Why people who believe in God fear death
Hill, Scott
Hill, Scott
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Issue Date
2025-07-28
Type
Article
Genre
Keywords
Belief,Death,Fear,God,Grief
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Citation
Scott Hill, Why people who believe in God fear death, Analysis, Volume 85, Issue 3, July 2025, Pages 639–648, https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/anae069
Abstract
People who report believing in God fear death. They also experience grief when someone they love dies. Philosophers and social scientists sometimes claim that this can only be plausibly explained by the hypothesis that people who claim to believe in God do not really believe in God. I show that this is mistaken. I identify three independently plausible explanations of why people who genuinely believe in God would have these behaviours and attitudes. First, there is an evolutionary explanation of why a fear of death would be resilient even if one genuinely believes God has good things in store for us after death. Second, people often fear low-probability outcomes. It may be that religious people are afraid of hell or the cessation of existence even if they judge those outcomes to have a low probability. Third, belief in God is typically combined with views according to which death is accompanied by the permanent loss and radical transformation of important relationships. © The Author(s) 2025. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved.
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Description
This is an open access article under the CC BY license.
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Journal
Analysis
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Archival Collection
PubMed ID
ISSN
0003-2638