The Healthiest Worldview
We can have no surer sign of the decay of a province than to see Divine worship held therein in contempt.
Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, 1517
One of the principles that has made America great is freedom of conscience—that each person has the fundamental right to choose their own beliefs and that it is a violation of human rights to coerce others into believing or observing religious practices. As reasonable and logical as this sounds to our modern minds, when the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights were written such ideas were truly revolutionary. Throughout most cultures in human history coercive pressure was brought to bear upon people to force conformity to the culturally accepted religious norm.
Just a cursory review of human history is filled with the abuse, torture, and execution of people based on a difference of religious belief:
Truly, the institutionalization of religious freedom into the very foundation of American law was an absolutely radical yet genius concept. This single principle of liberty, of freedom to think and choose for oneself, is one of the core concepts that has contributed to the rise of the United States as one of the greatest nations in history.
The principle of liberty is an essential reality to how God designed human beings to function, and the New Testament overtly teaches that when it comes to religious beliefs, “each . . . should be fully convinced in their own mind” (Rom. 14:5). However, it is a mistake to confuse the fact that people have the freedom to choose their beliefs with the false idea that all beliefs are equally healthy. They are not! Some beliefs are positively harmful.
Not All Beliefs Are Healthy
Believing cigarette smoking improves health and that tobacco is beneficial as a medicine and helps one breathe better, something doctors thought for years,2 is not as healthy as believing cigarette smoking damages the lungs and contributes to a wide variety of diseases.
History is replete with accounts of people who acted with sincerity and a genuine interest to help but who believed something unhealthy and therefore, regardless of intent, injured rather than healed. For more than two millennia physicians practiced bleeding and leaching to drain “evil humors,” wrongly believing sickness was due to some mysterious bad substance in the blood. George Washington, after falling ill, had half his body’s blood drained, certainly accelerating his demise.3
In the nineteenth century doctors used a variety of poisons such as quinine, arsenic, calomel (mercury), antimony, and strychnine to treat a broad range of conditions.4 They called these toxins “medicines.” But believing these poisons promote wellness is not as healthy as realizing they kill!
And if treating patients over the years with “purging, puking, poisoning, puncturing, cutting, cupping, blistering, bleeding, leeching, heating, freezing, sweating, and shocking”5 were not bad enough, psychiatry jumped in with the infamous lobotomy early in the twentieth century to treat a variety of mental, behavioral, and emotional problems.
False beliefs that result in injury are not restricted to medicine. On October 30,1938, panic broke out across North America as millions believed the world was being invaded by martians. Orson Welles’s dramatization of War of the Worlds, broadcast nationwide on CBS radio, was thought to be real, and “civilians jammed highways seeking to escape the alien marauders. People begged police for gas masks to save them from the toxic gas and asked electric companies to turn off the power so that the Martians wouldn’t see their lights. One woman ran into an Indianapolis church where evening services were being held and yelled, ‘New York has been destroyed! It’s the end of the world! Go home and prepare to die!’”6
In 1633 the Roman Catholic Church tried Galileo and found him guilty of heresy for teaching the earth rotates around the sun. Why did the church fail to embrace the truth? Because its philosophers refused to examine the evidence. Galileo, writing to astronomer Johannes Kepler in 1610, said:
My dear Kepler, I wish that we might laugh at the remarkable stupidity of the common herd. What do you have to say about the principal philosophers of this academy who are filled with the stubbornness of an asp and do not want to look at either the planets, the moon or the telescope, even though I have freely and deliberately offered them the opportunity a thousand times? Truly, just as the asp stops its ears, so do these philosophers shut their eyes to the light of truth.7
Galileo was imprisoned and kept under house arrest until his death in 1642.
Religion and Unhealthy Beliefs
History documents that religious people throughout the world have engaged in destructive practices based on various beliefs that were damaging rather than healing. Sadly this continues in a variety of ways today.
In April 2016 The Guardian reported on an offshoot religious sect in Canyon County, Idaho, known as the Followers of Christ, who believe that medical illnesses should be treated only with prayer and such things as rancid olive oil and wine. Brian Hoyt was a member who, as a twelve-year-old, broke bones in his foot while wrestling. His family treated him with prayer, rubbing rancid olive oil on his leg and having him drink kosher wine. He left the church after watching an infant die from an untreated respiratory infection. In 2015 NBC reported:
Herbert and Catherine Schaible prayed and prayed, but their 2-year-old son Kent died of pneumonia in Philadelphia [in] 2009. It was bacterial pneumonia, and antibiotics could have saved him. They were convicted of child endangerment and involuntary manslaughter and placed on probation but horribly, the same thing happened again just four years later. In 2013, their 8-month-old son Brandon died, again of bacterial pneumonia.
“We believe in divine healing, that Jesus shed blood for our healing and that he died on the cross to break the devil’s power,” Herbert Schaible said in a 2013 police statement. Medicine, he said, “is against our religious beliefs.”
This time the Schaibles were charged with third-degree murder, pleaded no contest and were jailed. Their remaining children went into foster care.8
According to a task force set up by the governor, the child mortality rate for the Followers of Christ is ten times higher than for the rest of the state.9
Several years ago I attended a seminar at Harvard University that focused on inclusion of spirituality in medical care. There were speakers from a variety of religious traditions—Protestant Christian, Roman Catholic, Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish, but also Christian Science. The speaker for the Christian Science tradition reported that while they will seek professional medical treatment for things such as eyeglasses, hearing aids, and setting broken bones, prayer is preferred to medicine to treat most illnesses. I went to the microphone and asked a few questions.
“If your child had bacterial meningitis would your approach be to give antibiotics and pray or to pray only?” The speaker replied that they would pray and give cool compresses and other nonmedical interventions to try to reduce the fever and keep the child hydrated and comfortable but not give antibiotics.
I then asked, “If your child was playing in the backyard and stumbled across a hornets’ nest and was being attacked by the hornets and you had easy access to hornet/wasp spray, would you use the spray or would you drop to your knees and pray to God to deliver your child?” The speaker with absolute certainty in her voice immediately replied that she would use the spray. To which I replied, “Then can you explain the difference as to why you would use a man-made chemical to save your child from attack by bugs in the hornet scenario but refuse to use man-made chemicals to save your child from attack by bugs in the bacterial meningitis scenario, other than the size of the bugs?” She stood there speechless; she looked to the moderator for help and then simply shrugged and said, “I don’t know.”
Destructive religious beliefs are not restricted to physical illness. Today, millions of religious people live in fear, insecurity, and anxiety due to some belief they have about God.
Yes, we are all free to determine our beliefs, but freedom to choose one’s beliefs doesn’t determine the reliability, health, value, and truthfulness of said beliefs. Genuinely healthy beliefs are those grounded in reality, in fact, in truth, in wisdom, and in harmony with how God actually designed reality to function.
In my book The God-Shaped Brain: How Changing Your View of God Transforms Your Life, I documented the impact various religious views have on our brain. I will not reproduce that work here but summarize with this: God-concepts that promote love, forgiveness, compassion, beneficence, reasoning, thinking, and the pursuit of truth and evidence while respecting the freedom of conscience are healing to the brain. God-concepts that incite fear; promote hostility, intolerance, conflict, and resentment; shut down thinking; undermine reasoning; minimize truth and evidence; and lead to the coercion of others are damaging to the brain. Our belief systems really do matter. Beliefs that are grounded in reality—how life actually works and functions—and that move people toward love, forgiveness, and so on are healthiest.
The good news is that regardless of what beliefs one holds we are free to change them. We can, with examination of evidence, reason things through from cause to effect, make careful experiment, test our ideas against reality, and replace erroneous ideas for ever-increasingly more accurate ones. When we do, a positive physical transformation occurs in our brains and bodies. But clinging to unhealthy beliefs activates the brain’s stress circuitry and the immune response, increasing inflammation and causing a subsequent increased risk of type 2 diabetes, heart attacks, strokes, loss of bone density, and depression, all of which accelerate aging and increase the risk of dementia.10
People don’t like to be wrong, so unless a person has reached a certain level of maturity, a level at which they can say, “I am finite; there is an infinite universe of information (or an infinite God) and knowledge that I don’t know. Therefore, while this is what I currently believe to be true, I am open to update and change my beliefs when the evidence persuades me that a new understanding is healthier, more reliable, and sustained by how reality actually functions,” then their fear of being wrong not only closes their minds to healthier understandings but also often results in hostility toward others who believe differently.
This means the healthiest mindset is one that loves to grow and advance in truth as it is understood and comprehended rather than maintaining a mindset that believes it already possesses the truth and therefore resists any new insights. Those who love and seek truth are less anxious and less fearful because they are open to modifying their thinking as new credible evidence is presented. However, those who rest on tradition, custom, or established institutional constructs often experience more fear and anxiety through life from the stress of new ideas and perspectives that threaten their current view. This is especially true if they have already rejected truth in order to defend their historical stance. I have seen both scientist and theologian manifest both types of thinking—open and interested and growing in greater truth, and closed and hostile and unwilling to consider ideas that don’t comport with their previously stated perspectives. What I did not explore in my previous book is the impact belief systems without God—agnostic and atheistic—have on our ability to move toward an ever-increasing reality-based understanding of the world and method of living.
Science and Unhealthy Beliefs
All human beings, whether religious or secular, scientist or layperson, can believe falsehoods and are vulnerable to being resistant to advancing truth, evidence, and new ideas. Our challenge is to develop the ability to think, reason, weigh evidence, and come to conclusions for ourselves so that we can eliminate distortions from our thinking and refine our belief systems to be more consistent with how reality functions.
Unfortunately, history demonstrates that it is not an easy thing to change beliefs. For the majority of people, once they have formed a belief, acted on that belief, and taught that belief, they become resistant to evidence that would replace the false belief with a more accurate one—even among those of science who claim their beliefs are based on observable evidence.
Scientists are also human and their minds build belief systems that can be just as resistant to new evidence that would refute their current paradigms as a pastor, priest, or theology professor would, and history proves this to be true.
In 1867 Joseph Lister, an English surgeon, after reading a paper on germ theory by Louis Pasteur, pioneered antiseptic techniques for surgery. He published six articles that year in the Lancet describing the new techniques: using a dilute solution of carbolic acid in sterilizing instruments, preparing the skin before surgery, washing hands before wound probing, and so on. His protocols resulted in marked reductions in postoperative infections and improved survivals. He visited the United States in 1868 and again in 1876, presenting his findings in lectures to leading American doctors. And how did US doctors respond to this evidence? They refused to believe it, which resulted in tragedy.
On July 2, 1881, James Garfield, the twentieth president of the United States, was shot by Charles Guiteau. Over the course of the next several months the top doctors in America repeatedly probed the wound track with unwashed fingers and unsterilized instruments, refusing to believe the evidence of Pasteur and Lister. Sadly, President Garfield died September 19, 1881—not from damage caused by the bullet but after a long, arduous course with infection. He was only forty-nine years of age.
Today hypertension (high blood pressure) is called the silent killer and is recognized as a serious health problem, contributing to strokes, heart attacks, renal failure, and early death if not treated. However, when high blood pressure was first discovered doctors refused to believe it was something to be concerned about.
The greatest danger to a man with high blood pressure lies in its discovery, because then some fool is certain to try and reduce it.
J. H. Hay, 193111
Hypertension may be an important compensatory mechanism which should not be tampered with, even were it certain that we could control it.
Paul Dudley White, 193712
Perhaps one of the greatest false beliefs scientists continue to cling to today is an idea that has its origin in ancient Greek paganism: spontaneous generation—that life originates spontaneously from nonliving matter. Even though science has proven this does not occur,13 even though there has never been one example of nonliving matter spontaneously giving rise to life, many scientists still cling to the false belief that life began in this way. They now call it abiogenesis and have added a long explanation of how it might have happened, but after cutting through all the distractions the bottom line is the same: life originating in nonliving matter.14
For life to happen three divergent elements are necessary, and they must work together harmoniously: matter, energy, and information (organized data). Consider as an analogy a computer: for a computer to be operational there needs to be hardware (matter), electricity (energy), and software (information). The computer will not function with only two of these three elements. Nor will it work if they do not work harmoniously and in proper balance—too much energy and the circuits fry; matter that doesn’t conduct energy to the proper parts or insulate in the proper places and the computer malfunctions.
All living organisms require the same. There must be matter, an energy source, and organized operational information that contains the base programming directing the functions of the operating systems of the organism. The atoms that make up the various molecules (DNA, proteins, etc.) would be the matter, energy would be from the various chemical and ionic reactions going on within the organism, and the information is found encoded within specific sequences in the DNA strands.
Scientists who deny God focus entirely upon the physical components that are the building blocks of living organisms, the DNA, proteins, and so on. They ignore entirely the complex information stored within the DNA itself. Where did that information originate? The idea that living beings originated on their own without any intelligent input would be similar to believing the following scenario: a storm arose with high winds, rain, and lightning that raged for years; during this storm the strong winds blew rocks and sand at high speeds until some were shattered and worn down and formed letters of the alphabet. This is analogous to believing that the random forces of nature mixed together in some chemical soup with lightning strikes and eventually formed DNA molecules. Even if we were to accept that this happened (which is a big leap of blind, evidence-less faith), scientists still ignore the most critical aspect of what is required for life—the encoded information contained within the organized DNA sequences. Having an alphabet does not mean we have usable and functional information. To believe that random forces brought life about would require we not only believe the alphabet formed on its own but, beyond this, that we also believe the winds, rains, and lightning strikes—all on their own—organized the letters into the entire Encyclopedia Britannica. Yet this is exactly what millions of good-hearted, honest, thinking people do believe.
But why would thinking, honest-of-heart scientists choose to believe something that the evidence refutes? Because the historical alternative belief system is significantly more destructive! What is the historical alternative belief system—the one that reasonable people reject? The belief in an all-powerful god who functions no differently than the worst despots in human history—a god who says, “Love me or I will burn you in hell forever.”
This grotesque god-construct, rightly rejected by reasonable people, is pointedly described by Richard Dawkins in his book The God Delusion:
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.15
Sadly, this warped god-construct—intolerant, dictatorial, capricious, arbitrary, and severe—became the view promulgated in theory and practice by Christianity through much of history. This distorted view of God led to the complete reversal of Jesus’s teaching to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt. 5:44) and resulted in the Crusades, the Inquisition, burning dissenters at the stake, and the closing of millions of minds to the pursuit of truth that resulted in the Dark Ages. And the Dark Ages was a period of superstitious beliefs, irrational religious practices, and incalculable cruelty in the name of God.
The Unhealthiest Belief about God
The New Testament church lived quite differently than Christians in the Dark Ages. New Testament Christians refused to war against Rome, lived communally and in peace with their neighbors, shared to help others, and often died as martyrs. By all accounts a New Testament Christian would have made a great neighbor—helpful and kind but never pushy or judgmental, seeking to uplift but always respectful of the individuality of others. But all this changed with the acceptance of a single false idea—that God’s laws function no differently than human laws, which are imposed rules that require the rule giver to inflict punishment for rule breaking.
But by recognizing God’s laws as design protocols on which reality is constructed—the laws of physics, gravity, thermodynamics, health, and so on—we realize deviations from them are inherently damaging and result in pain, suffering, and death. In such a worldview God is never the source of inflicted pain, suffering, and death but is instead the Designer who seeks to heal and restore any of his creatures who will let him.16
In her book Finding Truth, Nancy Pearcey describes the problem for those who deny that nature’s laws were specifically designed by a higher intelligence:
The origin of the universe has given rise to a puzzle known as the fine-tuning problem. The fundamental physical constants of the universe are exquisitely balanced, as though on a knife’s edge, to sustain life. Things like the force of gravity, the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, the electromagnetic force, the ratio of the mass of the proton and the electron, and many other factors have just the right value needed to make life possible. If any of these critical numbers were changed even slightly, the universe could not sustain any form of life. For example, if the strength of gravity were smaller or larger than its current value by only one part in 1060 (1 followed by 60 zeroes), the universe would be uninhabitable.17
These various laws are the laws the Creator put in place when he constructed and built reality. Violations of these laws are inherently destructive to those who break them—whether they believe in God or not. In day-to-day life we might simply call them the laws of health. Pearcey goes on to say: “What makes the fine-tuning problem so puzzling is that there is no physical cause to explain it. ‘Nothing in all of physics explains why its fundamental principles should conform themselves so precisely to life’s requirement,’ says astronomer George Greenstein.”18 Yet millions of good-hearted, thinking people prefer to deny this reality and believe it all happened by random chance—why? Because the alternative historic view is one of an arbitrary deity whose laws are not the protocols reality functions on but are merely imposed rules enforced by inflicted punishment.
I submit that the single greatest distortion of reality in human history, the single greatest false belief that has resulted in more harm to humanity than any other, is the idea that God’s laws function like human laws—which has resulted in people worshiping gods who function no differently than they do! I further submit, if Christianity had always taught that God’s laws are the design parameters on which life is constructed to operate, then Christianity would not have devolved into a tyrannical, authoritarian system intolerant of diverse ideas but would have embraced the principles of liberty of conscience and encouraged reasoning and thinking, and the split with science would never have happened.
There is a design law (how things actually work) in psychiatry called modeling, or by beholding we are changed (2 Cor. 3:18). This is a testable law, a design parameter on how life actually works. Our brains do rewire based on what we spend time reading, watching, thinking about, and worshiping and the activities in which we engage. If you worship a cruel, tyrannical dictator and believe it is a lack of faith to think and ask questions, such beliefs and actions will transform you into a person who is less tolerant, less open to evidence, and more willing to use force to coerce others.
This dictator version of God dominated the world during the Dark and Middle Ages and led religious authorities to resist evidence and persecute those such as Galileo who presented ideas contrary to the orthodox view.
Scientists who reject a dictator god who is the source of pain, suffering, and death have not rejected the Creator God that Jesus came to reveal but have rejected the lie, the false god that should rightly be rejected by all thinking people. The door remains open for all reasonable people, scientist or theologian, to integrate evidence, to come together and share our best ideas, insights, and evidences and then test them, eliminating those that are proven false, holding to ideas that are proven true, and keeping our minds open to possibilities not yet considered.
Why do this? Because beliefs without evidence, beliefs that are contradictory, beliefs that are not rational are damaging. There are two grand beliefs: a godless universe and a God-created universe. Under the God-created-universe theme there are two grand beliefs: a benevolent God of love and gods that are something other than love. The healthiest belief system—which results in greater health, longer life, and reduced dementia risk—is the belief in a benevolent God. The next healthiest view is a humanistic godless view in which human altruism, honesty, and freedom of conscience are valued. The worst or unhealthiest belief system is the belief in a punishing dictator god.
Our beliefs, attitudes, and thought processes really do matter; they play a critical role in our overall physical and mental health. Unhealthy beliefs increase stress and activate inflammatory pathways in our bodies and thereby accelerate the aging process and increase the risk of dementia. A study of five thousand individuals found that neuroticism—which included feelings of guilt, anger, anxiety, and depression—was associated with a greater risk for dementia. In contrast, conscientiousness was shown to be protective against dementia.19
Our mindset, what we think and believe, really does make a difference. Ellen Langer, a professor of psychology at Harvard, in her book Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility, describes her remarkable experiment that seemed to turn the clock back on aging. In 1979 she recruited men age seventy-five and placed them in a retreat in which for one week they were to pretend it was 1959—twenty years earlier. During that week they were secluded at a facility built to authentic 1959 details. They could only access reading materials, magazines, and other media that were available in 1959. And they were given IDs with their fifty-five-year-old pictures on them and instructed to pretend it was 1959. They underwent testing of physical strength, posture, perception, vision, cognition, and memory before and after this one-week retreat—and the results? In every measure they improved! They had greater flexibility, better posture, improved hand strength, improved eyesight by 10 percent, improved memory by 10 percent, and more than half even had higher IQ scores. And amazingly, when before and after pictures were shown to random strangers asking them to pick which picture the person was younger in, the strangers chose the after pictures as looking younger!20 What we think and what we think about has a real, measurable effect on our bodies and health—either improving or worsenening them.
Unhealthy belief systems activate the brain’s fear circuitry, which in turn activate inflammatory pathways in the body, which accelerate aging and increase the risk of dementia. This is due to chronic increased stress on our brains and bodies.
Not only does negative thinking activate stress pathways, which increase inflammation and contribute to more disease and increased risk of death, but also positive thinking has been linked to reduced risk of death. Researchers examined prospective data from over seventy thousand women and found those with the highest levels of optimism had significantly reduced risk of dying from all causes over the next eight years when compared to those with the lowest levels of optimism. The reduced risk of dying remained after accounting for variables such as healthy living practices, baseline health, and rates of depression.21 A healthy, positive mental attitude is good for us and helps slow the aging process!
LEARNING POINTS
ACTION PLAN: THINGS TO DO