Bring in a bunch of atheists and give them a placebo painkiller that they know is a placebo. Then put their hands in ice water and record the pain response. Send the control group home, but ask the experimental group to believe as hard as they can in the Flying Spaghetti Monster for the next week. A week later, give everyone another placebo painkiller and another pain test. Hypothesis: intentional religiosity increases the strength of the placebo effect.
Faith might be like a muscle. And it might be possible to deliberately cultivate faith for beneficial purposes.
ignoring the elephant in the room that the study of anyone other than white males is rare, people don't talk about the obvious. We don't write it down.
Gravity took FOREVER before someone went "wait why?" and there's tons of stuff we don't even think about, like the 'new shape' that people just didn't think to talk about because it's just so simple
To be fair Plato said that earth and water elements want to go down in order to be near the other earth and water. That's his explanation for the phenomena of gravity. Newton's explanation is rather less intuitive and requires an understanding of orbital mechanics.