Can science describe happiness?

A new course is making a splash in online education by teaching students around the world how to turn frowns upside down.

“The Science of Happiness”—a 10-week massive open online course (MOOC) sponsored by UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center (GGSC)—launched Sept. 9 and is taught by neuroscientist and GGSC science director Emiliana Simon-Thomas, campus psychology professor Dacher Keltner, and a variety of guest lectures. The course is open to anyone through the nonprofit online initiative edX. It claims to offer research-backed tips on living a happy and meaningful life based on positive psychology.

“Everything we teach in the science of happiness is based on a research finding,” Simon-Thomas told the Huffington Post. “We don’t have a philosophical or spiritual tenor. … I don’t have any other agenda than to give people more information about what works and what doesn’t work.”

Each week, via a series of short videos and articles, more than 89,000 students learn a new research-tested practice to foster social and emotional well-being, from mindful breathing and active listening to thank-you letters and random acts of kindness. Quizzes, polls, a discussion board, and weekly “emotion check-ins” help students gauge their progress over time.

Nicky Sloss, a 43-year-old student wellbeing consultant for the Association of Independent Schools in Sydney, Australia, is enrolled in the course and pleased with her experience so far. “I wanted to take the course to see how it affected my own wellbeing as well as for educative purposes,” Sloss said. “A large part of my work also involves professionally developing teachers to assist their students with these same skills of resilience, optimistic thinking, etc.”

But Christian critics are skeptical. They question the effectiveness of a strictly research-based class that seems to bypasses biblical principles of joy and could lead students astray. Bill Hathaway, dean of Psychology and Counseling at Regent University, recently spoke with me about the UC Berkeley course in light of a Christian perspective on happiness and the rising “positive psychology” movement.

So what does the “science of happiness” really mean? This new “science of happiness” engages big issues, such as what gives life meaning, or what does it mean to promote human wellbeing. It is really a new way of pulling together several strands of psychological research on emotion, wellbeing, and human adjustment. … This newer movement in psychology is “positive” in that it focuses on positive or healthy emotions rather than problematic negative emotions such as “depression.”

Biblically speaking, is there any truth-based value to the movement? This movement is at its best when it simply describes how the human body, behavior, emotions, thinking, and social life reflect specific emotions, what is the apparent functions of those emotions. … There is much in this research that we can learn and that could potentially contribute to pastoral care and spiritual formation strategies as Christians. The movement is at its weakest when it jumps from studies of emotions and adjustment to big claims about things like “what is a meaningful life?”

Could a positive psychology course like this potentially make light of negative human experiences, though? There is nothing in this newer approach that requires one to be pollyannaish about human suffering or pain. People can increase their wellbeing even while still experiencing negative emotional stands. To my mind, this is much closer to the biblical depictions of how people overcome difficulties than the idea that victory means, at least in this life, freedom from pain or negative emotions.

Could this course have an authentic or lasting impact on participants? In other words, can happiness boil down to science? Notions such as “greater good” or even a “meaningful life” cannot be fully engaged through science alone. Dacher Keltner is a remarkable research psychologist who has done solid work on a range of topics of interest to Christian thought. … We can value his science but have to be careful to not assume his spiritual, moral, philosophical statements are at the same level as his direct work in psychology. What thoughtful Christian would seriously object, for instance, to the cultivation of gratitude as a healthy life practice?

Why the exploding cultural interest in this topic? As a Christian in psychology, I believe people are longing for “shalom,” a state of wellbeing in which our internal and external worlds are properly ordered according to the principles of God’s kingdom. People have “eternity in their hearts” and as Augustine noted, have restless hearts until the heart rests in God. That small bit of cherry-picked biblical psychology suggests that Christians should not be surprised when people are drawn to visions of life that reflect aspects of shalom.

What should Christians take away from all this? We should be grateful for the explosion of research in the “science of happiness” that shows us with ever greater detail, down to the molecular level, how we are built for shalom, what it looks like body and soul when we approximate it and what it looks like when we do not. It would be hard to reconcile a purely naturalistic approach to self-perfection or “wellness” maturation (i.e, happiness) with a biblical view of the person. But I see more opportunity than peril in the movement, particularly if we embrace the … millennia of Christian thought on these topics.

So you would argue that the course contributes something valuable to a biblical understanding of the pursuit of happiness? Just as Big Bang cosmology created new opportunities as well as points of challenge for Christians, so this turn towards wellbeing, with its frequent head on valuing spiritual virtues such as contentment or forgiveness, now provides new opportunities and challenges. This great new interest in “the science of happiness” is not just a soapbox opportunity. There are discoveries here about human functioning that can enrich and enlarge our Christian understandings of how God designed us. We should be genuinely grateful for that helpful development in psychology and welcome the light it can shed on those details.