G.K. Chesterton wrote that when people stop believing in God, they don’t start believing in nothing, but in anything – anything but God, that is. His remark is thrown about frequently as a sage observation on the insane consequences of atheism.

But Chesterton was wrong in his ill-observed view. It is those who believe in God who are most prone to believe in anything. I count myself among them: because I believe in something amorphous and vague that roughly fits the description of God, then I also believe in the supernatural powers of something equally vague and amorphous called Saint Anthony, who finds almost everything I lose, and in the most extraordinary places too.

My grandmother, who was most definite about the existence of God, believed in the miraculous powers of Saint Jude, and would advocate them for impossible causes like chemistry O-levels. My mother, who is also confident about the reality of God, believes in the power of candles. She has spent the last 30 years lighting them on the eve of examinations, first for her daughters, then for her grandsons; and she will be lighting them for another 15 years for her granddaughters. I have caught the candle habit. Each time I visit a church or cathedral on a trip abroad, I use up all my loose change and light battalions of them in front of the local votive icon, statue or painting. I don’t even know why I do it, but I have to. It’s called superstitious compulsion.

Atheists, on the other hand, are not burdened with all of this. Those who don’t believe in God tend also to dispense with any form of superstition or “alternative” beliefs. The kind of mind that prevents you from believing in God is precisely the kind of mind that prevents you from believing in anything else that you can’t see or touch, and for which you have no scientific proof of existence.

The opposite holds true: those who believe in God have the kind of mind that predisposes them to believe in fantastical things, because on paper God is just such a fantastical thing. The more religious a person is, the more predisposed he is to believe in fantastical matters and superstitions – hence the miraculous powers of saints and the forces of good emanating from lucky charms like holy pictures or saintly relics.

Chesterton may have been a great writer, but he wasn’t a great psychologist. He himself was the perfect example of what I am describing here. His early adulthood was devoted to experimentation with the occult and with Ouija boards. This took him, in a progression that seems to me entirely natural, into religious exploration, thence to conservative Christianity, and from there to Catholicism.

He was what I call a “searching” person, and those who search will eventually find something that fits their bill, or they will spend their entire lives moving from one form of superstition to another. The mistake Chesterton made was to fail to classify Catholicism with superstition, precisely because he believed in it. I don’t mean this as an offensive term, but purely as a practical way of classifying our irrational belief in something that we hope is true, rather than what we know to be true.

I can use myself as another example. Candles and Saint Anthony apart, for they are mere aberrations, I have always regarded the occult, alternative therapies, homeopathic medicine, spiritual mysteries and all of that with exactly the same kind of interest and enthusiasm I reserve for sport, athletics on television, card games and board games.

I know that people are interested, even obsessed, but I also know that I will never, and I mean never, feel the same way myself. For exactly the same reasons, I feel the same way about organised religion – well, about any kind of religion really, organised or disorganised. I think I was just born a “non-searching” person, which is the opposite of a “searching” person.

When people try to persuade me to join a prayer group, for example, they might as well be trying to sell me an Ouija board or a year’s subscription to the sports channel. There is no way I am ever going to want anything like that. I try to explain this to those who approach me by saying that the very same facets of my character that have made me a lifelong rejecter of spiritual experimentation (and they are probably the very same facets that have made me a lifelong rejecter of drug experimentation too, because you’ll find that the two have the same root cause) are the very ones that have made me completely uninterested in religion as a participant but very much interested as an observer because I am curious.

Richard Dawkins is yet another example of how wrong Chesterton was in his observation. He famously doesn’t believe in God – he wrote the book The God Delusion, and speaks about the subject all the time – but he also famously doesn’t believe in anything else that is remotely superstitious.

He’s taken up the subject in a television series in Britain, called The Enemies of Reason. His argument, and it is a very sensible one, is that the growing obsession with “new age” therapies and beliefs and other irrational superstitions are causing what he calls a retreat from reason. This booming industry, he says, impoverishes British culture and “throws up new age gurus who exhort us to run away from reality.” He describes it as an epidemic of superstitious thinking. “There are two ways of looking at the world,” he told a London newspaper – “through faith and superstition, or through the rigours of logic, observation and evidence, through reason. Yet today reason has a battle on its hands. Reason and a respect for evidence are the source of our progress, our safeguard against fundamentalists and those who profit from obscuring the truth. We live in dangerous times when superstition is gaining ground and rational science is under attack.”

Professor Dawkins holds the Charles Simonyi Chair for the public understanding of science, at Oxford University. He is concerned that as religion and other forms of superstition are booming (the growth in Christian fundamentalism is as great as that in Islamic fundamentalism), the number of students sitting for A-levels in physics in Britain has fallen by 50 per cent over 25 years, and for chemistry by a third. And this is when many more people are taking A-levels now than they were in 1982.

The growth of irrationality is perceivable in Malta, too, and it’s causing a certain degree of schizophrenia. On the one hand you have the rise of information and communications technology and the drive to get as many young people as possible into that field and other areas of the sciences. Then on the other hand you have the absolutely phenomenal growth of Catholic prayer-groups, conservative Christianity, and a great mass of people who are looking for higher meaning in all the wrong places – by which I mean that their search is all about them, that it is entirely egotistical, and that their problems would be ameliorated if they took the time to step outside themselves and start thinking of others.

The trouble begins when the interests of the two halves collide and not coincide. For example, MP Michael Asciak cannot understand why he can’t be at one and the same time a supernumerary of the ultra-right-wing conservative Catholic organisation Opus Dei and also the chairman of the Malta Bioethics Committee. He really cannot grasp this, as his letter to this newspaper’s sister Sunday edition, a couple of weeks ago, shows.

A few other people who wrote in to support him have demonstrated a similar inability to grasp the implications of having a member of Opus Dei chair the state’s (secular) bioethics committee. So let me spell it out: it’s unacceptable because whether we like to admit this or not, the findings of the secular bioethics committee are going to come into conflict, at some point, with Catholic teaching. The chairman will then have to make a decision, and that decision must be secular not religious.

I know that there are many people out there who have adopted the Islamic way of thinking: that their religious beliefs should be imposed on everyone else by default through state legislation governing behaviour. But that way, madness lies. G. K. Chesterton ended up converting to Catholicism only because he started out believing in Ouija boards. I shall light some candles, and hope that commonsense prevails. If that fails, there is always Saint Jude, the patron saint of lost causes.