with skincare for most of my life, which is to say I mostly ignored it. 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I'm Meena B, I'm a therapist, author, and creator of the sibling theory, and on this feels familiar, I explore how belonging, conflict, and relational patterns shape your mental health and relationships, and how to change them. If you're ready to understand the why behind your patterns, you tuned into the right show. This is "This Feels Familiar". Let's dive in. [Music] Same thing with meditation. Yes, you will get benefits from doing it on your own with an app. We've shown that in my lab, but the benefits are going to be much more powerful for you if you engage in the spiritual community and do it the traditional way. You know, by, I think, just historical accident, the scientists who began studying meditation, they were interested, "What does it do to your gray matter? What does it do to your memory?" You'll see articles in the Atlantic and in the New York Times on meditation that basically say, "It'll increase your test scores, so it'll help you be more productive at work." You know, as well as I, that's not the reason it was created. Meditation was created for one reason to reduce suffering, yours, and those of other people. We decided to put this idea to the test. That's a lot of what we do in my lab, now, is studying these spiritual technologies. And so to make a long story short, right, the way we decided- I want to be a lab rat in your lab. Come anytime. The way we decided to study this is we brought people into the lab who had never meditated before and we either had them on a waiting list so they didn't meditate or they came to the lab. And for eight weeks, they studied at the foot of a Buddhist Lama and engaged in meditation and did practices throughout the week. At the end of those eight weeks, we brought them to the lab. And I'm a big proponent of studying behavior as a psychologist, so we don't ask people, "Would you be more compassionate rain if you meditated?" Because what are you going to say? You're probably going to say, "Yes," or you may really think you would, but when push comes to shove, you may just walk past the guy in the street or needs your help. So they came into the waiting room in our lab and in that waiting room, there were three chairs. Two of them were occupied by actors that we hired, who they just thought were other people waiting to be in the study. And there was one last chair. And so when the real subjects came in, who had either meditated or not, they sat in that last chair. And about three minutes later, another actor came in. And this person was on crutches and had their foot in one of those boots that you know when you broke your foot. She's coming in, she's winsing in pain, the actors we told them just ignore her. So they're thumping on their phones. It's kind of like we're here on the subway train and you know somebody needs your seat, but you don't want to look at them. So you pretend you're really busy. You're really busy. Candy Crush. And so the question was, what was the person really going to do? And what we found is that 50% of the people who had meditated when that person came in, whinsing on the crutches and kind of leaned against the wall looking in pain, got up out of their chair and offered it to this person. You know how many people who didn't meditate did that? I do know. Because I listened to you tell this story before, 15%. 15% exactly. So basically we more than tripled that. And to me, that was just an astounding finding. And we've replicated it. So we know it's true. We've done something. And I've heard other studies about this where people are lying in pain and people that are meditators are going to class. Oh, the class got moved and it moves them past the person in pain and like, do they stop and help them? And you know, there've been other kinds of studies in this. In the studies. Yeah, there's enough of them now that that were fairly certain that it increases compassionate behavior. But my favorite version that we did was you said, you know, it's easy to help someone who is just a stranger. The real test of if you have compassion is will you help someone you don't like, right? So if you do loving kindness meditation, you know, the last part of that is now think of an enemy. And can you extend to them compassion? And so we used a paradigm where people come into the lab and we tell them, take five minutes, write a story about your five year plan for your life. After that, they come up with an actor who they think did the same thing. We say, okay, tell this person your plan and they're going to evaluate it. So the person starts telling them, here's what I plan to do. And the actor who they think is just another person in the study looks at them and says, really? That's your plan. That's not going to work. That's the most ridiculous thing I ever heard of in my life, and basically insults them. And so this paradigm has been shown over and over and over, going to make people really angry and to make them want to punish the person. And so we gave them the opportunity to punish this person. They weren't, he wasn't really going to feel the pain, but they thought they could do something that would cause him to feel pain. Like physical pain? So the way it's done, because we have to be very ethical in this, right? Not physical pain, but we actually tell them they're preparing taste samples for this person. And the taste sample of the day is hot sauce. And so we give them these little cups and this bottle that has all kinds of warnings on it. And we say, whatever you put in this will be placed in its entirety in the other person's mouth. And so they know that the more they put in, the more pain they're going to cause this person. Right. And so if you are not angry at this person, you put in about, you know, maybe one gram, because you have to create a taste test sample. If you're really angry at this person, people will put in about seven times that much. And so what we saw is the people who hadn't meditated. We had them do a brain training app as a control. So they were doing something. Because this was a training done using headspace. They were really pissed at this guy. And they put in a lot of hot sauce to cause them pain. The people who had meditated using headspace refused to do that. Now, wasn't that they were suckers? They weren't like, oh, it's okay. They were like, what he did was wrong. And I'd like to tell him what he did was wrong. But I don't want to cause him pain. And the amount that they put in was no different than people who would just create a sample when they had no anger toward the person. And so to us, this was clear evidence, right? That engaging in meditation increases your compassion for other people. So the Tibetans were right. The Tibetans were right. Right. And they knew that, you know, I've been at conferences with Tibetan monks. And I tell them my funding. And they're like, yeah, they can tell you that. That's what it's supposed to do. But, you know, do you know why meditation increases both compassion and decreases vindictiveness? Well, I think it's it's it's it's it metacognition. We don't know. There are there are a few different theories. And you know, like anything else, it's probably all of them combined. One is that through this deep breathing, what you were doing is you're activating your parasympathetic nervous system, which basically is the part that makes you feel comfortable and opens you up to sociality with people. And if the more you do that, the more you're in a constant state of that. Another is it begins to break down the artificial categorizations we put between people. So, you know, you start you stop seeing people as your member of this group, your member of that group. And you start increasing the connections that you have for everybody. In essence, it enlarges your moral circle. Who's whose pain is worth your care? And there's some evidence showing that. And so, you know, it's probably a combo of what it does to theologically to use a chronic state. And also how it changes your view of whose pain is morally important. But I was saying about medical cognition is Arthur Brooks's idea that, you know, we're in our little pachinko ball machine heads, you know, this is thing and the thing is laid and I got out of the text. Oh, that guy, he's a jerk and blah, blah, blah. And we're in this. And then in meditation, we're kind of taking the 20,000 foot view kind of down on ourselves and we kind of see ourselves have more compassion for ourselves in our situation, taking a greater totality and as shift in perspective, could that perhaps be part of increasing compassion? It certainly will make you more present. And in that present, it becomes harder to ignore someone in front of you who is suffering. You know, we can all distract ourselves in lots of ways. We can all create rationalizations in lots of ways for why I'm sure they're okay. I'm sure somebody else will help that person. No, it doesn't matter. I've got to do this. And so that's probably part of it too. We don't know. We're on the hunt to find out why. - Yeah, there was a great talk by Peter Singer, the effective altruist. And he showed this tape of a famous YouTube tape of a child that had been hit by a car in China and it was caught on a security camera and people were walking by, bicycling by, driving by and no one helping this hurting sick child. And this video caused a huge uproar in China. And there was a lot of reflection of what's wrong with us. Chinese that we didn't stop to help this ailing child. And then he said, but there are hundreds of thousands or millions of children that are suffering in the same way right now on planet Earth. And we know that to be true. And we inconveniently kind of go, "Halala la la la" or conveniently go, "la la la la la" and pretend it's not happening in Darfur or Sudan or East Congo or wherever. And so I'm wondering about that shift, are there religious practices that allow us to see kind of a totality of suffering in a clearer way? - Yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right. We are, people always ask me, Dave, do we evolve to be good or bad? And I say neither, we evolve to be adaptive. And we're social species. That means we can't be assholes all the time, right? We have to depend on one another. And so morality exists to have, let us have those moral sentiments to care for people who are around us. But what typically happens in study after study is there's a gradient of who we care about, people who are closer to us, we care more about than others because they'll help us back. But and for most of our evolutionary history, that made sense 'cause we lived in small groups and we didn't have the ability to affect people who lived on the other side of the world. Now we do. And so I think what a lot of religions have developed over time is this focus on how do we have more care for people who aren't like us, right? The Bible talks a lot about, yes, you should be good to your parents and to people who are your friends, but you should also take care of the stranger and it mentions the stranger way more often. Yeah, story of the good, the parable of the good Samaritan and Love Thy Neighbor. So one thing we wanted to do is to figure out how we can have more compassion for people in the future who aren't here yet. And to do that, we borrowed a spiritual practice from our descendants and humanities descendants. Those yet to come. Our great, great grandchildren who are inheriting the planet that we're giving to them. Exactly, yes. Whereas very convenient to not think about that and to satisfy our own desires for self gratification. So St. Ignatius said, "If you need to make a decision that has some moral consequence, do two things." One, close your eyes and imagine it as vividly as you can. Picture on those people's faces, what they're feeling. Try to understand exactly what they're going through, make it really vivid. And the second thing is, think about how you would feel on your deathbed about the decision you made. And what this really does is it combats two things psychologically. One, there's a lot of evidence that we know psychologists that the further someone feels from us in distance or time, the more sparse and degraded our mental simulation of them is. And so if I'm actually going to try and picture them and picture the pain that they're feeling or the hunger that they're feeling or the difficulty of their breathing from pollution or whatever it might be, that overcomes the innate empathy gradient that's built into us to kind of preserve our own resources. And the second thing is, we know when people are facing death, it tends to reorient their value systems. So if we bring people into the lab and we say, think about what it's going to mean when it's time for you to die. Suddenly what's most important to them isn't their job, isn't buying the new iPhone. It is connecting with people they love and it is service to others. And so these little spiritual practices, when you do them, reorient your value system. And what we showed is when we gave people the opportunity to direct money that they had to charities that would help people in the hour, charities in the future, we could substantially shift how much compassion they felt for people in the future and how much money they would actually give. And again, we thought, well look, we discovered a way to do this. How people have been doing it for thousands of years. They just didn't have experiments to run to prove it. - Well, let's take the death thing. You know there's the Tibetan death meditation. You know that pretty much every faith tradition reflects on death. It's part of ritual ceremony, prayer, meditation, holy writings. There's a Tibetan death meditation. I put in my book, Soul Boom, available now. What are we losing as a culture by being so cut off from death, not talking about death and not considering it, especially in kind of Western secular society? - Yeah, you're right. We kind of push it to the side and warehouse people who are coming close to it. One thing we know from the psychological literature, and this is work done by a psychologist named Lauren Carstensen at Stanford, is that as we approach death, as the horizon to death becomes closer, it reorient our values. What we begin to care about is connection with other people, service to other people, leaving a legacy, enjoying those types of things, and not what's on my own bucket list, or how am I gonna get ahead of work? And so what these rituals do, whether it's the Tibetan death meditation that you're talking about or on Yom Kippur, right? All just chant the, the, the Natanatokha, which is basically, is a long prayer and part of it basically says, in coming year, who's gonna die by fire, by flood, by disease, by whatever, as a reminder that around you, some of us may not be here. For Catholics and Christians, it's Ash Wednesday, it's a reminder that you're going to go to death. - And the priest is literally putting ashes. - He's putting ashes on your head. - He makes ashes to ashes. - He's putting ashes to ashes. - Yeah, whatever. - And so what does that do, that contemplation of death? It re-reense your values, and you might say, well, Dave, is that a good thing? Yeah, because what we know from the psychological literature is those are the things, connection with other people, service to other people, those are the things that bring true happiness, the most happiness to people. And so, normally it happens to people later in life. But if you reflect on death earlier, you can reorient your values earlier to what's truly gonna bring happiness. We kind of saw this during the pandemic. Remember, suddenly, death was near for anyone. It didn't matter if you were 25, right? You could die. And people were leaving their jobs and looking for meaning in other places. Some of them didn't have choice in leaving their jobs. But the great resignation, a lot of that was a question about how do I reorient my life? Because I'm not happy with what I'm doing. - And it took a plague to get people to kind of stop. - It took a plague to do that and think. - Because it made them think that they could die. But as you're saying, all these traditions have little ways to reflect on death, not in a morbid way, but in a way that daily, if we do it, reorient our values toward what truly brings us happiness. - There's a bigger topic here. There's a woman in the New York Times, I forget her name, she's doing a series on God and faith, I don't know if you've read. - Yeah, yeah, Laura Jackson, I think. - Yeah, and she was talking about, you know, young people's slow slide back to religion after, you know, 30, 40 years of leaving religion and how people are finding more meaning, community, life, well-being by returning to different faith traditions. And she interviewed Richard Dawkins, I brought this up in a previous interview and he said, well, they don't need a religion to do that. They need community, they could join a golf club. And they don't need to experience like with a wonder of transcendence in a church or synagogue or religious ceremony, they could watch a documentary by Neil deGrasse Tyson about science. And I almost thought it was a joke, like, but in a weird way, I think this is where secular humanists have really missed the boat that we've gone more secular. As I say in Sobum, we've thrown the spiritual baby out with the religious bathwater. We've lost so many beautiful nuggets, like you said, reflecting on death and allowing that to enrich our lives. And I don't see the secular humanists kind of taking some responsibility for this. And they often see just great satisfaction in an ultimately meaningless materialist life. And is that just a reaction? Is that a natural kind of overreaction to the perils of religion, which are many corruption? And war, hatred, judgment, ostracization? Is that an over correction? - I think it's an overreaction. And let me tell you why Richard's wrong. Even in terms of metrics that he'll understand. So yes, a lot of the benefit, not all, a lot of the benefit from religion is through connection with other people. However, if you look at that data that I talked about in terms of people living longer, healthier, happier lives, yes, joining a bowling club or a golf club or any other type of organization will help. But the effect That sizes, that is, the degree to which it increases your health or happiness, is larger for religious engagement, religious community than other types of community. It's doing something additional for you. And there's also evidence that private practice does it as well. So I think the whole, it's just community, joint bowling team is not right, even the data contradicts that. The second reason is yes, we can go out into nature and, or watch a David Dattinboro film and feel that kind of aw, right. But and this I'll give David Brooks credit for this because we just had him on my show. And he said, spiritual experiences that touching the transcendent is a wonderful feeling. But you need religion to kind of scaffold it because religion also has obligations. It asks things of you. If you go into nature and have a transcendent experience, it may be a wonderful experience. But you may then take that to confirm whatever it is you believe about the world, right. What this structure of religious religion does is it channels that fire, it channels that passion that you're feeling by asking things of you and giving you obligations to come back to this world and help repair it. And so I think the things that Dawkins is pointing to certainly are good things. But in the absence of faith communities and the traditions we have are going to palen comparison. I think there's a couple other aspects to being a member of a religious community or faith tradition. One is the fact that you're not just coming together in community and like, oh, we're going to have a potluck and we're going to laugh and we're going to sing together. And that's wonderful. Potluck and singing together are wonderful and super healing, right. But in the best of religion, it's kind of like there's a pastor, there's a clergy member or there's holy writings there to remind us what we're a part of. We're a part of something larger. We're striving to transcend in some kind of larger way. We're not just gathering as to have a potluck and to sing together. We're building the kingdom of God on earth, let's say. And what does this mean? And can we invite new people to the potluck? And this person is sick and let's bring them a hot dish. And we're here to we're singing praise of God to uplift our spirit, but also as a prayer to bring peace to humanity. So do you know what I mean? That's a little different than a bowling club where there is kind of a longing, a yearning for something greater than our own kind of paltry ego fed lives. It asks things of us. Whereas if we approach transcendence on our own, it's not asking anything of us. I think you're really hitting on something important there, which is, so as a behavioral scientist, one thing that my tribe likes to study is how do people reach their goals, right? And we all know that we all kind of fail at that, right? If you look at New Year's resolutions, things that we think are important, 25% of them are gone by the second week of January, less than 10% make it the year through. The only way to really reach your goals is to have tools that help you get their strategies that help you get there. And so if your goal is to be a good person, is to have the kingdom of God in terms of compassion, empathy, care for those around us to leave this world a better place than we found it. That's a great goal. But these traditions have practices within them that nudge your mind and body toward that so that it's easier to stick to those goals. We talked about meditation. That will help you be kind. We talked about contemplating death. That will help you reorient your values toward service and connection with other people. A favorite one for me too is also how do we help people deal with grief and with mourning, right? That's the one thing cuts across all levels of humanity. All of us will lose people. And if you think about it, one thing that we all typically do is we eulogize somebody when they die. And if you think about it, it kind of seems kind of strange because if I just lost a job that I love or if my wife who I loved really left me, I wouldn't want to spend a lot of time perseverating about this person or this job because that would make the loss feel all the worse. So one thing we know, and this is worked by George Bonanna, who's a psychologist at Columbia, one of the primary predictions of coming through grief in a way that is healthy is consolidating positive memories of the person who has passed. Every religious tradition brings us together to eulogize the person. But there's also other elements. If you look at the Jewish ritual of Shiva, it's beautiful. It is a gorgeous ritual. For seven days, the community comes to you and it's not like their choice. It's not like, oh, do you want to go? It's a mitsvote. It's an obligation you have to go and you bring food. You come and pray with a person. You're there to support them. That's called instrumental help. That's the biggest predictor of coming through grief are people there to help you. It's not like they're sending you a like on Facebook. They're there physically with you. You have to have a group of ten people to pray together called a minion. What does that do? When you're praying together, you're engaged in what's called motor synchrony, which is kind of us moving together, singing together. We know scientifically that increases feelings of empathy, compassion, and belonging. You have a community by engaging in this practice. There's more compassion and belonging that's going on. They cover their mirrors. Why do you cover your mirrors? It seems kind of odd. We know from the scientific literature that when you look in a mirror, whatever emotion you're feeling is intensified. If you're feeling happy, you look in a mirror, you're happier. If you're feeling sad, you look in a mirror, you're sadder. And so covering a mirror is this, I would reduce grief. I would have thought it would have been something different that you cover the mirror because a mirror is ego or reminds you of yourself or your own vanity. That is part of it too. And then even like if you're crying and you look in the mirror and like, oh, I look awful, then you'll stop the crying. So you're hitting on another element of Shiva, which is also that you are supposed to not focus on yourself. In fact, so if you're a man, you don't shave. People traditionally would often tear some of their clothes. Now they'll wear a torn ribbon known as the Kriya. And the idea is reducing self-focus. How do I look today? People are coming to my house. I have to host them. That also reduces grief. Any way that you can reduce self-focus. And so there are all these little things built into these traditions that nudge the mind and body in very physical ways to help us deal with the challenges of life. One place I'd like to take this, and I'm not sure if it's something you've spoken on before, is part of Soul Boom and why we need a spiritual revolution is not just spiritual tools for the modern world or not just spiritual tools for personal transformation, but spiritual tools for social transformation. And we've talked about that a little bit, that what is contemporary secular society missing by not grieving together and sitting chival? What are they missing by us not reflecting on death? What are they missing by us not praying and meditating together and thereby increasing our compassion? That's all well and good. But in your studies, have there been things that you found that you feel could revolutionize how we are as a society building bonds of unity coming together. We've got this red state, blue state divide that seems insurmountable, hatred against DEI and immigrants. And there's a lot of finger pointing and toxic partisanship. And it goes even deeper. It's international issues as well. Do you see spiritual tools from the faith traditions that could kind of help on a broader scale, societally? I think they can help on a broader scale. One thing I want to make clear is when you're mentioning these things like societal divisions, red state, blue states, religion plays a role there too. You can think of religion in two ways. And I'll borrow a categorization that my friend, Miroslav Wolf, a yellow theologian uses, which is you can practice religion in a thin way or thick way. Thin basically means it's a label. I self-identify. I am a Catholic. I'm an evangelical. I'm a Muslim. In that way, it becomes any type of group label as much as anything else, Democrat Republican. And it becomes very easily co-opted by people who are in power. Most wars, people say all religion leads to wars. Most wars aren't about religion per se. Leaders use religion to kind of amp people up and to give a justification for what they're doing very rarely. Are they fighting over scripture? I mean, it happens, but it's rare. Yeah, if you boil down like the Catholic Protestant conflict in Northern Ireland, I mean, it's a thousand years of history. It's oppression of the Irish people. It's class, you know, and subjugation. And there's all these other issues there. It's not really just like you're wrong about your Catholic God. You're wrong about your Protestant God. That almost becomes a convenient way to frame it, but it's not the totality of the reality. That's right. People will amp it up because suddenly it's hard to debate with your leaders if they're invoking God and you believe that this is what God wants. Right. If you look at the Bible and this is true of most other scriptures, it's a book of many voices. For all its exhortations toward mercy and compassion, you can find some pretty rough stuff in there too. And what we know is that when people feel that they're under threat, suddenly what comes to their mind are those verses that talk about conquering the enemy and being a soldier for God. So that's thin. If you engage in it in a thick way, what that means is you're engaging in those practices that we've heard. we talked about. You're engaging in contemplative prayer. You're engaging in meditation. You're engaging in practices that foster forgiveness and make you think about your own mortality. So what these will do, as we've said, is push you toward more tolerance, more love, more mercy. It will expand your moral circles that even the enemy falls within it, who you perceive as your enemy. And these things change society, I think if they're done at scale, right? It's like anything else. There are two ways religion is going to affect society. One is the person in power, the dictator, the emperor uses it to say, "Here is what we're going to do, because here's what I believe." The other way is from the bottom up, which is hopefully going to work in democracies. That is, if we all begin to cultivate these practices, it will change what we value. Once our values change, it will change who and what we vote for. I had Senator Chris Murphy on the show a while ago, and he has been lamenting the fact that the progressive left has kind of looked at religion as scats, kind of like, "Oh no, that's for the right." But if you think about it through history, a lot of the civil rights movement was led by spiritual people, 100%. Right? I've spoken about this many times on the show. The civil rights movement will not have happened without the Black Church. Exactly. Not just like the infrastructure of the church, the belief of the church, the history, the fire, the heart, the sacrifice. That's where the ideas of love, intolerance, and care for future generations, and care for each other comes from. Let's not forget where that all came from, from Gandhi, who harnessed so many Hindu ideas about compassion and nonviolence and seeking peace and channeled that into overthrowing the British in transforming the world. So there is a big spiritual idea that led to the liberation of a billion people and then was used in various ways and forms throughout the planet to affect peace. So what Chris Murphy is arguing is that, "Hey, Democrats on the left, we should reclaim that mantle. Let's not seed religion to the far right." Because there is a message here that in many ways is consonant with progressivism. And I think to the extent that we follow the Soul Boom revolution, right, we engage in these practices, it will begin to change those beliefs and values. And hopefully that will trickle up into who we vote for and what sacrifices we're willing to accept. Hey, I wanted to give a quick shout out to our spiritual partners at the Fetzer Institute. They have just launched a brand new shiny website over at Fetzer.org. That's F-E-T-Z-E-R.org. And it's full of spiritual tools for modern struggles, which is exactly what we're trying to cultivate here at Soul Boom. Fetzer believes that most of humanity's problems are spiritual at the root and they're helping people plant some deeply soulful solutions. So I urge you to go poke around their new website, check out Fetzer.org. Thank you, Fetzer Institute, for helping sponsor the show and all of the truly amazing work that you do over there. Fetzer.org, that's F-E-T-Z-E-R.org. Right now you have this such toxic partisanship and each team is yelling at the other team and trying to encourage its base to also hate them to inflame the arguments to seek greater and greater division. Maybe there's a point in time when there's a group of people who are like, "How no, we're not going to do that anymore. We're going to love the other side. We're going to reach out to the other side. We're going to try and get to know them better." And this can come from the teachings of Jesus. It can come from the Buddha. It can come from Bahuala. But being anchored in compassion means you're not going to engage in just hating Maga people or hating lib tarts. Exactly. I mean, it's that hate. It's that escalation of tip for tap violence. That is the problem. And what you're seeing is actually the scaling up from the study we talked about earlier. Right? If someone tries to provoke you and in our studies, people who meditated resisted that provocation, they didn't change their beliefs. They didn't say, "Oh, you're right. I'm wrong." They said, "I want to work with you to tell you why I think what you did is wrong. But I'm not going to cause you any harm. I care about you in some sense to do it." But isn't that working the brain to the limbic part of the brain that's reactive and angry that space? And the prefrontal cortex that came on generations later. And when you move into the literally the higher parts of the brain, you're more conscious and compassionate. Or is that just dumb? I mean, people look all, so are you absolutely saying that? You have something to say about that. Yeah. It's like our knowledge of neuroscience is like this. Every other year, half the stuff we thought we knew was proven wrong. And that's fine. It's early on. But I can try to come back to my friends. That's science. And what I try to tell my friends who are neuroscientists, you know what? The people who developed these practices did it way before. They had any understanding of the way the brain works. And so I'm all for trying to understand how it works in the brain. But ultimately, I don't care. Because if I'm going to try and help you be a more compassionate person, explaining your neurosurcatory isn't going to help you do it. It's engaging these practices. These are going to change your mind and body in certain ways. And it's going to lead to this outcome. And our knowledge of what we do. But David, don't you feel like that happens? If someone bumps into you in the subway and you get that, you know, you rile up it and it feels limbic. It feels animalistic. Like, I'm going to punch him and we all have that capability. And then you can use breath, which is also something that's used in every religious tradition is harnessing the breath, getting in touch with the breath. You can breathe. And then you can kind of feel how it shifts in your brain chemistry to kind of like, he didn't mean to bump into me. I'm just in a bad mood. Let it go. And you can, you can literally breathe it away. You know in the 12-step tradition that says, we pause when agitated or doubtful and ask for the next right course of action. And which is one of them, my favorite things, especially when sending back texts or emails. And you feel like, oh, what? Yeah. You know, because texts can be so toned out. And you feel like responding right out of the gate, right? Pause when agitated or doubtful. Ask for the next right course of action. You stop, you slow down, you think it through. And then you're like, oh, wow, I was being way too reactive. So responding rather than reacting, there's got to be a brain shift. There is. All I'm saying is that I don't, I don't think trying to make arguments about tying it to which part of the neurosurgery is that useful now. But we actually feel like scientists have also been trying to do that with consciousness for a long time. That's gotten us nowhere. Absolutely nowhere. But two things on that point. One is yes. We have all felt that, oh, I'm going to slam this person. And then by engaging in the breath practice that the increased exhalations, longer exhalations increase the parasympathetic response, it makes us less angry, it slows us down, let's us pause. But I want to be careful that we don't make this assumption that we can always work our way out of something that's happened initially wrong and kind of correct it because we do have in us these moral sentiments too. Sometimes you get really angry at someone. But sometimes when you see something beautiful, it just wells up in your chest. And so that intuitive kind of automatic response can be good or bad. And that knee jerk violent response kept us alive for hundreds of thousands of years. And sometimes the worst thing for us is engaging in a lot of thought because there's a very short distance between rational and rational ad that e at the end. Oftentimes we can engage in motivated reasoning, not objective reasoning to justify something that might be morally questionable. We see this a lot. And so neither system that kind of automatic response or our conscious response is always going to be virtuous. And what a lot of these spiritual practices do is they can work on both levels to nudge them toward the more virtuous response. And so the wisdom comes in knowing when and which to use. As you're saying, when you're feeling agitated, it is that practice of the breath. But there are also practices like practicing prayers of gratitude. And in the Jewish tradition, there's this notion of a hundred blessings a day. And the idea is there's a prayer for everything. When you get up in the morning, you thank God that you're awake again. But there's prayers for seeing a beautiful sunset, having a beautiful meal. There's even prayers for being able to go to the bathroom successfully. And so all these things that ways that you can micro dose gratitude throughout the day. The bathroom one does become more important the older you get to. Yeah. I do notice a certain like deeper gratitude for for defecation and and urination. And my body is working and I'm feeling deep, deep satisfaction. Yeah, someone is 57 on with you. But what is that microdosing of gratitude to do? So if you come into my lab we have all these ways that we make people feel grateful. And what have we found that it does for them? It makes them more generous, it makes them more kind, it makes them more helpful, it makes them more moral, it gives them more patience, it makes them cheat less. And so if you are microdosing with these prayers stopping and pausing and feeling grateful throughout the day as a ritual, something that becomes ritualized in you. It's automatic. What it's doing is continually altering that response in your So to speak metaphorically, such that your brain is tuned more toward virtue. So you don't have to correct it. You're not as likely to have that initial, I'm gonna kill you, response in the first place. And so, I think within these traditions, there's just a beauty to them. - Right. - But I've come to learn is how much I don't know and how much for the beauty of science and I truly believe that the scientific method is one of the best ways to understand the world and it's a gift, but it can answer what it can answer. And in these traditions, I've seen evidence, as we've said, of the ways that improves people's lives. And for me, I would say I'm agnostic in the sense that I'm humble enough to say I don't have the answer. Am I part of any faith tradition right now? No. Is the reason I really-- - So how come you're not practicing what you preach? You're like, there are so many great benefits to being a part of a faith community. Like right now, I'm not really practicing anything. - It's a fair question. So I will say I do practice in the sense of contemplation, cultivating gratitude. I use those strategies to help me make my decisions. For me, it's a matter of finding the right fit. And I think part of it is coming from the Catholic tradition like many institutions, there have been failures with the institutions themselves. - Sure. - And finding a place that I feel I belong in terms of an institution, I haven't found the right one yet. And so it's a fair question. I'm kind of like the doctor who's smoked. - Come over to the Baha'i faith, come on over. - So tell me, I know Baha'i is basically the sense that God can be revealed through many different traditions. Is that right? - That's correct, yeah. - There's one God, he reveals himself through these divine teachers, Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, Abraham, Moses, Lord Krishna, and now Baha'u'llah, who's the prophet founder of the Baha'i faith, but it's all the same religion. It's just going to different tribes of people at different eros and humanities development, but it's all part of kind of the spiritual maturation of the human race. And you can immediately say, well, there's such big differences between Buddhism and Islam. It's like, yeah, yes, and there are tons of universalities. And the Buddha's writings weren't written down for hundreds of years after he appeared. Who knows how much more similarity there might have been, but all of these faith traditions are pure. As a Baha'i, I get to be a Buddhist, as a Baha'i, I get to be a Christian, and a Muslim. And I also get the revelation of Baha'u'llah, which is the most appropriate for modern humanity. And so I feel like, oh, I get to kind of be living in the most recent chapter of this ever unfolding book of God's revelation. - See, that makes a lot of sense to me because if there is a God, to me, it makes sense that that God is going to reveal itself to different people in different ways at different times, depending upon what their needs and context are. And you're right. At the base, there's so much overlap in terms of care for humanity, how to be a good person, what it means to live a good life. Yes, maybe Catholics will pray a certain way, and Jews will avoid certain foods, and Hindus will do certain other little practices. And those are all, in my language, different tweaks on developing those spiritual technologies that help us live a good life. But if there is a God to me, it's got to be a God that cares about everybody. And if you look at the traditional way religions form, I mean, we had a scholar on our show, basically, says every year, there's about 100 new faiths that form. - No kidding. - Most of them are like, and gone. - Yeah. - The ones that live, the ones that go on are the ones, well, two ways. Either somebody in power says, this is what we're all gonna be, and you're all gonna do it. Or they speak to people in what their needs are for the moment. And so, you know, your sense of an ongoing revelation of the Baha'i faith, on that level, makes really good sense to me. - Right. - Because things change. And what speaks to me in the here and now. And I will say, if you had asked me 25 years ago, if I believed in God, I'd say no, it's all nonsense. If you ask me now, I'll say, I don't know, but in my heart of hearts, and from what I've seen and kind of the data and the people I talk to, there's a reason we're here and there's something greater than us. I just haven't found the right form that I feel comfortable in in terms of an institutionalized organization to do that, but now I've got to check out Baha'i. - That's beautiful. That's beautiful. Did you just alienate yourself from a whole bunch of social psychologists by saying that? - No. I mean, I'm on this journey anyway. I have people like Steve Pinker, always arguing with me about why I do this. And as I say, religion, when used the wrong way, it's a powerful technology. It can lead people to commit horrible acts or it can lead us to find the best of our humanity. But it's the same with science, right? If you want to, and this is Richard Dawkins, if you want to find the most efficient way to kill the most people, science is your friend. If you want to find the way to save the most people's lives efficiently like we did with COVID vaccines, science is your friend. - But if you want to motivate the most people to commit the mass killing, maybe religion is your best friend. - If you get into religion is your best friend. - So when you look at Hitler or Mao or Paul Pot or Genghis Khan, those were not religiously motivated mass slaughters. - They weren't. But again, religion moves hearts and minds. But if you do it right, and this is going back to that distinction of thin versus thick, not using it as a label, but engaging in the prayer practices, and the ritual practices, and the contemplation and finding opportunities for awe and your attitude. There it leads to good. And on average, and all that data that I quoted at the beginning, on average, it leads to happier, healthier lives. Why don't we want to do this? You know, if I said to you or to anybody in the audience, if you follow my advice, you'll cut your odds of dying over the next decade by 30%. You'll cut your odds of cardiovascular disease and cancer. You'll be happier, you'll find more meaning. What do you want to do it? As a society, everybody would say yes. - If there was a pill. - If there was a pill, go to bars. - Or even a simple practice. - Even a simple practice. We're all looking for the life hack. Like in my world of social psychologists, everybody wants to give you a best seller that will give you the life hack, right? Life hacks are like playing single notes on a piano. These practices are like symphonies. Because what they do is they affect us at the brain level, at the body level, at the level of thought, at the level of social interaction, in ways that come together in a beautiful package that have been honed over time. And so for me, it's like, yes, it takes some effort because it will ask things of you, right? The life hack means, give me the quick easy way to do that. - I want to short cut. In religion, it takes up. - I want a transcendent experience. I'm gonna have a weekend. I'm gonna do aewaska. - Exactly. - Boom, I'm done, then I'm back to my workaholic life. - Exactly, and even if it's a good trip, it may last you a little bit at time. Then you're back to your workaholic life. Religion takes those transcendent experiences and gives you a framework that asks something of you to make yourself and the world better. And those transcendent experiences are the fire, but religion is the plan. And I think every faith has its tenets of what it means to live a good life. And yeah, they have built into them problematic things, like gender disparities and discrimination towards certain people. And those are problems, but most of those are created by power dynamics in human society. Most of them can be changed if we're willing to. I mean, if you look at Jesus, right, Jesus was a radical. Jesus hung around with, he talked to prostitutes, he talked to people who had diseases to the greatest sinners there were. And he would sit with them, right? He had tolerance and love for everyone. If you look at a lot of Christians, did they do that? No. And so the question is, how do we find that level of love and care for each other? The wisdom is in those practices if we embrace them. I'm curious to get your thoughts on the harmony, the essential harmony between science and religion and faith tradition. From a behind faith perspective, science and faith are two wings of a singular reality. There are two different lenses to look at reality. So we look at science to understand the how, how does this work? How does the lights come down and illuminus and how do these cameras capture the image and how are they beamed out over YouTube or Spotify so that you're listening to this conversation. And you can study any one of those things. You can study cameras, you can study media science, you can study lights. And faith is the why, like why are we here? Why are we having this conversation? Why are we live? Why were we given this level of cognizance, of consciousness to be able to be having this kind of fascinating conversation? I hope it's fascinating conversation, folks. So faith allows us to dig into the why and give us kind of a different perspective and understanding of the exact same reality. It's not two different realities. It's one reality. Bye. How do you rectify these two different forces that are often viewed as, you know, in opposition to each other? - So I think, as you're saying, there are science and religion offered two ways to look at the world and to find answers. And I am very much in favor of the scientific method as a way to understand this world. Where the problem comes often is when you approach religion in a fundamentalist way. And I will say a lot of the tension between religion and science, not all religions have it. Like, you know, Judaism embraces science, behind embraces science. Buddhist embraced science. I mean, the Dalai Lama funds a lot of neuroscience work on. - Tibetan Buddhists are going to universities all around India and around the world and studying psychology and how the brain works. - And to be fair, the Catholic Church is pretty in favorable in science. They have their own observatories. They fund science as well. But when you take a very textualist, fundamentalist approach to religion, where everything this text says is true and exactly the way it says it, then it very much constrains you in what you can do. And so that's a problem. And you'll see that in certain areas of Christianity and certain areas of Islam and some other faiths as well. But science can be just as fundamentalist, right? I mean, there are people in my field who like, all of religion is nonsense. There's no proof that God exists. I said, well, is there proof that God doesn't exist? And they'll say, no, but I just can't imagine that God exists. I'm thinking, well, you know, what we scientists need is a little bit of intellectual humility. Like, let's stand our lane, right? What we can prove, we can prove. What we can't prove, I can tell you, and I have no scientific evidence that God exists. Does that mean that God doesn't exist? Well, it kind of leads me potentially to say, well, maybe he doesn't. But I can't say for sure. And so I think intellectual humility is the key on both sides. But many religions view science as, look, God gave us the ability to have this brain to ask these questions about the nature of life, the nature of the cosmos, and discoveries and the awe that comes from them can be thought of as windows into the mind and the beauty of what the creator created. And ultimately, there's this question of, what does it all mean? Who should we care for? Why should we care for? Is there something beyond? And science can't answer that. But I don't think that means we shouldn't study it. Not that we're gonna find the answer, but we shouldn't dismiss it because it's an important part of people's lives and what drives them. And so for me, it's a question of contemplating those questions in a way that religion teaches us. How does that shape our life? I can't tell you what's gonna happen to you when you die. I can't tell you if there's a God. This is again why I say the question of, does God exist? Is not useful for me. But what is useful for me is how do those practices and beliefs lead people to live better lives on an average they do? And as scientists, if we don't take that seriously, we're slowing the science of human progress and flourishing. Now do I believe science, do I believe religion is going to tell us about how the universe formed or the nature of exoplanets, probably not? But that doesn't mean that when it comes to the biggest questions of existence, we should push it to the side. - Very well said, that's beautiful. How would you define the word soul? - As a scientist, I would define soul as basically what we feel to be our essence, that is our concept of ourself, the thing that we reflect on at night when we're trying to decide, are we a good person or are we not a good person? So in that sense, it's kind of a mental construct. For me personally, it's really hard 'cause 25 years ago, I would say, there is no soul. What are you talking about when we're dead, we're in the ground. And yeah, I'm getting older and so people might say, well, Dave, if you're contemplating a soul, maybe it's because you're worried you're gonna die and you don't want to face annihilation. And so you're thinking about it. But in talking to all the people I talk to on my show and all the experiences that they've had, I cannot discount the fact that there is no essence of us that goes beyond in some way. Am I certain that it exists to know? Do I believe it's possible? Yes. Is it probably like what all different religions tell us probably not? But it just seems to me that there is in some way a spark of the divine, however you want to conceive of that in everybody that makes them worthy of value and care. And I'd like to think that that goes on in some way. Dave, thanks so much for coming on SoulBoom. Thanks for having me at Long Last. 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