Happiness: Is Psychology Making Religion Obsolete?

Religions have traditionally had a view on how to be happy. In recent years, Positive Psychology has started to offer its own insights. This raises the question of whether psychology could one day make religion obsolete. Might we see worship migrating from churches to the self-help aisles of bookshops?

The issue of happiness is of central importance to Religion, Philosophy, and Psychology because it is an answer to the most basic question of what life is for. Ever since people began recording their thoughts, people have asked about the meaning and purpose of life. Why are we here? What is the meaning of life?

Ancient philosophy had a simple answer to those questions. It said that people want to be happy, so people exist to be happy. This means that happiness is the purpose and meaning of life.

Of course, there were philosophical disagreements about what happiness meant. Hedonists viewed happiness as pleasures. Eudaimonia approaches treated happiness as a deeper, more enduring state of peaceful joy. Philosophers also probed the idea of human flourishing, as the underlying cause of happiness.

Christianity inherited an ancient interest in happiness. Christians depict heaven in terms of joy and happiness (e.g., the beatific vision). The 1992 Catechism even talks about the human desire for happiness as what draws people to God (paragraph 27; also 1718).

If psychology is now starting to offer new insights on how to be happy, it raises the question of whether it could ever make religion obsolete. To answer that question, we will begin by looking at the four differing types of views about how to be happy.

1. Mentalist approaches
2. Physicalist approaches
3. Psychological approaches
4. Ethical-Religious Approaches

1. Mentalist Approaches

Perhaps one of the most ancient approaches to happiness is to view it as a mental reality. Ancient philosophers took this approach because the mind seemed to be what distinguished humans from animals. If the mind is what makes the difference, then the mind is what is important. So, happiness must be in the mind.

This Mentalism took at least two forms. Platonist approaches stressed mental content as the basis for ultimate happiness. This meant that Platonists typically talked of contemplating as the basis for ultimate happiness.

Stoic approaches stressed mental skills as the basis for happiness. Those skills included detachment from emotions and controlling thoughts, so that people could live in a state of untroubled tranquility. If we do not desire things, then we cannot be unhappy when we do not have things. By viewing happiness as not-unhappiness, these kinds of approaches suggested that ultimate happiness was a kind of emotionless disinterest.

Much of ancient thought revolved around nuanced distinctions of these Mentalist approaches. Even some ancient religions like Buddhism made a point of stressing the importance of mental skills, like meditation and tranquil acceptance.

Aspects of Mentalism are compatible with Christianity, as Christian conversion does indeed involve a change of mind (e.g., metanoia). It is also a common-sense truism that worrying about what you cannot control, makes people unhappy. So, learning to manage thoughts is recommended within many religions.

But Christianity also diverges from Mentalism. Jesus’ words and actions suggest that Christians need to engage with the world, not just change how they think about the world. For example, when Jesus encountered the money-changers, he did not try to cultivate a mental state of acceptance. He made a whip and drove them out of the temple (John 2:13–25).

Christianity was initially incarnated in a world steeped in Mentalist approaches, and early Christian theology reflects this. When St. Augustine (d. 430) converted to Christianity, one of his first academic projects was a book on happiness. It takes a thoroughly Mentalist approach to happiness, an approach which his philosophical contemporaries would have approved of.

Thirty years later, when he wrote The City of God, Augustine changed his mind. Reflecting on the goodness of the human body and the doctrine of the resurrection, he realized that Mentalism alone cannot make people happy, when people have both a physical and a mental dimension. At best it can reduce types of unhappiness. But reducing unhappiness is not the same as causing happiness. Something else is needed besides Mentalism, something which reflects the fact that people are more than just minds.

2. Physicalist Approaches

Extreme Physicalist approaches to human happiness are models of happiness based on living naturally, like a beast. Diogenes (d. 323 BC), the ancient Cynic philosopher, is sometimes described as living in that way.

More sophisticated Physicalist approaches try to integrate mental and physical perspectives. Happiness may be partially a (Mentalist) matter of how you think about things, but human happiness also requires physical elements for a physical body.

One of the most famous ancient proponents of this type of approach was Aristotle (d. 322 BC). He thought that objects flourished when they were performing as they were meant to perform. For example, a flourishing knife is a knife that is sharp and effective for cutting things.

A flourishing human is a human who is performing optimally as a human. When humans flourish, by functioning optimally, that makes people happy. This insight led to Virtue Theory, as virtues are the character strengths which enable humans to perform optimally. This means that Aristotelian approaches to human happiness tend to focus on virtues and stressing the importance of being virtuous.

St Thomas Aquinas (d.1274) designed his Summa Theologiae around this insight. The large second part of his book starts with a reflection on happiness, which leads into an extended analysis of the virtues.

3. Psychological Approaches

Modern Positive Psychology is a Physicalist approach which applies scientific research to discover more about what creates human happiness. Research projects like the Grant Study, have tracked people for 75 years, looking carefully at what causes happiness when people are in different circumstances and stages of life.

These types of studies tend to produce varying recipes for happiness, which psychologists nuance differently. The models are generally similar and tell us that happiness arises when people have positive emotions and good relationships. Happiness depends on achieving outcomes which people think are worthwhile and on finding meaning in what people are doing (etc.).

One of the conclusions of these psychological studies is that religion is largely irrelevant to human flourishing and happiness. Having a religion (any religion) can help, but it does so accidentally by providing opportunities for emotions, relationships, achievements, and meaningful activities.

There is undoubtedly much of value in Positive Psychology’s insights about happiness. But there is also a serious problem lurking within the models.

We can see this by imagining a scenario in which some genocidal racists gang up together to annihilate other races. The gang may come to tick all the psychological boxes for flourishing happiness. They may get a strong emotional buzz and develop friendships as they work together in their criminal endeavours. They may even find meaning and achievements in their murderous enterprises.

However, would we say that the gang is flourishing happily? They may tick off the psychological criteria to look as if they are, but could we say that they are really and genuinely flourishing?

This is a problematic question. If genocidal racism could be an instance of flourishing happiness, and if humans are meant to seek happiness, then it implies that becoming a genocidal racist could be a successful way of becoming a flourishing happy person.

Clearly, genocidal racism cannot be thought of as leading to flourishing happiness. But if a gang can meet psychological definitions for being happy, then this suggests that there is something missing from psychological accounts of happiness.

What is missing is the idea of moral goodness. It is not enough for a person to fulfil psychological criteria to flourish and to be happy. It is also not enough for people to think that they are behaving in a morally good way. Genocidal racists can seem to flourish, and genocidal racists can be convinced that they are acting for some greater moral good.

But, to actually flourish happily, people must be actually behaving in a morally good way. Genocidal racists are not behaving in a morally good way because racism and genocide are morally evil. So, genocidal racists cannot be flourishing happily.

Some Positive psychologists have recognized the need for objectivity and objective ethical standards within definitions of flourishing and happiness. Otherwise the definitions cannot rule out examples like genocidal racists, who are subjectively convinced of their own moral justifications.

But psychology cannot provide an account of objective moral goodness. Psychology observes and describes how things are. It cannot prescribe how things should be. It is Ethics which prescribes, and so it is only Ethics which can clarify an account of objective moral goodness.

This means that the Physicalist accounts of happiness which underpin Positive Psychology are incomplete. They offer pertinent and valuable insights about flourishing and happiness, but they need something more.

4. Ethical-Religious Approaches

Mentalism, Physicalism, and the suggestions of Positive Psychology all offer valuable insights into flourishing and happiness. But those accounts are incomplete unless they also appeal to an ethics which can identify which actions are objectively morally good.

Traditionally, ethicists have appealed to ideas like Natural Law or Divine Command theories to explain how objective moral goodness can exist. In the modern world, many people are uneasy about objective morality. Objectivity implies comparisons and judgements, and the idea that some cultures are right and some cultures are wrong. This makes some modern thinkers uncomfortable. They prefer the idea that every culture should be able to make up its own ideas about moral goodness and so they reject the idea that there can be objective moral standards.

But rejecting the objectivity of moral goodness has serious consequences for the idea of happiness. The example of the genocidal racists showed us that if we are unable to identify which actions are objectively good, then it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to know what can lead to happiness.

This brings us ultimately to Ethical-Religious approaches to happiness. In so far as they appeal to accounts of objective moral goodness, they can address the limitations and incompleteness of psychological accounts. (For example, see Christian Daru, “Without Excuse: The Divine Origin of Happiness”).

Of course, there is more to religion than merely clarifying objective morality. And there are complexities in dealing with differing religions’ diverse claims. However, the important point is that unless there is an Ethical-Religious account to supplement psychological models of happiness, there is a risk that genuine happiness may turn out to be elusive.

Conclusion

We began with a question. If humans exist to be happy, and if Positive Psychology is now telling people how to be happy, does this mean that religion is at risk of being superseded by psychology?

The answer to that question would seem to be no. Positive Psychology has many valuable insights, but it is also an incomplete account of happiness. This is because it cannot distinguish which actions are objectively morally good. Without that piece of information, Positive Psychology is unable to distinguish between genuine happiness and the false impressions of happiness which genocidal racists might have.

So, rather than swapping the altar table for the bookshop café, perhaps we should look at how Positive Psychology and religion complement each other. Rather than forcing a false “either-or,” perhaps it would be more appropriate to view them as an integrated “both-and” approach to human happiness.