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Freud’s Critique of Religious Belief

Friday, August 3rd, 2007

Most people are familiar with Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic critique of religious beliefs (or at least give lip service to it), but how often do you hear his theory of how man tamed fire?

Psychoanalytic material, incomplete as it is and not susceptible to clear interpretation, nevertheless admits of a conjecture—a fantastic-sounding one—about the origin of this human feat. It is as though primal man had the habit, when he came in contact with fire, of satisfying an infantile desire connected with it, by putting it out with a stream of his urine. The legends that we possess leave no doubt about the originally phallic view taken of tongues of flame as they shoot upwards. Putting out fire by micturating—a theme to which modern giants, Gulliver in Lilliput and Rabelais’ Gargantua, still hark back—was therefore a kind of sexual act with a male, an enjoinment of a sexual potency in a homosexual competition. The first person to renounce this desire and spare the fire was able to carry it off with him and subdue it to his own use. By damping down the fire of his own sexual excitation, he had tamed the natural force of fire. This grate cultural conquest was thus the reward for his renunciation of instinct. Further it is as though woman had been appointed guardian of the fire which was held captive on the domestic hearth, because her anatomy made it impossible for her to yield to the temptation of this desire.¹

“A quite extraordinary and unexampled achievement,” he says. Indeed. However, most of Freud’s scientific claims have fallen on hard times these days, the consensus on about them being either highly suspect or, at the very least, dubious.² The story isn’t much different for his critique of religion in general and religious belief in particular. Because Freud’s analysis of individual religious belief is much more sophisticated and well known than his analysis of how religion in general originated, it is safe to bypass evaluating the latter.³

I. Freud’s Critique of Religious Belief

In short, Freud hypothesized that religious belief arises from a psychological mechanism called “wish fulfillment.” Similar to traditional psychological projection, Freud maintained that in response to our own shortcomings and insecurities, we subconsciously generate compensatory beliefs—beliefs that naturally exhibit characteristics opposite those which damage our ego. He calls these beliefs illusions:

These [religious beliefs], which are given out as teachings, are not precipitates of experience or end-results of thinking: they are illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind. The secret of their strength lies in the strength of those wishes. As we already know, the terrifying impressions of helplessness in childhood aroused the need for protection—for protection through love—which was provided by the father; and the recognition that this helplessness lasts throughout life made it necessary to cling to the existence of a father, but this time a more powerful one. Thus the benevolent rule of a divine Providence allays our fear of the dangers of life; the establishment of a moral world-order ensures the fulfillment of the demands of justice, which have so often remained unfulfilled in human civilization; and the prolongation of earthly existence in a future life provides the local and temporal framework in which these wish-fulfillments shall take place.⁴

Freud concedes that illusory beliefs are not necessarily false beliefs, but are nonetheless maleficent, infantile, and a whole host of other contumelies. Further, Freud maintains that it is within our power to resist those sorts of beliefs; when we do not, we are “guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanor,” are to be pitied, and encouraged to grow up.

So what is to be said of this charge? First and foremost, what exactly is the charge? Well, first, a word about what it isn’t. As an attack on the justification of the belief in question and not the belief’s truthfulness, Freud’s critique is not guilty of the genetic fallacy as many apologists mistakenly claim.⁵ The genetic fallacy occurs when one attacks the truth of a belief on the basis of how that belief originated. But as psychoanalysis specialist Adolf Grünbaum points out⁶, Freud’s objection is not de facto in nature, but de jure. A de facto objection is leveled against the truth of some belief, whereas a de jure objection is leveled against some belief’s justification or rationality or warrant. So if a de facto objection succeeds, it has shown the belief in question to be false. If a de jure objection succeeds, on the other hand, it has shown the belief in question to be unjustified, irrational, or unwarranted. After a careful look at Freud’s complaint, eminent epistemologist Alvin Plantinga claims it should be understood to mean religious beliefs lack warrant. Therefore, fundamental to understanding Freud’s critique of religious belief is the epistemological notion of warrant.

II. Religious Belief as Lacking Warrant

According to Plantinga, warrant is that which distinguishes knowledge from mere true belief. For a belief to have warrant, three conditions must be met: 1) The belief has to be produced by properly functioning cognitive faculties. 2) The belief has to be produced in an environment that is appropriate for the kind of cognitive faculties that produce the belief to function properly. 3) The belief-forming process has to work according to a design-plan that is successfully aimed at truth. How do religious beliefs fail to meet these conditions? According to Freud, religious beliefs are formed in (something like) the following way. In an instance of fear or insecurity, young Tommy yearns for parental care, receives it, and develops a dependency. Once Tommy becomes of age, he realizes the parental figures once provisional are no longer an adequate means of comfort. So, Tommy projects (subconsciously, of course) a larger, more competent parental figure to compensate. As Thomas’ fears and insecurities seem to increase in tandem with his age, the only parental figure large enough to appease them naturally fits the job description of “God”.

Now as far as we know, Thomas’ cognitive faculties were functioning properly by producing fear or insecurity in response to situations where he received or would later desire parental care. Further, each time Thomas received or desired parental care we can assume the events took place within an environment where the cognitive faculties which produced those feelings were functioning properly (e.g., his crib was not a gas chamber, he was not raised on some other planet where radiation amounts were such that his function of memory was impeded, etc.). Conditions (1) and (2) of warrant are met for Thomas’ belief in God. Condition (3), however, is not. Rather than forming his belief according to a design-plan successfully aimed at truth, Thomas instead formed his belief according to a design-plan aimed at something like psychological comfort. Plantinga summarizes:

According to Freud, theistic belief is produced by cognitive faculties that are functioning properly, but the process that produces it—wishful thinking—does not have the production of true belief as its purpose; it is aimed, instead, at something like enabling us to carry on in the grim and threatening world in which we find ourselves. Therefore, theistic belief does not meet the third condition of warrant; as a result, the presumption of reliability that goes with warranted beliefs does not apply to it.⁷

Tommy’s religious belief, then, fails to have warrant. Beliefs that fail to have warrant can’t be proper objects of knowledge and are ipso facto unjustified and irrational. Hence, religious beliefs are irrational. So that is Freud’s charge. What can be made by way of a response?

III. Responding to Freud

Once we get a clear idea of the nature of Freud’s critique of religious belief (as outlined above), several lines of argument can be mounted up against it. First, and perhaps most importantly, Plantinga’s entire book, Warranted Christian Belief, is devoted to offering a model of how religious belief can have warrant. Without detailing Plantinga’s model, so long as it makes warrant for religious belief even possible, Freud’s charge to the contrary is rebutted. Second, as it stands, Freud’s case for religious belief lacking warrant is itself severely lacking. In order for it to pass as a serious objection, Freud (or any of his compatriots) must first show two things.⁸ First, that religious belief does, in fact, arise from wish-fulfillment. And second, that wish-fulfillment is not aimed at producing true beliefs. Consider them each in turn.

First, does religious belief arise from wish-fulfillment? What reasons does Freud give us for thinking this is true? Well, none. So a better question might be, What reasons could there be in general for thinking religious belief arises from wish fulfillment? Again, not many if any. As “not susceptible to clear interpretation” by nature, how could this hypothesis even be tested, let alone objectively assessed? What kind of evidence could one offer for this claim? Perhaps the best indicator of cases where religious belief is plausibly explained by wish-fulfillment would be where the belief projected fits conveniently well with the subject’s own likes and dislikes. I think it was Nietzsche who remarked, “If there are gods, I couldn’t stand not to be one.” I have a sneaking suspicion that religious beliefs projected out of wish-fulfillment would look strangely like a grandiose version of one’s self. But most religious beliefs don’t fit that profile at all. The God of Christianity, for example, is a wrathful God who demands personal holiness by having you recognize and repent from your own sinful nature—hardly the sort of religious belief one would project out of wish-fulfillment!⁹More concretely, however, is prominent Psychologist Paul C. Vitz’s observation that “there is no systematic empirical evidence to support the thesis of childhood projection being the basis of belief in God. Indeed, the assumption that religious belief is neurotic and psychologically counterproductive has been substantially rejected.”¹⁰

Furthermore, as Freud himself realized, this argument cuts both ways. Psychological projection has a counterpart known as repression (both being a sort of wish-fulfillment). Some people don’t want there to be a God.¹¹ Out of a desire to kill the father figure (maybe due to a dysfunctional relationship), perhaps they repress religious belief to preserve autonomy. At the very least, psychological repression explains lack of religious belief equally as well as psychological projection explains the presence of it. But Vitz in fact has argued that “the present theoretical understanding ties…atheism…much more firmly to the theoretical structure of psychoanalysis than Freud ever tied belief.”¹² Moreover, even if Freud is right about religious belief being produced by wish-fulfillment, then this might provide fertile ground for the argument from desire.¹³ If it is true that there is a natural correlation between our desires and the existence of that which fulfills them, then wish-fulfillment is evidence that there actually is a God who is the object of the religious beliefs we project.

Second, is wish-fulfillment not aimed at the production of true beliefs? For the sake of argument, suppose we did have good reason to believe religious belief came about by wish-fulfillment. Even if we assume this, however, it still would not follow that religious belief does not have warrant. It has to be shown that wish-fulfillment itself is not aimed at the production of true beliefs. But again, Freud grants us no supporting thought on the matter. As a mechanism that functions wholly subconsciously, it’s nearly impossible to see exactly what kind of beliefs wish-fulfillment is aimed at producing (religious or other), much less whether the process is successful. One possibility is as good as another. Certainly it’s possible that God could use such a faculty for commonly producing religious beliefs within us. In fact, this is exactly the sort of design plan the third condition of warrant has in mind.¹⁴ Prominent philosopher John Hick explains:

Perhaps the most interesting theological comment to be made upon Freud’s theory is that in his work on the father-image he may have uncovered the mechanism by which God creates an idea of himself in the human mind. For if the relation of a human father to his children is, as the Judaic-Christian tradition teaches, analogous to God’s relationship to man, it is not surprising that human beings should think of God as their heavenly Father and should come to know him through the infant’s experience of utter dependence and the growing child’s experience of being loved, cared for, and disciplined within a family. Clearly, to the mind which is not committed in advance to a naturalistic explanation there may be a religious as well as a naturalistic interpretation of the psychological facts.¹⁵

Freud’s theory is not only open to the religious believer; it is just as reasonable to believe from a religious perspective as it is from a naturalistic one. For as Hick also noted, Freud’s theory has force against religious belief only if we first assume naturalism as a worldview is true. In other words, the de jure objection depends on the success of some de facto objection against religious belief. Atheist philosopher Kai Neilson also notices this:

…Sigmund Freud’s accounts of religion, as [he was himself] well aware, gain the considerable significance they have only after we have come to believe that the Enlightenment critiques of religion by Bayle and Hume, perhaps with a little contemporary rational reconstruction, have successfully done their work.¹⁶

But, of course, no religious believer is going to assume Bayle, Hume, or any of the ‘contemporary rational reconstructions’ have successfully done their work. So Freud’s theory should be far from compelling to him. The only religious believer going to buy this is “a certain variety of ‘liberal’ theologian, crazed by the thirst for novelty and the desire to accommodate current secularity” as Plantinga humorously remarked.

IV. Conclusion

Freud’s analysis of religious belief, though widely influential among laymen and in popular atheistic literature, isn’t nearly as extraordinary and unexampled of an achievement as how man tamed fire. More than just countering Freud’s claim that religious belief lacks warrant, the believer (or at least a Christian believer) can turn the tables and offer a de jure objection of his own to non-religious belief. Romans 1.18-32 makes it clear that it is the non-believer’s cognitive faculties that are not functioning properly.¹⁷ Admittedly, however, this de jure objection to non-religious belief would itself depend on the truth of theism. So it seems we are back to the age old de facto debate between theism and naturalism to determine who’s got the upper hand.¹⁸ (more…)

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Archive for August, 2007

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