This week's episodes of BBC Radio 3's Night Waves are on the good life.

I was in on a discussion on Monday. Podcast here. It got quite lively...

This piece on two new books, plus one not quite so new, has just gone up at the Guardian's Cif Belief...

What is it like to be a Christian? Not what do Christians believe or how many superstitions do they quietly excuse before breakfast? But what is faith as experienced?

It is an important question because, as Rowan Williams notes in his new book, The Lion's World, people might think they know what faith is about when, today, they perhaps don't, never having been there. Subtitled "A Journey Into the Heart of Narnia", the book is partly about CS Lewis. But it is also a chance for the archbishop of Canterbury to convey what Christianity means to him. This is difficult to do, not only because contemporary Britons lack Christian experience but because, as titular head of the established Church of England, Williams recognises a need to "rinse out what is stale in our thinking about Christianity – which is almost everything".

The elusory character of Christianity is also on the mind of Francis Spufford, the historian and science writer. The subtitle for his new book, Unapologetic, is "Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense". A central worry for him is not that the rational justification for belief has been undone. Faith is not about that anyway: as Coleridge noted, the best argument for Christianity is that "it fits the human heart". Rather, it is that so many of the secular alternatives to Christianity only work because they "depend on some tacky fantasy about ourselves". They are in flight from what is truly difficult about life; what is hardest to stomach about ourselves. Take John Lennon's anthem Imagine, which had such a prominent place in the closing ceremony of the Olympics. Spufford labels the lyrics the "My Little Pony of philosophical statements", with its monstrously deluded assumption that the default state of human beings – psychological, cultural and social – is one of peace.

Instead, Spufford likens the experience of being a Christian to listening to the adagio of Mozart's clarinet concerto. This "very patient piece of music" has been described as conveying the sound of mercy because its quiet beauty does not deny the horrors of life but admits they exist and yet insists there is more too. It is as if, running through the mess, there is an infinite kindness, or gentle forbearance, or what Dante called a love that moves the sun and stars. Reason cannot decide whether that is true. The feelings that deliver closer, insider knowledge of human experience can.

Williams reflects extensively on the nature of mercy as well. He portrays it as an unsentimental though humane experience, again because it means facing up to the truth about what you have done and who you are. The theistic insight is that this truth can only be seen when you are confronted by the divine. To meet God – or Aslan, as Lewis has it in the Narnia stories – is "to meet someone who, because he has freely created you and wants for you nothing but your good, your flourishing, is free to see you as you are and to reflect that seeing back to you".

In other words, to see yourself as others see you might be discomforting but it will also always be skewed by the distorting lens of their self-interest. To be unmasked as God sees you is painful because purgative, but is also a path to true liberation. It is merciful because without it we are left in a citadel of self-deception, life's energies being sapped and wasted on bolstering self-regard.

None of this proves the existence of God in the way a science would demand because its evidence arises from the inner lives of individuals. It does, though, reflect a strand in the philosophical discussion of God, often forgotten today. Pascal drew attention to the problem God has in revealing himself to creatures he has made to be free, because if God were to offer irrefutable evidence then that would force a relationship of coercion, not love. God's solution, Pascal proposed, is to "appear openly to those who seek him with all their heart, and [to remain] hidden from those who shun him".

The philosopher Paul Moser calls the demand for such proof "spectator evidence" in his more academic recent book, The Evidence for God: Religious Knowledge Re-examined. And being a spectator of life will not take you into life or reveal the ground of life to you. It separates the individual from both. Rather – and as Williams and Spufford stress – what is required is a transformation of the individual, akin to the transformation that occurs when someone falls in love. It happens not because there is a hardening of the evidence but because there is an unhardening of the heart, softened in relationship. Only then might we see as we are seen.

This piece has just gone up at the Guardian's Cif Belief, responding to the complaint against Jeremy Paxman who called myth "hogwash" during an interview with Richard Dawkins.

Richard Dawkins is a master myth-maker. His best fiction is that of the selfish gene. His great book of that title, published over 35 years ago, described human beings as lumbering robots driven by immortal genes. It even had a brilliant, final twist. Sometimes, the myth promised, we can overcome the tyranny of the biological imperative inside us.

Inevitably - though perhaps more quickly than many anticipated - his myth is going the way of the world. It spoke powerfully of what was taken to be truth for a time. But subject to the inexorable shifts of human knowledge, the myth is now starting to look outdated.

A crucial moment came in August 2010, when Martin Nowak, Corina Tarnita and Edward O Wilson published an article in Nature. They argued that the mathematics behind the idea that Dawkins had so successfully popularised doesn't stack up. It was wrong, Wilson insists - and he should know as one of the few people who originally did the maths. He now prefers evolutionary theories that speak about altruism, based upon group selection. The next generation awaits a myth-maker of Dawkins' stature to tell us this new story about life. Now, I know what you are thinking. Is it not overly provocative to refer to the selfish gene as a myth, though it seems quite precise: my dictionary includes definitions such as 'false belief' and 'fictitious thing'? It will be thought inflammatory because, unfortunately, naming something a myth carries these pejorative overtones in our times. It is as if myths are straightforwardly untrue, and those who believe them are ignorant and foolish.

Ironic, then, that following complaints made to the BBC because a conversation between Dawkins and Jeremy Paxman caused some people offence, that the BBC Trust excused Paxman's use of the word "hogwash" because he said it of myths rather than religion.

Much to his credit, Dawkins was strikingly fulsome about myths in the interview. He confessed to finding Aztec myths amusing and loving the myths that begin the book of Genesis. A tremendous writer, he understands their power. All successful popularizers of science do. His latest book, which prompted the Paxman interview, trades on the genre in its very title: The Magic of Reality. The book describes many myths, religious ones as well as scientific. Myths are so powerful because they fire the imagination, encourage play and make great poetic stories. They can only do so when there is something true in them.

There are, of course, differences between scientific and religious myths. For one thing, scientific myths are far less long-lived than religious ones. The great faiths of the world daily turn to myths that are thousands of years old and find truth leaping off the page as they read them. Scientific myths, on the other hand, do well if they last more than a century. Who today reads Newton? Both kinds of myth seek evidence in their support. The difference here is that scientific stories seek empirical evidence - and when the empirical evidence fails, the myth fails too, which is what appears to be happening to the selfish gene.

Conversely, religious myths seek proof of a more personal kind. These myths work when they speak in their details about the truths of life.

Take a myth like that of Narcissus. It tells the tale of a beautiful man whose looks made him the centre of attention. Everyone fell for him and, as a result, his heart became swollen with pride, his demeanor hard and aloof. He became lost, then alone, and eventually died.

Such is the troubled life of the narcissist. But the proof of the myth is not established by trying to find a man called Narcissus and seeing whether his heart became empirically swollen and his visage literally hard.

Everyone knows that. So why is it that many religious people are as wary of myths as Paxman appears to be? Is it because they agree with Paxman that the scientific accuracy of millennia old myth can be readily knocked down? Don't they see that saying that is like saying Shakespeare should not be taught in schools because Romeo and Juliet never existed?

Religious people should be masters of myth, like Dawkins, for the greatest myths convey the truth of things to us, be that spiritual or scientific.

I had this piece in The Tablet last week, on the discovery of the Higgs boson...

It began with a walk in the Cairngorms almost 50 years ago. The physicist Peter Higgs had an idea about the origins of mass in the universe. The Higgs boson was born in the human mind. And now, after spending billions of dollars – as well as all the creative energy that cash represents – scientists at Cern (otherwise known as the European Organisation for Nuclear Research) have discovered the subatomic particle. Or at least, they have seen the signature for something close to what they expect the Higgs to be.

It has been called the “God particle” because the Higgs plugs a crucial gap in what physicists refer to as the Standard Model. That has been successful at describing the behaviour of matter, energy and forces. Yet the discovery of the Higgs does not mean that physics is now over. Far from it. In the 50 years since Peter Higgs’ brainwave, cosmologists have discovered that the majority of the universe is made of stuff most probably unknown to science, the so-called dark mass and dark energy. The Standard Model will not be standard science for future generations.

Given those qualifications, it is striking that the Higgs has generated so much hype. This is partly because Cern, the organisation responsible for the Large Hadron Collider tests which discovered the particle, needs to justify the spend. So teams of spin doctors ensured the experiment produced regular headlines. But that only raises a further question: why are we so gripped by the weirdness of the subatomic world? Physics powerfully resonates with the notion of cosmic design. Physicists look for theories that can be described using mathematics. When tested, these theories reveal the hidden nature of reality. The mathematical and hidden element readily fires the theological imagination. As the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz put it: “When God calculates and thinks things through, the world is made”.

It is as if science and religion are part of the same enterprise: revealing the ways of God. “Science appears as a collective effort of the Human Mind to reach the Mind of God,” writes the physicist and priest Michael Heller. “The Mind of Man and the Mind of God are strangely interwoven.”

It is a powerful intuition explored in a famous essay by the Nobel laureate for physics, Eugene Wigner. His title says it all: “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences”. Wigner describes the descriptive and predictive power of mathematics as a “miracle”. He continues: “It is hard to believe that our reasoning power was brought, by Darwin’s process of natural selection, to the perfection which it seems to possess.”

It is not so hard to believe if you believe that human beings are made in the image of God. The trumpeting of the discovery of the God particle flirts with the thrilling thought that we have taken one step closer to divinity. As the essayist Annie Dillard has written: “What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are they not both saying: ‘Hello’?”

But it is easy for the theological imagination to become overexcited by science. For one thing, it seems likely that life can only emerge in a universe in which matter and energy are patterned and constrained. It is this patterning that gives mathematics a grip on nature. A life-bearing cosmos would inevitably be a mathematics-friendly cosmos. Alternatively, you can ask what kind of God is revealed by the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics. William Blake reflected on the deistic divinity implied by such an understanding of the cosmos and found it “soul-shuddering”. His“dark satanic mills” are the impersonal, cold machines that “grind out material reality”, much as the indifferent Higgs boson is said to generate mass. A tyrannical God would fix life according to laws of nature, Blake continued. A world of such determined domains of space and time would be a prison. Further, the scientist or theologian who overplays humankind’s capacity to understand the cosmos risks idolatry. “He who sees the Ratio only,” Blake mocked, “sees himself only.”

More generally, you could say that contemporary physics so captures our imagination because it is the way many now do metaphysics. As the scholastic theologians of the medieval period gazed towards heaven seeking the divine, so we gaze into the heavens seeking replies to our great questions. Both activities promise to reveal the nature of reality and so something of our own nature.

Only perhaps we need to learn not to be so concrete, so literal. If it is a mechanism you seek, then the God particle will thrill you. If it is life, then clues must be sought somewhere else.

This article was in last week's Tablet, behind the paywall but here with permission...

It is sensible to be sceptical of the pronouncements of neuroscience. When you read, say, that brain scanners have found the ‘love spot’ amongst the folds of grey matter, it is probably a case of neuromania, to use the word coined by the neuroscientist Raymond Tallis.

Nonetheless, neuroscience carries weight in our public discourse. Carefully considered, it offers insights into what it is to be human. Although, what is revealed, upon a second reading, often seems not so much like new insights, as old insights re-described with the authority of science. This is particularly true when it comes to matters concerning spirituality.

One crucial phenomenon here is brain lateralisation: the significance of the fact that the brain is not symmetric. Its two hemispheres are structurally, physiologically and psychologically different. They see the world in different ways.

In fact, argues Iain McGilchrist, in his fascinating book, The Master and His Emissary, it is best to think of the hemispheres as two personalities. It often makes better sense to ask what each hemisphere is like, as opposed to how it works.

It is a discovery with deep implications for the study of spirituality. I suspect McGilchrist’s book will prove instrumental in reinvigorating spirituality for an age that has otherwise grown wary of the religious quest. Others appear to think similarly too. Last month, no less a figure than the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, hosted a private seminar with McGilchrist to discuss the ramifications of his work.

The two persons interpretation of brain lateralisation comes from Roger Sperry, the neuroscientist who won the Nobel Prize for his work on split-brain research. The left loves precision. Its purpose in life is to manipulate. It seeks certainty and gains that by building maps of what it has grasped of reality, though like physical maps, the left hemisphere’s charts come with the inherent limitation of being abstracted from the world as it actually is. They are handy fictions.

The right hemisphere serves the ability to make connections and build understanding. It has the kind of personality that enjoys possibilities and novelty. Delighting in pattern, it discovers, though is also able to remain uncommitted about the nature of things. This negative capability, to recall Keats’ expression, allows it to stay alert to the unknown and, therefore, more in touch with reality. It can live with what it can’t understand.

Why two hemispheres, not just one brain? In short, because we need both kinds of attention to survive. The left hemisphere’s narrower focus supports the capacity to control the world. The right offers the capacity to maintain a sustained, open engagement. If the left longs to make the world its own, the right receives. If the left conceptualises, the right is expectant. The two are in a creative tension. Put them together and you have the brilliant capacity, say, to stand back from reality whilst remaining part of it; to have a distance from things without becoming detached. That must have tremendous evolutionary advantage: other animals have split brains too. In this process of right-left-right exchange, human experience deepens. It becomes three dimensional. One seamless self-consciousness is the result of embracing the wills of the two hemispheres.

Here, then, is a first ‘discovery’ that chimes with the traditions of spirituality because this is precisely the kind of awareness promoted in practices such as insight meditation. Mindfulness, as it is also known, cultivates an ability to be aware of thoughts and feelings as well as actually having those thoughts and feelings. As the author of the Visuddhimagga wrote 1600 years ago: ‘The first realization in insight is that the phenomena contemplated are distinct from the mind contemplating them… he can, with further insight, gain a clear understanding of these dual processes…’

It is important to emphasis the necessity of both hemispheres for such full consciousness, as it is tempting to make the reductionist move and simplistically associate the left with the rational and the right with emotion. McGilchrist is keen to stress that it was such popularisation of brain lateralisation that almost ruined the subject for serious science. As he said in a recent talk: ‘Then there was a Volvo ad about the car for your right brain. That did it. From then on, no self-respecting scientist could be found to touch the topic.’

Being ‘right-brained’ does not mean being spiritual. The truth is that the most valuable spiritual insight lives on a knife-edge between intuition and discernment. You need both to keep a balance between what Wittgenstein called ‘saying’ and ‘showing’. This is a second dominant theme in spiritual writers. Denys the Areopagite, for example, stressed such a binocular approach when he remarked: ‘The tradition of the theologians is twofold, on the one hand ineffable and mystical, on the other manifest and more knowable… the ineffable is interwoven with what can be uttered. The one persuades and contains within itself the truth of what it says, the offer effects and establishes the soul with God by initiations that do not teach anything.’ The marriage of the left and right hemispheres could hardly be more precisely expressed.

A third area concerns the importance of the body. ‘Spiritual practice is always embodied when it is most effective,’ explains Fraser Watts, who heads up a research group on embodied cognition in the University of Cambridge. ‘People pray with their bodies as well as their minds.’ Hence a spiritual director is likely not to advise you to contemplate ‘proofs’ for the existence of God to deepen your relationship with the divine, but to go on pilgrimage, attend liturgies and rituals, or introduce discipline and pattern into your life.

This makes sense when it is realised that the right hemisphere is more deeply connected to the body. Both hemispheres have motor and sensory connections with the opposite side of the body. But whereas the left makes maps, the right carries a whole body sense that is intimately linked to lived, affective experience. It is responsible for empathic and emotional connections with others and the world. It is the wellspring of expansive, meaningful and uncertain feeling – which in the theological realm is the pathway to God. Hence, as the author of The Cloud of Unknowing insists, the cloud is pierced by a ‘dart of longing love’, not intellection.

There are many other points of contact between the science and the spiritual, but one more particularly catches my eye. It concerns the way the two hemispheres communicate. This is something of a problem because they speak such different languages. The gulf is bridged largely by processes of inhibition across the structure known as the corpus callosum. It is the inhibitive quality that is so fascinating because what it implies is that the left can only accept what the right has to offer, and vice versa, by a process of unknowing what it had taken to be the case. It must let go and tolerate a new, unsettling and unexpected vision of things. To make the link to the spiritual, it could be said that this mode of communication is a kind of via negativa. To cite the author of The Cloud of Unknowing again, when describing how God might be grasped: what was known must be ‘covered with a cloud of forgetting’.

In his book, McGilchrist musters the evidence to show that the left hemisphere is good at suppressing the insights of the right. Hence an age that fails to understand the spiritual quest, such as ours, may be suffering from a condition known as ‘hemispheric utilisation bias’. The left has, as it were, imposed its view of the world upon us at a cultural level.

That explains why it is often claimed that neuroscience demonstrates we are purely material beings and that consciousness is a delusional by-product of electrically charged meat. But perhaps the truth is precisely the opposite. To put it crudely, a culture enamoured with the insights of the left hemisphere trusts the neuroscience because it is a science. What it is perhaps just beginning to notice is that the science is subtly unpicking the very worldview to which it has been so wedded.

The new edition of The Idler is out now, examining utopias. I've an essay on Plato's much misunderstood, I reckon, Republic. It begins:

Karl Popper almost did it for Plato, when he published The Open Society in 1962. A central plank of Popper’s defence of freedom was a fierce attack on what he called ‘utopian social engineering’. He cast Plato as the originator of a form of totalitarian politics that in the twentieth century threatened the whole world, in the form of the Marxist regime of the Soviet Union. In short, Plato was an armchair Stalin. The ancient Greek philosopher was responsible for nurturing the dream of all subsequent dictators, that they could design an ideal state that would never decay.

Never mind that when Popper wrote The Open Society he did not have to hand a decent translation of Plato’s key text, the Republic, as he admits in his autobiography, Unended Quest. Or that ‘what I read was determined largely by what books I could get in New Zealand’, which was limited because of the war. Subsequent generations of English-speaking philosophers have picked up the main drift and tended to follow Popper’s line. Plato’s invention of the genre of utopian political writing was a dangerous mistake. It could be said to be indirectly responsible for the deaths of millions. Certainly any freedom-loving liberal, who might feel compelled to read the Republic as an historical artefact, should do so mostly so as to marshal arguments against it.

Poor Plato. The fundamental devices he uses to frame his seminal political discussion are ignored or forgotten. Just to note that he always wrote in the form of dialogues, never in his own voice, should be enough. It was his apparently failed attempt to ensure that his readers would not lift philosophy from the page, like the fundamentalist does theology from a sacred book, but would engage with his interlocutors and cultivate wisdom in their own life. John Stuart Mill described the process well in his political pamphlet, On Liberty. Plato produced brilliant discussions of the great questions of philosophy and life, Mill writes, ‘to the purpose of convincing anyone who had merely adopted the commonplaces of received opinion that he did not understand the subject.’ Plato’s political writings, like his other work, are designed to guard against social engineering by relentless exposing the folly of human ignorance.

In fact, it is only relatively recently that the Republic has been interpreted as if it were Plato’s premier political work. It seems that it was adopted by the Victorian public school system as an ur-text for the young men who were being trained to govern the empire. They had the Bible to shape their souls and the Republic to hone their leadership.

Before then, the Republic had been treated as an exercise in fantasy politics, an attempt to expose what is at stake in political philosophy, rather than as an attempt to write a manifesto upon which Plato might, as it were, stand for election to office. In that former sense, it has been very successful, not least since the ideas about justice, education and the good that it contains are still discussed millennia later. Additional evidence about the correct way to read the Republic is found in the fact that it actually contains very little discussion of the day-to-day business of government. You might say that it is deliberately not practical. Further still, Plato has one of his characters comment that such a city-state as they have been describing will never, in actually, be found. But the literalism of twentieth century Anglo-American analytic philosophy appears to be such that even a warning like that is met with bemusement and, then, overlooked.

I've a review of John Polkinghorne's Science and Religion In Quest of Truth in the new TLS. The full piece is behind a paywall, I think, or of course the newspaper is on all good bookstands. The second half of the review casts an eye to the future of the science and religion debate...

[Polkinghorne] briefly but carefully makes the case for an understanding of the unpredictability of quantum physics that is ontologically intrinsic, the so-called Copenhagen interpretation. He argues for a similar kind of intrinsic unpredictability in relation to chaos theory. Put them together and this implies that reality might have an ‘open grain’ rather than a closed causal tightness. He speculates – acknowledging the boldness – that this might make room for ‘novel additional causal principles… beyond those described by conventional physics.’ Several possibilities relevant to science and religion would follow.

First, that there is no reason to assume that science has the last say on the nature of reality. There is a ‘need for humble realism about what science can actually tell us about the character of causal process,’ he writes, noting that scientism is ‘overblown’. Second, that there is plenty of scope for a notion of top-down as well as bottom-up causation. Indeed, explicating a general theory of the emergent phenomena that are best described top-down might turn out to be one of the triumphs of twenty-first century science. At the moment, scientists are still collecting cases, like nineteenth century naturalists collecting specimens.

Further, it could be that the scientific concept of information is key – information defined as the specification of dynamic patterns of large-scale orderly behaviour. That, in turn, might become enriched so as to offer a new understanding of the nature of personhood: perhaps personhood will come to be thought of as a continuously developing ‘information-bearing pattern’ carried by the constantly changing biology of the body. This pattern or form, which starts to look not unlike the Aristotelian conception of the soul, would incorporate memories alongside everything else that constitutes a person.

Then, there could be further possibilities, to do with God’s action in the world. Divine providence might come to be described as the ‘input of pure information’, a cosmic level dynamic patterning, analogous to the strange attractor of chaos theory that constrains and directs though without physical or energetic exchange.

This piece just went up at the Guardian's Cif...

We expect marriages to get rocky and families to provoke pain. But friends tend to be presented in a mostly happy light: think Sex and the City, or Friends. Bumps and scrapes between Samantha and Charlotte are in the plot but only so they might be resolved. Lovers come and go. Friends remain.

This idealisation does not help us in real life, where friendships do not just have entertaining ups and downs, but disturbing fights and bitter endings. Such a reality is demonstrated in new research based on data collected from the Mass Observation Project, just published in The Sociological Review.

Prof Carol Smart and her colleagues argue that some friends can be dumped quite easily. These are "simple friendships" – people we know for fun, say, so when the fun ceases the relationship is dropped or drifts away. But "complex friendships" – people to whom we were close, as soulmates – prove more distressing.

One woman is typical when she confessed that she stuck with an old friend out of responsibility: 'I have an ongoing friendship with a divorced man … who is a good friend in many ways, but who can be very overbearing, loud and insensitive … and he has an anxiety problem. I am sorry for him but find myself totally drained after a day in his company.'

The idealisation of friendship comes through in the research too. Some insisted that you should not abandon old friends, ever. "I'm loyal towards my friend," said one participant, before admitting: "This sounds awful, but I don't get a lot out of the friendship any more." Another person made the arresting observation that the way someone talks about their friends opens a window into the soul, "through which a person's moral calibre could be assessed".

Interestingly, the research advises caution when it comes to reconnecting with old friends. Meeting college or childhood friends can "call up the ghost of former selves, causing regret, embarrassment and discomfort".

Part of the problem is that friendship has no institutionalised life course. When you fall in love, you will think about moving in, about engagement, about marriage, about children, about divorce, about how to get along with your ex. The pathway is not trekked by everyone, of course. But the marital pattern provides a template against which to chart your love life, even when you honour it in the breach. Further, the institutional nature of marriage and marriage-like relationships means that help can be sought when things go wrong.

Not so with friendship because the course of a friendship has no such pattern or support. That is part of its appeal, in fact – friendship as the relationship of freedom. You did not choose your family. You realise that you had little conscious sense of why you chose your lover, once the romance quietens. But you did choose your friends, apparently. And then something goes wrong. You are left floundering.

Perhaps there should be friendship counselling too. It would recognise that friendship is vital to human wellbeing because this form of human love gets under our skin quite as much as any other, for good and ill. But in the meantime, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche has a useful metaphor to offer.

He knew a thing or two about amity's calamities, having once been a friend of Wagner. The experience of the break-up seems to have led Nietzsche to develop the notion of "star friendship".

Stars are distant, like the friendships of yesteryear. They look bright, as you remember the good times. But the great thing about stars is that they don't cast a shadow over you now. So too might old friendship, once a blessing, now broken. It is not easy to find the place where they don't cast a shadow of guilt or bitterness or loss. But the star metaphor might keep you headed in a better direction. It holds out the hope that one day you will wake up and realise that you're over the friendship, it was good, and all will be well.

I have this feature in The Tablet this week.

Fundamentalism, fanaticism, fights. Headlines in the press often cast religion in a bad light. In fact, the evidence suggests otherwise; all in all, the practices of faith tend to have positive effects on people’s lives.

The impact has been assessed across a number of metrics. For example, the likelihood that an individual will drink excessively or take drugs decreases significantly if they go to church, temple or mosque. Among Americans – where religiosity has been extensively studied – being actively religious means you are less likely to commit crime, get divorced, commit suicide or suffer from depression. You will probably also be healthier and live longer.

The upbeat message sounds clearly in posi­tive psychology too, the discipline known as the science of happiness. Martin Seligman, the US psychologist who has put positive psychology on the map, argues that lasting levels of happiness can be influenced by changing your life. “Becoming religious” is in his top five things to do. These results are echoed by the economist, Professor Richard Layard, who advised the last Labour Government on well-being. In his 2005 book, Happiness: lessons from a new science, he presented evidence that having no faith had a more detrimental impact on happiness than losing a job, though not quite as bad as being widowed.

It reads as if the science was designed for advertising God. But the evidence becomes more complicated when a further, crucial question is asked. Just why is it that religion has positive effects? A range of possibilities are mooted, and hotly contested.

A first possibility assigns efficacy to the proscriptive character of religion. World faiths carry moral weight, which is to say that they encourage, if not insist, that faithful adherents do not do things like take drugs, commit crimes and practice infidelity.It is certainly the case that commandments, in the form of “thou shalt not”, are important. They set a tone, help sustain attitudes. But, as any honest believer will testify, commandments are often honoured in the breach. So the question needs to be asked: how it is that proscriptions ­actually work, in so far as they do?

The story of the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous is illuminating. In 1931, the psychologist Carl Jung was trying to treat an alcoholic, though Roland H’s craving for drink remained stubbornly strong. Then Jung had an idea. He recommended that Roland attend the meetings of an evangelical Christian movement which stressed submission to God. It worked. Roland had a conversion experience, which Jung interpreted as releasing a new source of energy from his patient’s unconscious, one more powerful than the desire to drink. Roland related the experience to another apparently hopeless alcoholic, Bill W, and it worked for him too. He founded AA, which today has more than two million members in 150 countries.

Research on the effectiveness of the 12-step AA programme is disputed. But it seems undeniable that the recognition of a “higher power” was crucial to the success it has had. In other words, proscriptions work not when they are perceived as persecutory commandments but rather when they are perceived as charting a path to a new way of life.

Speaking personally, I have a friend who regularly attends AA meetings, though he is not a churchgoer. But the language of conversion makes eminent sense to him. He pointed me to the literature of Narcotics Anonymous, which expresses it well. “For our group purpose there is but one ultimate authority: a loving God as he may express himself in our group conscience.” And yet, this only points to another knotty issue in the debate. It has to do with the significance of groups.

An alternative possibility to prohibitions being the secret of religion’s success is that individual well-being is boosted by the social support provided in groups – and not just religious groups, but family groups, common interest groups or therapeutic groups. Could the group aspect be what helps people at AA meetings and benefits people who go to church? As the psychologist Oliver James recently noted in The Guardian: “It is … plausible that the comradeship and feeling of belonging supplied by religious peers are a substitute for the buzz you get from substances.” James conceded, however, that social support does not provide an adequate explan­ation. He cited a large-scale study that tracked the lives of thousands of Americans and concluded that community was not a substantial mediator of inner strength.

There are other possibilities. Richard Layard has suggested that the benefits of religion have little to do with prohibitions or sociality but, rather, the issue is emotional habits. He argues that religious practices train individuals to control their feelings.

In his book on happiness, Professor Layard discussed The Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, noting how the saint sought to nurture several attitudes that modern science has demonstrated are essential for well-being. Ignatius urged his readers to praise God, that is, to learn to be grateful. He believed that humankind was made to serve God, which had the effect of dissolving egoism by drawing attention away from yourself. As Layard also pointed out, Ignatius argued that salvation involves being indifferent to what happens to you, so while everyone has times of desolation, it is also the case that such experiences tend to pass. This too can help, by building resilience.

Resilience is a theme that interests Eric Greitens, an American humanitarian and social entrepreneur currently researching the virtue. Early indications of his work suggest that individuals who demonstrate resilience in the face of life’s difficulties cannot simply bounce back because their harsh experiences become part of them. Instead, they are able to live with the distress in such a way that they can ascribe meaning to it. The experiences do not demean them, but deepen their sense of being human.

Again, this is an attitude embedded in spiritual traditions. Julian of Norwich lived through the Black Death, one of the most devastating plagues in history, and yet she was still able to write, “All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.”

Many of the researchers in the positive psychology field are searching for ways of reformulating such religious attitudes for a secular age. They exhibit a desire to raid religious traditions for their wisdom, while removing the theological scaffolding that has traditionally supported them. One of the most articulate recent attempts is found in the latest book by philosopher Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists, published earlier this year. In it, he agrees with the positive psychologists that religious practices provide useful techniques for everything from building humane communities to tending attitudes of kindness.

But reading de Botton’s book crystallised in my mind something crucial about religion that is overlooked. It will come as no surprise to believers that this something has to do with God. Positive psychology is characterised by its instrumentality. Alain de Botton puts it explicitly: “Religions are intermittently too useful, effective and intelligent to be abandoned to the religious alone.” What he misses, is that religions are good at building community and nurturing kindness because, paradoxically, they do not aim directly to do either. Rather, they aim to open adherents to that source of life, or spiritual sustenance, that is expansive of our humanity. They offer practices that, over time, transform the soul. It is variously called salvation, eternal life or enlightenment.

Goodwill and well-being may follow. They also may not. But when they do, they are happy by-products of the main task, which is not actually to have a successful life. It is to come to know God. The spiritual dimension has instrumental effects; but without the vertical striving, religious virtues come to feel empty. To whom are you expressing gratitude for life if not God? The blind mechanisms of evolution? Or, it might be noted that you do not become religious in order to be happy, and if you tried to do so the strategy would fail you.

It is striking that atheistic writers and researchers are coming to a new appreciation of religion. Going are the days when faith could simply be written off. Nonetheless, I suspect that their ideas will flounder because a basic and obvious question is being avoided, though as Oliver James remarked, it is one “no researchers have ever posited”. Might human well-being actually have something to do with God?

... for your diary.

1. Monday 9th April, 22:45 on BBC Radio 3

The Essay - 1/5. Mark Vernon on political doubt.

"Forget that life is enveloped not just by known unknowns but unknown unknowns, and you will fall like Icarus from the sky".

2. Monday 23rd April, 16.30 on BBC Radio 4

Beyond Belief - a discussion of science and religion.