Research has shown that religious beliefs offer their adherents a variety of psychological benefits: from coping with stress to increasing self-control to promoting pro-social behaviors. But religious belief is on the decline in the Western world. What’s an atheist to do?
Nonbelievers could be in luck. Belief in the power of science might help nonreligious people cope with stress the same way belief in a higher power helps religious people, according to preliminary research.
The study, published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in 2013, found that the belief in science increases when people are placed in adverse situations.
“That science can be a source of meaning, similar to religion, is not a completely new idea; it has been raised by philosophers and scientists alike,” Miguel Farias of Oxford University and his colleagues wrote in their study.
“While many have attempted to understand the emotional or social underpinnings of religious belief, the possibility that science might serve similar psychological functions has received less attention.”
The study compared 52 rowers about to compete to 48 rowers who were merely training, and found those confronted with the stress of an imminent competition reported greater belief in science.
“The greater belief in science observed in the high-stress condition is consistent with the notion that belief in science may help secular individuals to cope with stress,” the researchers said.
Farias and his colleagues also compared 31 participants who wrote a brief diary recording their personal thoughts about death with 29 other participants who wrote about experiencing dental pain.
Participants who wrote about death reported significantly greater belief in science.
“A large body of research has established that being reminded of one’s own death results in existential anxiety, which leads people to defend their belief systems,” the researchers explained.
Both findings suggest nonreligious people in uncomfortable situations appeal to their belief in science, similar to how religious people appeal to their religious beliefs.
The study only “examined only one direction of the effect,” Farias and his colleagues admitted, and future research should examine whether affirming one’s belief in science reduces stress.
Farias and his colleagues also said additional research needs to examine the relationship between belief in science and belief in progress.
“It is perhaps not surprising that secular belief systems like Humanism and belief in progress can play a comforting role, as they present the world as a broadly moral order. By contrast, our findings suggest that merely believing in the superiority of science as a method of making sense of the universe may be sufficient to play such a compensatory role, even if the order that science reveals is not moral, and perhaps independently of any optimism about the future.”