Professor Andrew Clark from the Paris School of Economics claims to have shown that religion is good for you. With religious faith, he suggests, we are better able to cope with setbacks in life such as divorce or redundancy, and as a result believers generally experience a higher level of life satisfaction than atheists.

However, that doesn’t mean that churches should expect to be inundated with calls from recanting atheists wanting to arrange to be baptised.

There’s a difference between beliefs being beneficial and beliefs being true, and we shouldn’t confuse the two. Plenty of beliefs that would increase well-being (e.g. the belief that people only ever say nice things about each other behind their backs) have no basis in fact whatsoever.

Arguments inferring that something must be true from the idea that it’s good for us to believe it (or that it isn’t true from the idea that it’s bad for us to believe it) commit the appeal to consequences fallacy.

Whether belief in God is good, bad, or indifferent for us is an entirely separate matter to whether it is true.