How Psychology has Changed our Faith (#315)

Religion on the Mind

Religion, Spirituality, Religion & Spirituality

4.7 • 542 Ratings

🗓️ 17 March 2025

⏱️ 47 minutes

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Summary

Laird Edman, Myron Penner, and Kristen Tideman join me to talk about how psychological science has transformed our faith. We discuss how the cognitive science of religion has allowed us to hold theological claims with an open hand while deepening our appreciation for religious practice. Myron discovers that seeing religion as human-made deepens his compassion for believers of all kinds while Kristen's academic journey transforms her from would-be apologist to humble truth-seeker. Laird explains how efforts to 'debunk' religion actually strengthened his faith, and I reveal the counterintuitive way my research on spiritual abuse reinforced my appreciation for religious community. Our conversation weaves through topics including post-hoc justifications for behavior, religious anxiety, church community, and the natural human propensity for spiritual experience—ultimately showing how psychological understanding can enrich rather than diminish religious life. In the second Patron-only half of the conversation, we discussed church community, intergenerational relationships, embodied cognition, and the evolution of agency detection mechanisms. Highlights: 02:52 Cognitive Science of Religion: Understanding Belief 12:07 Psychological Insights and Spiritual Growth 21:08 Religion as a Human Construct 41:19 The Role of Humility in Belief Systems YHP Episodes Mentioned: Episode 288 | Dan Made His Own Enneagram Episode 253 | Still Christian & Way Humble About It! Episode 191 | All About Ritual (with Laird Edmund) Episode 80 | Myron is a Demon Skeptic (with Myron Penner) Episode 41 | Cognitive Science & Religious Belief (For Beginners) (with Myron Penner) Episode 39 | Psychedelics & Other "Spiritual Technologies" (with Sarah Lane Ritchie) ___________________________________________ Follow Dan on IG: www.instagram.com/dancoke/ Or Twitter: twitter.com/DanKoch Faith deconstruction resources: www.soyouredeconstructing.com/ Edited by Josh Gilbert (joshgilbertmedia.com -- he is accepting more work!) Join the Patreon for exclusive episodes (and more) every month: patreon.com/dankoch Email about the "sliding scale" for the Patreon: youhavepermissionpodcast@gmail.com YHP Patron-only FB group: tinyurl.com/ycvbbf98 Website: www.dankochwords.com/yhp.html Join Dan's email list: www.dankochwords.com/ Artwork by sprungle.co/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back, everybody, to You Have Permission, the show that aims to take both Christianity
0:09.1	and the modern world very seriously. I am joined by three of my real-life friends for a in-person
0:17.2	IRL episode. I'm so stoked here. We are talking about how psychology,
0:26.3	that is what we've learned about psychology, psychological science. Three of us have done
0:31.8	active psychological research, but we've all been very tuned in to this stuff. How that's changed our faith.
0:39.4	Myron, this was your idea for an episode, and I'll give you credit for that. Thank you so much.
0:43.9	Let me introduce my guests here. We've got Laird Edmund, research psychologist, returning guest.
0:50.2	Last time we spoke about the role of ritual in human and religious life.
0:55.0	We've got Kristen Tidman, returning multi-time guest, no longer in charge of social media for us, but still very much in the family fold, as I think of it.
1:08.8	Yeah, maybe.
1:09.9	And then Myron Penner, philosopher, returning multi-time guest, member of the so-called
1:15.9	Big Five.
1:17.0	Myron, can you please remind us of your sole signature from our AI Enneagram episode?
1:21.8	I forget exactly what it was, but I'm pretty sure it was written in Times New Roman,
1:25.7	so.
1:26.4	That's right.
1:27.2	Because you have to have a
1:28.1	font and you get a color. Okay, well, that's a joke in reference to our chat GBT made me an
1:34.1	eneagram episode from this past summer. I know what you did last summer. What? We did it. We had
1:39.7	chat GvT create an eneagram. So, okay, before we get into it, I had two potential answers to this question that I'm not
1:49.4	going to give because there are episodes already dedicated to those.
1:52.6	I'm just going to really quickly call those out up here.
	...

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