Religion helps people cope with death, right? There’s some evidence to the contrary…
March 17, 2009 — Terminally ill cancer patients who relied on their religious faith to help them cope with their disease were more likely to receive aggressive medical care during their last week of life, a study shows.
Patients who engaged in what the researchers called positive religious coping, which included prayer, meditation, and religious study, ended up having more intensive life-prolonging interventions such as mechanical ventilation or cardiopulmonary resuscitation.
The study is published in the latest edition of The Journal of the American Medical Association.
The patients who reported a high level of positive religious coping at the start of the study were almost three times as likely to receive mechanical ventilation and other life-prolonging medical care in the last week of life as patients who said they relied less on their religious beliefs to help them deal with their illness.
Curiously, the researchers missed an obvious explanation for this in their assessment:
It is not entirely clear why terminally ill patients who report relying more on their religion would choose more life-prolonging medical interventions.
But researchers say these patients may be less likely to believe their doctors when they are told there is no hope.
“There may be a sense that it is really not in the hands of the doctors to decide when to give up,” study researcher Holly G. Prigerson, PhD, of Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute tells WebMD. “Refusing some of these very aggressive medical interventions may be seen as giving up on the possibility that God might intervene.”
Or… duh… maybe religion really doesn’t help people cope with death, and they’re fucking scared of dying. Pardon my colloquialism, but this is a great illustration of how deeply entrenched is our belief in the power of belief.
Yesterday, a friend mentioned the theory that religion started as an adaptive mechanism which allowed early humans to cope with knowledge of their ultimate demise. The more I reflect on this idea, the more I reject it. This study helps to reinforce this conclusion. If religion does indeed help people cope with death, we should expect to see the exact opposite result.
Personally speaking, I’ve watched friends and relatives die, and I can only say that those of my friends who were atheists were stoic and prepared, if not happy, about dying. They had known their whole lives that death is something we all do, and they felt like oblivion was not such a bad option, particularly when compared to pain.
It doesn’t take a rocket science atheist to figure out that dying isn’t the worst thing that can happen to a person. I just don’t believe that humanity reached a crisis ten or fifteen thousand years ago in which we needed religion as an adaptive mechanism to deal with mortality. I think it’s just one more way to try to make religion useful in some way — any way at all — when science is dismantling its claims almost by the hour.
That reminds me of something that I’ve long wondered about. Whoever makes their last words
See you in Heaven
???
If believers in everlasting happiness after death are so sure that that is would happen to them, then they’d view death as going on a trip somewhere, one where they’d be shucking off their old bodies and getting new bodies. And why don’t their friends and relatives turn funerals into celebrations of the arrival of the dear departed in Heaven? Instead of acting as if it is some terrible calamity.
Posted by Loren Petrich | March 18, 2009, 6:18 pmNeandertal burials have been found that seem to indicate a rudimentary type of religion and specifically a belief in an afterlife. I don’t think it’s that far fetched.
Modern people using present day science to prolong their life at the end may simply be the walls of comparmentalization starting to fall.
Posted by Watcher | March 18, 2009, 6:46 pmWatcher, I’m tossing thoughts around for a blog on the topic of religion’s origins, but I need to do a bit more research first. I’m open-minded to the possibility that religion evolved as a death-coping mechanism, but the arguments I’ve heard so far leave me a long way from convinced.
I know you’ve heard this before, but for the benefit of readers, my primary objections to this theory are threefold:
1) It doesn’t substantiate part of its base claim — namely, that religion really does provide more benefit to humans with regard to death than non-religion. This claim is widely believed, but we know how much validity that gives it. I’d like to see some actual evidence that religious people cope with death better than non-religious.
2) The answer seems ad hoc. That is, once religion was around, perhaps it helped people deal with death, but this doesn’t address the question of how and why it formed in the first place.
3) The suggestion that religion is a spandrel rests on shaky ground, since a lot of what Gould thought of as a spandrel has since proven to be adaptive, and the concept itself is not fully established as a real principle of natural selection.
In short, I don’t think it’s been sufficiently established that religion is an evolutionary adaptation or spandrel. This is shaky ground, of course — culture is certainly an evolutionary adaptation, and religion is a product of culture…
There are a lot of definitions to clear up before we can say anything definite.
Posted by hambydammit | March 18, 2009, 6:55 pmBe careful: There is nothing at all shaky about the spandrel concept, and I don’t know what you mean by “real principle of natural selection” because that seems to miss the point – that a spandrel is an indirect product of natural selection rather than a directly adaptive trait.
The basis of the original Gould/Lewontin spandrel argument is simply that scientific method requires making one’s best effort to eliminate alternative hypotheses. The all-too-common approach that only seeks to eliminate the null hypothesis that a given trait (or allele) is random/selectively neutral before concluding that the trait is an adaptation fails on perfectly sound basic epistemological grounds – because it does not eliminate the theoretically plausible alternate hypothesis that the trait is selectively neutral side effect that just happens to co-vary with some other trait that actually does give a fitness advantage. The fact that some proposed spandrels have turned out to be adaptations is no more a criticism of the spandrel concept than the fact that some proposed adaptations have turned out to be spandrels. The point is that you cannot conclude that a given trait is an adaptation by eliminating just the null/random hypothesis, you must also eliminate the spandrel hypothesis. (Similarly, you cannot conclude that a given trait is a spandrel without eliminating both the null hypothesis and the adaptation hypothesis.)
The best way to look at it may be this: Any allele which undergoes positive selection (because of a specific fitness advantage it gives organisms which possess it) may very well have the potential for a variety of other causal effects besides the fitness-increasing one: Over generations and changes in circumstances, one or more of those “other” causal effects may come to have a fitness advantage (or disadvantage). Such genetic changes are not a matter of genuinely random mutation such as a transcription error or gene duplication, because the change is produced by selection – just not selection for that particular change. Nevertheless, such knock-on changes are – like transcription errors and duplications – a potential source of raw material for future selection and thus an engine for evolutionary change.
Not that I think religion is a spandrel – or an adaptation. Frankly, I think most of the people who try to say that religion is a spandrel don’t even know what the term actually means…
Posted by G Felis | March 18, 2009, 7:56 pm[quote]
Michael Shermer proposed that magical thinking was a spandrel and was a necessary product of rational thought that comes to the fore when uncertainties arise in the absence of proven scientific explanations.
…
Does man possess spirituality as a result of natural selection because it had survival value, or is spirituality a spandrel? it is difficult to give a definitive answer, however, since spirituality has a strong genetic component, and since it is one of the most enduring and universal of human traits, and since much of spirituality appears to be associated with a specific brain structure, the temporal lobes…
[/quote]
Did Man Create God? by David E. Comings
Yeah. That’s where I came across that idea.
Posted by Watcher | March 18, 2009, 8:34 pmWatcher: “Neandertal burials have been found that seem to indicate a rudimentary type of religion and specifically a belief in an afterlife. I don’t think it’s that far fetched.”
Hm.
I’m wrong about all kinds of things when it comes to early hominids, but I’d been under the impression that most ‘life after death’ myths and burial rituals were more or less a direct result from the old myth of spontaneous generation – where people saw maggots, bacteria, fungi, etc appear to ‘spontaneously’ erupt from dead things and thereby falsely attributed death as giving rise to new life?
Posted by Kevin R Brown | March 18, 2009, 10:47 pm1. Just to show you that the same story can be reported in two entirely different way, see the following:
http://www.christianpost.com/Education/Polls_reports/2009/03/highly-religious-patients-fight-to-live-longer-18/index.html
http://strangeherring.wordpress.com/2009/03/19/religious-cling-to-life-longer-want-to-make-sure-their-tithes-remain-tax-deductible/
2. Kevin Brown writes:
“I’m wrong about all kinds of things when it comes to early hominids, but I’d been under the impression that most ‘life after death’ myths and burial rituals were more or less a direct result from the old myth of spontaneous generation – where people saw maggots, bacteria, fungi, etc appear to ‘spontaneously’ erupt from dead things and thereby falsely attributed death as giving rise to new life?”
Did you ever see a dog, a cat or even a fish come back to life? I thought not. And who wants to be reborn as a maggot, anyway?
Posted by Vincent | March 19, 2009, 3:14 pm