Review: How God Works

Review of How God Works: The Science Behind the Benefits of Religion by David DeSteno

When it comes to the joys, difficulties, and anxieties of being a human, religions have sought to provide answers in this domain long before we knew anything of the scientific method. Then, ever since science came to the picture, we’ve tended to pit it against religion.

As a result, we have had plenty of attempts (and books) that attempt to ‘prove’ God exists.

Others attempt to prove God doesn’t.

David DeSteno’s “How God Works” does something far more interesting: ignoring the argument of whether God exists or not, he takes the scientific lens and looks at all that thousands of years of religious practice has learned in helping people through life’s travails. As DeSteno says, when it comes to managing the human experience, it would be strange if thousands of years of religious thought didn’t have much to offer.

Indeed, turns out they have discovered quite a lot that we can learn from.

DeSteno frames religious practices as “spiritual technologies” - tools and processes meant to soothe, move, convince, or otherwise affect the mind. It’s an elegant sidestep of theological debates that lets him examine what actually works, divorced from questions of whether the doctrinal matters are “true”.

The result is a brilliant tour through psychology, neuroscience, and anthropology that treats religion seriously without requiring you to believe in it, and enabling us to learn from it.

How God Works is essentially a fascinating artefact of religioprospecting - willingness to test spiritual practices for psychological efficacy regardless of their theological origins. DeSteno argues we need much more of this, in interdisciplinary fashion.

This makes perfect sense; much like pharmaceutical companies have bio-prospected numerous drugs and compounds by researching traditional remedies, I’m confident religions have honed many technologies over thousands of years of unguided research that we can learn from. Strip away the metaphysics if you want, keep what works, and you can adapt it to secular contexts, too, or into whatever frame you are working with.

The empirical evidence of benefits of religion is strong – or, to be more accurate, the benefits of being religious. Just saying you’re religious doesn’t matter much for health and happiness – but taking part in rituals and practices of faith does.

The book is packed with findings how rituals enhance memory through repetition and embodied practice, how public demonstrations of faith (what researchers call CREDs - credibility-enhancing displays) make beliefs stickier, and how cognitive dissonance works in reverse when you can’t easily change your behavior - if you’re a child whose parents dragged you to a service every week, it’s psychologically easier to embrace the beliefs than maintain the dissonance.

The same technologies can be harnessed for darker purposes. While ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are contestable categories, I’m comfortable saying cults represent a failure mode on the negative end.

The bulk of the book is structured around practices for different life phases, from birth to death.

On death, DeSteno walks through how Jewish shiva customs incorporate multiple now-scientifically-proven psychological techniques, such as: mandatory community support (people will show up for seven days), mirrors covered to reduce self-focus (which would intensify negative emotions), and sitting uncomfortably low to the ground (physical discomfort that prevents rumination).

These traditions have evolved as solutions to grief that science is only now validating. As an interesting data point, the data on death anxiety follows a U-curve: strong believers are less anxious, committed atheists are less anxious, but people harboring doubts – agnostics - are the most anxious of all about death. Certainty, it seems, matters more than which certainty you choose.

It’s not only about life-stage-relevant rituals though. One of the more provocative threads explores how gods evolved alongside human societies. Small-society deities tend to be transactional - you make offerings, they help with harvests.

Big-god religions emerged with complex civilizations precisely because an omniscient, moralizing deity who punishes wrongdoers serves as a check on anonymous cheating. It can be an uncomfortable observation to some: our conceptions of the divine may be less about discovering truth and more about solving coordination problems at scale.

DeSteno closes the book with a recommendation on three paths forward:

For some, the best way to find helpful spiritual tools is by deepening their engagement with traditional faiths. For others, it’s loosening the connection to a theology built around a deity while keeping the other aspects of their religion intact. And for a final group, it entails creating something entirely new.

I can very much get on board with this. The framework is pragmatic: deepen engagement with traditional faiths, loosen connection to theology while keeping the useful practices, or create something entirely new. It’s probably not surprising I’m most drawn to the second or third options, although I can see the value in the other paths as well. While not lingering in the new entrants, he does denote the rise of AI-based faiths, noting there is nothing unusual in this per se – religion has never been static. Whether we like what rises is irrelevant to the fact that it happens.

I very much enjoyed the book, which is not to say there wouldn’t be any limitations. The book occasionally oversimplifies complex cultural practices, and while DeSteno mentions cults in passing, the framework doesn’t fully account for how the same technologies can be weaponized (though he does acknowledge that belief in an afterlife has enabled apocalyptic movements). It’s also a relatively short book at 200 pages, and some sections felt like they needed another 20 to properly develop the nuance.

But DeSteno’s core insight stands: whether or not God exists, humans have spent millennia developing psychological tools that demonstrably work. Dismissing all of it because you don’t believe in the theological superstructure would be a little like refusing antibiotics because you don’t believe in the four humors.

The architecture of religion – the rituals, rhythms, and community structures - has been extensively A/B tested across cultures and centuries. We ignore that accumulated wisdom at our peril, and knowledge of the structures is even more important now, as the rate of societal change appears to be outpacing the ability of formal religions to make the necessary modifications.

How God Works succeeds because it respects religious practice without requiring religious belief. It treats spiritual technologies as worthy of serious investigation while maintaining scientific rigor.

• Rating: 4.5 out of 5

• Dog-ear index: 14 (right up at the top end)

• Who is it for: Anyone curious about why religious practices persist; people interested in the psychology of belief independent of theology; those seeking evidence-based approaches to meaning, connection, and life transitions; and anyone convinced they understand how religion works (you probably don’t – and you won’t after reading this book either, but I’m convinced you’ll be less wrong).

[reminder: I highlight important parts of the books I read, and dog-ear the really important pages. The dog-ear index is simply the average number of dog-eared pages per 100 pages. Product link for reference only; please support your local bookstore where possible: https://www.amazon.com.au/How-God-Works-Benefits-Religion/dp/1982142316]]