Belief brings benefits
Get this. A Canadian study published in the flagship journal of the Association for Psychological Science concludes that religious people deal better with stress and mistakes than people who don't believe anything in particular. The authors conducted experiments to examine the effects of religious belief on coping skills and determined that religion has the power to "act as a buffer against anxious reactions," insulating people from distress by providing meaning and structure.
"If thinking about religion leads people to react to their errors with less distress and defensiveness," write Michael Inzlicht and Alexa M. Tullett in Psychological Science (June 2010), "this effect may translate to religious people living their life with greater equanimity than nonreligious people, being better able to cope with the pressures of living in a sometimes hostile world."
But you can't fake it. The benefit of reduced anxiety is only available to bonafide believers, people who actually buy into a belief system. And religion is unsettling to non-believers. The experiments also showed that atheists "reacted to their own errors more defensively, responding as if the primes [subliminally planted religious thoughts] challenged their system of meaning and explanation."
Beyond anxiety
Well, most of us can use all the help we can get. Worry, fear and feelings of dread are some of the least favourite parts of being human. Anxiety is no fun; it's the opposite of relaxation. Nothing in us responds positively to stressors that make us irritable, restless and apprehensive. In fact, we usually take great pains to alleviate such feelings whenever they arise. And they typically surface in situations where the trouble is unavoidable; where matters are out of our control; where we don't understand what's going on.
All of this may help to explain why religious activity is as old as human history. Since time immemorial people have looked for ways to sort out the unanswerable questions of the world and allay anxious feelings about life and its aftermath.
This doesn't mean that religion is just some sort of cerebral placebo, what Karl Marx famously called "the opiate of the masses." Inzlicht and Tullett are careful to observe that it isn't necessarily religion per se that supplies the soothing effects. They posit, rather, that any system that provides meaning and structure can satisfy this basic human need. "Religion may not be so special," they conclude. "Many varieties of beliefs could serve a palliative function if they allow people to feel that their world is stable, understandable and predictable."
Core themes
But the authors also point out that religion does explain many things. "One of the core themes of this research is that religious beliefs are a natural byproduct of the way human minds and brains work, meeting a number of people's myriad needs, the most pressing of which may be the need to understand," they write.
This natural desire for the kind of questioning that gave birth to religion seems to agree with the worldview presented in our Christian Scriptures. We are told in the earliest chapters of the Bible, for example, that human beings are created in God's image. The Creator and the creation are inextricably linked at some deep level that may or may not some day be mapped and defined in scientific, neurophysiological terms.
The New Testament reinforces the suggestion that all of creation is a summons to God-consciousness. "Ever since the creation of the world His eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things He has made," writes the apostle Paul (Romans 1:20).
Longing to be on the good side of the all-powerful explainer-of-all-things is part and parcel of who we are as human beings. Religious practices provide subtle intimations of the perfect understanding we crave, if only like the fleeting glimpse of a celebrity behind the darkened window of a limousine. Humanity yearns for peace that passes understanding. But by the time we get the full explanation of how that works, the experience itself is likely to matter much more.
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