Nobody can have failed to notice that there is a noisy quarrel going on between religion and its opponents. The success of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion has raised the stakes between those who think religion is an important part of life, and those who see it as a hindrance to progress and truth. The different faiths, for their part, have become increasingly assertive in recent years, wanting public funding for their faith-based schools and new laws to protect them from satire and criticism.

One of the most significant aspects of the quarrel between religious and nonreligious people concerns morality. Religious people think that morals are undermined if they are not securely based on a belief in God. The more austere among them think the pursuit of pleasure and the desire for possessions have promoted selfishness and frivolity at the expense of moral principle: “the good life” has, they say, supplanted “living a life of goodness”.

Is this true? Is “the good life” incompatible with a good life? Most people want pleasure, achievement and material comfort in their lives, and yet also want to live a morally “good” life: hence the success of Nick Hornby’s novel How to be Good, and our enthusiasm for saving the planet. On the face of it there seems little reason why these ambitions should be inconsistent yet the prevailing view, based on religion, has been that “the good life” cannot be morally good, on the grounds that pleasure and the desire for material possessions undermine one’s moral fibre — a view dear to the more conservative groups of Muslims and Christian evangelicals.

As it happens, people who seek pleasure and material comforts have often enough given religious moralists cause for concern — think of Roman banquets, Renaissance feasts and Regency excesses — but do we need religion to tell us what goodness is? For most of history people believed that human beings are quite different from the rest of nature because they possess reason and language. They unquestioningly assumed that humanity was created by God, who gave each individual an immortal soul. In medieval times humanity was seen as the central point between earth and heaven, standing at the pivot of the great chain of being that extended from the lowliest worm to God himself.

Given this view, it is no surprise that what was regarded as good was whatever would save man from his beastly physical nature and its appetites, in order to prepare him for the felicity of life after death. Pleasures and possessions were therefore dangerous, because they distracted his attention from his heavenly goal.

There is a great difference between this view and one that sees humanity as part of nature. This was what the ancient Greeks like Aristotle thought. They praised friendship, the quest for knowledge, and the appreciation of beauty, as the greatest human pleasures. The focus of their attention was this world and its benefits, and they debated intelligently about how to make the most of them.

The central part of their enjoyment of this-worldly pleasures was of course not congenial to religious minds, so it had to wait for the Renaissance to be rediscovered. The Renaissance thinkers argued that man is a part of nature, and that it is natural to celebrate what pleases the five senses — colours and tastes, scents and sensations, music and the lover’s touch.

Today’s science has confirmed this Renaissance intuition. We know from biology and genetics how much we are part of nature, and how much all the things that were once thought to distinguish humankind from other animals are in fact widely shared by them.

The first full realisation of this truth came with Darwin, and has since been overwhelmingly attested from a thousand different proofs. It tells us that the range of this-worldly things people find to appreciate in life and the things that give them pleasure and satisfaction are as natural to them as the desire for food and drink.

This is why there is nothing wrong with the pleasures and possessions of “the good life”; they are what people naturally seek and even need (provided they are not enjoyed at the expense of someone else, and so long as the business of acquiring them does not become an obsessive end in itself).

Contrary to the religious anxiety about “the good life”, then, it is arguable that pleasures and possessions not only make life enjoyable, but they make other positive things possible too. The better things are in one’s own life, the more good one can do in other people’s lives. One of the best things anyone can have is successful relationships with friends, family and community. That is quite different from the mistaken picture of “the good life” as something selfish or debauched.

Here then is a way of deciding between the religious and nonreligious view of morality. The rich tradition of thought stemming from ancient Greece teaches that there is no conflict between “the good life” and a life that is morally good. The opposite view disagrees with this because it says that mankind should avoid being too much part of nature. This is the key disagreement in the debate about morality, religion and the good life, a debate still raging between the devout and the rest of us today. The question we each need to ask is: which side am I on?

Against All Gods by Anthony Grayling is published by Oberon on March 26, £8.99

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