Fear of Death Makes People Into Believers (of Science)

sciencehabit writes "Nothing, some say, turns an atheist into a believer like the fear of death. 'There are no atheists in foxholes,' the saying goes. But a new study suggests that people in stressful situations don't always turn to a higher power. Sometimes, they turn to science. Both athletes preparing for a big race and students asked to write about their own death showed a 15% stronger belief in science than those under less stressful situations (abstract). 'In stressful situations people are likely to turn to whatever worldviews and beliefs are most meaningful to them,' says study co-author, Anna-Kaisa Newheiser, a psychologist at Yale University. And many people find the scientific worldview more compatible with their own."

Comments

Science works

[MrEricSir]

There's nothing to "believe" in when it comes to science (it works either way) but if the fear of death makes people interested, that's great.

After all, science has brought us not only longer lives, but more fulfilling, healthier lives with less suffering. If you're worried about death it's just sensible to turn to science.

Re:Science works

[wonkey_monkey]

And my mom chose to believe what she felt God was telling her instead of what the doctor was telling her.

Thousands of other people die doing exactly the same. Were they not good enough to be saved? Sometimes people get lucky, and for some reason some people just can't accept this and have to invent some driving force behind the supposed miracle to literally sing their praises to, and mumble at in a cold building once a week.

In numerous cases, her intuition was right and he was wrong.

Sorry, but when it comes to medical treatments, your mom does not count as "numerous cases." She is one case of many, and quite likely an outlier. How many other people have disregarded their doctor's advice, used their own intuition, and subsequently died horrible painful deaths? You wouldn't be here telling us the story if that had happened (as it sadly has to so many people).

Statistically speaking, you're an idiot if you play the lottery. Any mathematician will tell you not to do it. Yet somewhere out there, at least one person usually wins, and for that one person, it's a wonderful bit of luck that wouldn't have happened if they'd listen to the statisticians. But it's random chance.

Here's another one. If a thousand people around the world toss a coin ten times, statistically speaking it's likely that one of them will get ten heads. If that person came here and wrote a post like yours, proclaiming it a miracle and praise be to the FSM, can you see why we'd be right to dismiss it? If so, why shouldn't we dismiss your anecdote as evidence of nothing but random chance?

And he changed his treatment methods after her success even though it didn't make logical sense, because it had the best results.

If that's really true, I don't want him having anything to do with the treatment of me or my family members.

(Incidentally, that's HOW he became the world's foremost expert on her condition.)

Incidentally, that's why we have bullshit like homeopathy. It "worked" once or twice, by coincidence, and people seized on it with both hands and won't be disabused of the ridiculous notion despite all the subsequent scientifically gained evidence that it's rubbish.

Re:Science works

[Black Parrot]

She lived longer than all his other patients, double over the next highest person.

Ummm. The fact that she lived longer than other patients just means that she lived longer than other patients. I am sure that some patients lived a lot less than other patients. It had nothing to do with god. It had to do with the fact that people react to diseases and treatments differently. Some people live longer than some people who live longer than some people.

IMO the common conceit that "God healed/rescued me/Granny", while letting all the others suffer and die, is the very pinnacle of arrogance.

Re:Science works

[bzipitidoo]

Ahh, such simple minded thinking.

In science, there is no believing. Science is not about belief and faith. Science is not a religion. Science is facts, evidence, and logical deductions. The Big Bang is a theory that fits the facts we have. Is it right or wrong? Likely it is more subtle than that, and is correct as far as it goes, but is not anywhere close to a complete explanation. It certainly has difficult problems. There is no faith involved in that.

As to the idea that our observations may not be reliable, that what we see, hear, and measure may not reflect reality, and pretending otherwise is just acting on faith, this is an old problem in philosophy. How do we know anything we sense is real? We don't know. Is it faith to act as if what we sense is real? No! We accept that what we sense is reality, not out of faith, but because it doesn't make sense to follow any other line of reasoning. Imperfect though our understanding of reality is, and perhaps must be, we can still work with it, and we have. We would never have been able to make integrated circuits, radios, and all the other marvels of modern techonolgy if we didn't have some understanding of apparent reality.

What if we go with a hypothesis that we aren't sensing reality, that there is a deeper reality that we can't sense? Assuming it exists, what could the nature of this deeper reality be? If it is a supernatural reality, then that ends the scientific inquiry right there. Science is only about the natural, not the supernatural. Soon as the supernatural is invoked, it's all chaos. Anything at all might be true of a supernatural reality.

If you claim there is a deeper reality and it is natural, but that it cannot be observed, that makes things difficult, but hardly insurmountable. How can we know it even exists, if there is no way to observe it? Without any way to sense it, perform experiments on it, or extrapolate its effects to things we can observe, we can only speculate wildly. First, anyone making such a claim ought to have some sort of rationale for it. We do speculate, with ideas like that our universe is only a part of a multiverse, or that our reality is actually not 4 dimensions, but 10 or 26, with the extra dimensions being so small that we can't perceive them. This is not reaching for faith, this is simply speculation. Even if we can't sort this out now, we may be able to in the future.

Re:Science works

[ranton]

Science and religion are not intrinsically opposed to one another, but answer different questions with very little overlap from one to the other.

I contend that science and religion have 100% overlap in their intended usage. Both science and religion are used to give us the answer to "why?". Nothing more; nothing less.

When you talk about finding purpose and meaning you are really talking about the human tendency to anthropomorphize just about everything. There is meaning and purpose behind our actions, or at least we have that perception (depending on whether free will exists). That is what incorrectly causes us to project meaning and purpose into all aspects of life. It is a very useful trait, and our very ability to do this is part what separates us from other animals. But it is also a big flaw in our brain's ability to reason properly, along with plenty of other natural biases that adversely affect our ability to make good decisions. Honestly it is a miracle that we are able to think the way we do at all, so it is reasonable that our capacity for thought has many problems.

Science does currently have an answer to the question of purpose and meaning. It is that our primitive brains made those concepts up. Luckily a well trained mind is sometimes able to identify biases such as these and rule them out during decision making.

Re:Science works

[ranton]

The problem with using words like belief and faith is that they have ugly connotations. A belief is simply a state in which someone holds a premise to be true. Faith is simply having confidence in something. But unfortunately when most people talk about faith, they mean a belief that is not based on proof. They mean having a level of conviction high enough that no matter what evidence presents itself, they will still hold onto their beliefs. This is primarily why most scientifically minded people reject using the word Faith, even though they still have faith in many things based on most definitions of the word.

That depends on how you define "religion". True Religion is living the lifestyle necessary to prove your beliefs.

I am not sure where you got that definition. Every definition of religion I have ever seen relates a system of beliefs with a supernatural and spiritual component. You really need to bastardize the definition of religion to claim that science is a religion. If you are willing to rewrite the definitions of common words then you can probably "win" just about any argument you want to.

As soon as Science _dictates_ how a person can understand truth it has become a religion.

No, it becomes a religion when your beliefs have supernatural explanations. That is it.

I agree that there are ways to discover truth without the use of the scientific method. Early humans learned that plants need water to grow long before we formalized the use of hypothesis, experiments, and theories (although you could contend that we were informally doing that). Science does not claim that the scientific method is the only way to find truth, although it does claim it is the best method we have found so far.

Technically Science is NOT a system of acquiring truth but about removing ignorance. (A quite successful masculine path as everyone is aware of.

Um, ignorance means a lack of accurate knowledge. Truth means having accurate knowledge. So saying something is about remove ignorance is the exact same thing as saying something is about gaining truth.

The other system IS a way of acquiring truth. Since it is the feminine path it is no wonder most men chose to remain ignorant and blindly ignore it.

No, religion is about holding onto beliefs so you can be confident that you have found the truth. Just believing in something does not get you closer to the truth, it just increased your confidence. Accurate knowledge (truth) is a system of justified true propositions. Religion is about holding onto beliefs based on faith, not going out and discovering justifications for those beliefs.

That is why _mind_ NOT space is the final frontier. Space is finite. The Mind is infinite.

This is just silly. I honestly didn't even read this last sentence until after I started responding, and now realize that I probably shouldn't have even bothered.

Re:Science works

[__aaltlg1547]

Respectfully, I disagree. Religion and science are antithetical in nature. In religion, a thing is believed based on appeal to authority and tradition. In science, a thing is shown to be true (or true as best we can figure) based on demonstrable evidence. There is no room in science for accepting propositions based on appeals to authority or tradition. Nor is there any room in religion for the idea that basic assumptions can be tossed aside just because they conflict with evidence.

Belief in science?

[c0lo]

WTF? The base of science is doubting everything - if you can't falsify a hypothesis, that hypothesis is outside the area of science.

Is this some insidious way to push towards the position that science and religion are both a matter of belief?

Re:Belief in science?

[femtobyte]

WTF? The base of science is doubting everything

Not doubting everything; there are a few assumptions held --- though they may seem so "obvious" that you don't even realize making them. For example, the assumption that the universe is somewhat "repeatable" and amenable to mathematical and logical description: if an experiment about one thing in one circumstance can't tell you anything about other things in other circumstances, then science is entirely useless.

Atheism isn't for sissies

[Anonymous Coward]

I usually phrase it more diplomatically, but often people assume atheism is some sort of conscious cop-out to avoid all the hard morality that supposedly stems from religion. If the opening for discussion presents itself, I always soft-sell atheism on a negative note. Atheism offers shit for consolation on the issue of death. Friends, loved ones, family, parents, children, all of them are just gonna die and turn to dirt. That is a real shit sandwich atheism gives you right there, and there's a lot more where that came from. In this way I can steer the conversation in the direction of "People aren't atheists because they prefer not having to deal with religion, but just because they think it's the truth."

Frankly if I thought the idea of a sky-fairy running a magical kingdom keeping us all immortal forever was even remotely plausible, I'd convert yesterday. But, frankly, it ISN'T even remotely plausible, which is why I'm an atheist. Clearly some of the people in this article made the jump. Good for them. They get some consolation in their time of grief. Being right is overrated.

Re:Bible: word of God

[K. S. Kyosuke]

and everything will suddenly make sense

That sounds like the experience of a recently inflicted paranoid schizophrenic.

foxholes

[Black Parrot]

There are no atheists in foxholes,' the saying goes.

And it's a fucking stupid thing to say: The mere fact that they're in a foxhole shows that they're putting their faith in boring old non-supernatural dirt to save them, not in their god(s).

Re:foxholes

[Waffle Iron]

I always thought that was a stupid analogy anyway. There are also no unsoiled underpants in foxholes. But very few people think that means we should all go around shitting our pants on a regular basis.

Living by what your brain spews out under severe overstress doesn't make much sense. It's like using results from your computer that it calculated while you were zapping the motherboard with a Tesla coil.

WTF is "belief in science"?

[Anonymous Coward]

So there is this process we use to help make predictions. Its called "science". It helps us form predictions that correlate with reality. Some people "believe" in it, I just use it. When I need to hammer in a nail, I use a tool: a hammer. When I need to make a prediction which I would like to correlate with reality, I use a tool: science.

Science is a tool: it helps you do specific kinds of things. It is useful.

This reminds me of my "creationism is useless" argument. Evolution helps you make predictions which correlate with reality. Its part of the science tool, and its very useful. Creationism does not help you make predictions that correlate with reality. Thus, its not useful in the scientific respect. Even if its true, its not science, so it should be taught in the department that covers that kind of thing (history) it you teach it at all. On the other side, evolution, even if incorrect, is useful science, and thus belongs in science classes.

We didn't stop teaching Newtonian mechanics because relative proved it wrong. They still make useful predictions that correlate with reality. Its still science, and we should still teach it, even-though we know its wrong.

Why does no one make that point? Maybe because they don't know what science is? (It would really suck to not to have science in my toolbox!)

Science vs religion: Prepare for boredom!!

[drrilll]

Seriously. I believe I have heard every single argument from either side about a thousand times, and that was just this morning. Agree to disagree already. Maybe find another hobby that isn't a complete waste of time. If I did happen to have an interest in someone's belief one way or the other, I would ask about it.

Re:Bible: word of God

[The1stImmortal]

I'm feeding a troll I'm sure - but I'm in a weird mood. So stuff it.

I love the circular reasoning in "The bible is the proven word of God. You really don't need any more proof than that." - so it's proven by the fact that it is proven. Hm. Rightio then.

Then there's a no-true-scotsman fallacy of if you've read it and don't believe it, then you've not really read it. Hm. Rightio then.

I'd love to understand why Bible believers think that, for non-believers, the Bible in particular is special?
Seriously - for someone who already doesn't believe in god(s), what would make them believe the Bible over the Torah, the Qur'an, the I Ching, the Guru Granth Sahib, the Principia Discordia or "There and Back Again" as a text of divine inspiration?

Finally - I have read the Bible several times. Fascinating read really (till you get to all the post-gospel stuff near the end to the new testament - I really don't care about early christians' "How are you doing over there then?" letters for example...)
But enlightenment did not come. Instead, the more I read the Bible the more I find it's just a curious collection of old folk tales and legends (old testament) combined with a dogma assembled by committee (new testament).
And Christians rarely live their lives strictly according to scripture btw. The average christian violates an awful lot of it whilst handwaving huge chunks as being "irrelevant" in the modern church (!). Which is fine if you accept that you're not living strictly according to the book. But don't pretend you are.

Finally - frankly, if it were written today the Bible would have a very rough time with censors. It's seriously lurid in parts. Incest, rape, slavery (both labour-based and sexual), extremely graphic violence, inciting racial hatreds... Much of which is presented as a good thing! It would probably be banned these days. I certainly will consider carefully when my son will be ready to understand the adult themes in the Bible for sure. I don't want to give him nightmares.

Observation:

[fyngyrz]

'There are no atheists in foxholes,' the saying goes

This is not a flaw with atheists, or in atheism. This is a problem with foxholes, and any other situation where you become so stressed that you can no longer think clearly.

Re:Observation:

[cusco]

My dad had a customer who had been a paratrooper in Normandy. My brother made some dumb remark about 'no atheists in foxholes', and Dick snapped back at him, "More atheists are made in foxholes than anywhere else, because no god worth worshiping would allow something like that to go on!"

Re:Observation:

[Joce640k]

It's almost like he *wants* a decent percentage of us to go to Hell, right?

Re:Observation:

[TheSeatOfMyPants]

In most uses of it, there's also no consciousness, which hopefully would also mean no inhibitions, fear, or concern about stress.

Do humans cause birth defects and disease as well?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do humans cause birth defects and disease as well?

How about you shut the fuck up and go work full-time with the sick and the poor.

Fuck you and fuck your gods, all of them.

But He doesn't like cooperation

[TrekkieGod]

Don't blame God for shit that is caused just because people don't know how to maturely get along with other people.

Have you read the Bible? Because if you believe what's written there, people were getting along just fine, learning technology and how to make bricks instead of using stones. Building a city and within that city a tower taller than any ever built before, as a monument to what they could accomplish together. "And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth." (Genesis 11:5-9)

So yeah, His response to people maturely getting along with other people was to scatter them all over the Earth, and making them speak different languages to make cooperation more difficult.

For God to disallow it would be to interfere with the the freely made choices that created that situation, invalidating the very purpose of giving us free will in the first place. If God were to just turn around and stop us every time we make a wrong choice, then what on earth would the point be of giving us a free will?

Unless we're freely making making the right choices, right? Then He gets to interfere, and it somehow doesn't invalidate free will.

Look pal, I don't have a problem with people who believe in God, or have any religion whatsoever. As long as religion isn't brought into science classrooms, or used to make government policy, I'm fine with it. I do, however, hate this tendency of religious people to praise God for everything that turns out well, without giving credit to the work humans put into it (You walked way from that horrible car accident: clearly God saved you. The engineers designing the crumple zone and mercilessly doing crash tests obviously had nothing to do with it), while simultaneously blaming humans and leaving God blameless for everything that's bad (God didn't put you in foxholes, people's decisions did it). You can't do that. Either you believe He interferes with the world, in which case He has to take part of the blame for our suffering, or you believe He doesn't interfere with the world, in which case He doesn't get part of the credit for our successes.