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Atheism and Unbelief.
Atheists or unbelievers can be defined as people who believe one or more of
the following statements to be true:
 That there are no supernatural agents: God, gods or even demons or the
devil. Also, that there are no abstractions of God intended to replace him:
e.g. Paul Tillich’s ‘The Ground of all Being.’
 That there are no miracles: no interventions in the natural order of things
by supernatural agents.
 That there is no life after death.
In his book ‘Varieties of Unbelief’ J.C.A. Gaskin argues that there are 5 types
of ‘unbelief’. He avoids using the word atheism, as atheism he argues has
negative connotations and has been used as a term of abuse in the past. In
Ancient Greece, atheism was seen as a criminal offence and impiety was
occasionally punished: Socrates for example, was forced to take hi sown like
by drinking hemlock. However, Ancient Greek society did permit a variety of
ideas and prosecutions were rare. Throughout the Christian era, atheism has
been severely punished and up until comparatively recently, it was not easy
to hold or profess atheist beliefs and get away with it. Anything that
contradicted the teaching of the Christian Church was suppressed and
individuals that professed these views were often executed. In 448 CE, copies
of Porphyry’s book ‘Against the Christians’ were burned and at the end of the
Sixteenth Century, Giordano Bruno was repeatedly tortured and burned alive
by the Holy Inquisition of the Catholic Church for expressing ideas that
contradicted Church teaching.
The five types of unbelief that Gaskin points out are:
1. Materialism; this is the belief that there is no supernatural realm; nothing
beyond the physical world that we can see. We will use Bertrand Russell to
explore this.
2. Skepticism; this is the belief that any knowledge of the gods or of God is
not attainable by humans. We will use A.J. Ayer to explore this.
3. Critical unbelief; this is the belief that theism is incoherent, that it does
not make sense as an argument. We will Use Baron d’Holbach to explore
this.
4. Social unbelief; this is the belief that religion causes more harm than
good. It is expounded very clearly in the present day by Richard Dawkins,
who likens religion to a virus. We will use Karl Marx to explore it.
5. Naturalistic explanations for belief; this is the belief that there is a
natural explanation for the source of religious belief (i.e. that it doesn’t
come from God and is not revealed.) We will use Sigmund Freud to explore
this.
It is important to remember that most atheists will argue against belief in
God from a number of perspectives to strengthen their arguments. For
example, David Hume, Bertrand Russell and Richard Dawkins all produce
systematic critiques of religious belief that attack it from a variety of angles.
Richard Dawkins for example, in his book ‘The God Delusion’, argues from
materialism, critical unbelief and social unbelief.
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Materialist unbelief: Bertrand Russell (1872-1970).
Materialism is the belief that everything that exists is either
matter, or the result of matter, that humans create divinities
out of their deepest longings and aspirations. There are a
number of philosophers who have adopted this position
through the ages: Epicurus, Hobbes and others. We are going
to look at arguments from Bertrand Russell; a Twentieth
Century philosopher to examine the materialist position.
Russell refutes two beliefs central to religion: the belief in a creator God and
belief in the afterlife.
In ‘Why I am not a Christian’, Russell dismisses belief in Christianity on a
number of grounds; one of the arguments that he puts forward is a
materialist one. Russell begins his argument, by refuting some of the
traditional arguments for the existence of God: the Cosmological,
Teleological and Moral Arguments. In his dismissal of the Cosmological
Argument, Russell writes the following:
‘There is no reason why the world could not have come into being without a cause; nor,
on the other hand, is there any reason why it should not have always existed. There is no
reason to suppose that the world had any beginning at all. The idea that things have a
beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination.’
Russell is arguing either that everything must have a cause, or it must not. If
everything has a cause, then God too must have a cause. If everything does
not need a cause, then the world or the universe does not necessarily need a
cause. Russell’s claim is that the material evidence for the existence of God
(e.g. the universe, or design in the universe) does not necessarily point to the
existence of God. He also points to the incoherence of the Design Arguments
(that the design is somehow flawed) and the Moral Arguments (by using the
Euthyphro dilemma and indicating that there must be a standard of right and
wrong independent of God).
Russell goes on to argue that it is in fact fear that is the cause of religious
belief: ‘fear is the basis of the whole thing – fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear
of death.’ Russell argues that materialism and scientific knowledge can help us
to overcome this fear and superstition:
‘Science can help us to get over this craven fear in which mankind has lived for so many
generations. Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach us, no longer to
look around for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to
look to our own efforts here below to make this world a fit place to live in.’
Even though Russell argues that materially speaking it is impossible to
conclude that God exists, he also admits that it is not possible to disprove
God’s existence using materialist arguments:
‘I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that
Satan is fiction. The Christian God may exist; so may the Gods of Olympus, or of
Ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any
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other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no
reason to consider any of them.’
Philosophically speaking this is a sound argument and
a shrewd move. Russell, whilst he admits that the
material evidence does not in fact point to God, has to
admit that there is no way of proving the non-existence
of God (see A.J. Ayer below). This is something that Richard
Dawkins does not do. In ‘The God Delusion’, Dawkins tries
to show that ‘the God hypothesis’ is false. He argues that
the material evidence for God’s existence is faulty and that
people believe in God because they want to as a result of
emotional immaturity:
‘It is time to face up to the important role that God plays in consoling us; and the
humanitarian challenge, if he does not exist, to put something in his place. Many people
who concede that God probably doesn’t exist, and that he is not necessary for morality,
still come back with what they regard as a trump card: the alleged psychological or
emotional need for a god. If you take religion away, people truculently ask, what are you
going to put in its place? What have you to offer the dying patients, the weeping
bereaved, the lonely Eleanor Rigbys for whom God is their only friend?’
Dawkins dismisses belief in God and argues that the only reason people hang
on to it, is because it offers us consolation in the face of a cruel world.
Elsewhere in ‘Unweaving the Rainbow’ Dawkins has supported his materialist
argument by showing that things thought mysterious in the past can now be
explained by science. Where people had once thought that certain events had
mysterious or supernatural causes, science can now give a clear explanation
of why these events take place. In Chapter 6 for example, he takes on the
subject of astrology and writes a scathing critique of it, labelling it
‘meaningless pap’ amongst other things. He adds later:
‘We can get outside the universe. I mean in the sense of putting a model of the universe
inside our skulls. Not a superstitious, small-minded, parochial model filled with spirits and
hobgoblins, astrology and magic, glittering with fake crocks of gold where the rainbow
ends.’
Although Bertrand Russell was unwilling to conclude that God does not exist,
he did not shy away from concluding that belief in life after death was
incoherent. For Russell, mind is produced by matter and people believe in life
after death because they are afraid of death and are afraid of not existing any
longer. In ‘What I Believe’, Russell begins by arguing that everything that
makes up the universe is material. A human being is material. Our thoughts
depend upon ‘tracks’ (synaptic connections) and chemical reactions in the
brain; it would be possible to turn an intelligent man into an idiot simply by
reducing the amount of iodine in his blood: ‘mental phenomena seem to be
bound up with material structure.’ Russell goes on to state that ‘God and
immortality…find no support in science.’
‘I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young
and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation.
Happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought
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and love lose their value because they are not everlasting…Undoubtedly we are part of
nature, which has produced our desires, our hopes and fears, in accordance with laws
which the physicist is beginning to discover. In this sense we are part of nature, we are
subordinated to nature, the outcome of natural laws and their victims in the long run.’
Skeptical Unbelief: A.J. (‘Freddy’) Ayer.
In 1936, A.J. Ayer published a book entitled ‘Language,
Truth and Logic.’ In this book, amongst other things,
Ayer set out a skeptical view of belief in God. The
skeptical view holds that we cannot achieve any factual
or full knowledge of God. The main reason for this is
that we are finite and God is infinite and as Hobbes
claimed in Leviathan: ‘Whatsoever we imagine, is finite.
Therefore there is no idea, or conception of any thing we call
infinite. No man can have in his mind an image of infinite
magnitude.’
In Chapter 6 of his book, Ayer writes:
‘It is now generally admitted, at any rate by philosophers, that the existence of a being
having the attributes which define the God of any non-animistic religion cannot be
demonstratively proved.’
It is important to note at this stage that Ayer does not claim that this God
does not exist, he is arguing that the existence cannot be proved, as we do
not have the tools to do so.
Ayer claimed that there were only two types of proof that have any meaning:
analytic and synthetic. An analytic proof is one which is logically true, where
the premises necessitate the conclusion. For example:
P1:
P2:
C:
Socrates is a man;
All men are mortal;
Socrates is mortal.
This is an analytic proof, as by definition it has to be true. Other types of
analytically true statements are: 2+2=4, or ‘blue is a colour.’ We do not have
to look outside these statements to verify their truth.
A synthetic proof is a proof that is grounded in fact. In order for a synthetic
statement to be true, we need to provide empirical information to support it.
For example:
P1:
P2:
C:
Socrates is mortal;
All men are mortal;
Socrates is a man.
This argument is not true by definition. We would have to look at Socrates to
verify that he was a man, because he could be a badger, a goat or a threetoed sloth. Other examples of synthetic statements are: ‘it’s raining outside’,
‘the Eiffel Tower is in Paris’, or ‘my hair is brown.’ I need to rely upon my
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senses to verify that these statements are true, whereas with analytic
statements, I do not need them, they are true by definition.
Ayer argued that the statement ‘God exists’ cannot be proved analytically or
synthetically and is therefore a meaningless and unprovable statement:
‘…if the existence of such a god were probable, then the proposition that he existed
would be an empirical hypothesis. And in that case it would be possible to deduce from
it, and other empirical hypotheses, certain experiential propositions which were not
deducible from those hypotheses alone. But in fact, this is not possible.’
‘…to say that “God exists” is to make a metaphysical utterance which cannot be either
true or false. And by the same criterion, no sentence which purports to describe the
nature of a transcendent god can possess any literal significance.’
It is again important to recognise that Ayer does not say that it is impossible
to claim that God exists, he claims that it is impossible to meaningfully state
both that God does exist and that God does not exist. This is why people like
Richard Dawkins and Bertrand Russell do not say “God does not exist”
because they are aware that it is philosophically unsound to do so.
Ayer argues that the word ‘God’ is wrongly used. Religious people use ‘God’
as a proper noun i.e. as a name of an existing thing or person. Ayer argues
that for a noun to work, it must correspond to a real thing that the senses
can experience. For example, the noun ‘chair’ corresponds to pieces of
wood, plastic and metal that we can comfortably sit on. Not so with ‘God’ as
the word God does not correspond to an empirically verifiable reality (i.e.
something we could touch, taste, see, hear or smell.)
‘The mere existence of the noun is enough to foster the illusion that there is a real, or at
any rate a possible entity corresponding to it. It is only when we enquire what God’s
attributes are that we discover that “God” in this usage is not a genuine name.’
Ayer goes on to dismiss life after death, religious experiences and the
antagonism between religion and science. The following quotations illustrate
this:
‘But to say that there is something imperceptible inside a man, which is his soul or his
real self, and that it goes on living after he is dead, is to make a metaphysical assertion
which has no more factual content that the assertion that there is a transcendent God.’
‘But the mystic, so far from producing propositions which are empirically verified, is
unable to produce any intelligible propositions at all. And therefore we say that his
intuition has not revealed to him any facts. It is no use his saying that he has
apprehended facts but is unable to express them. For we know that if he really had
acquired any information, he would be able to express it.’
‘Since the religious utterances of the theist are not genuine propositions at all, they
cannot stand in any logical relation to the propositions of science.’
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Critical Unbelief: Baron d’Holbach (1723-1789)
Baron d’Holbach was part of the French atheist movement
of the Eighteenth Century which helped to lead to the
establishment of a non-religious republic in France in
1789. Whilst there was a group of philosophers in France
at the time, such as Voltaire, who were keen to argue
against the influence of the Church, but maintain belief in
God, there were others such as d’Holbach who wanted to
sweep away belief in God altogether, claiming that belief
was the result of misguided human imagination.
Critical unbelief is the view that theism is an incoherent system of beliefs and
critical unbelievers attempt to show that belief in God is based upon flawed
arguments. The most recent critical atheist is Richard Dawkins who has
attempted to systematically undermine belief in God.
In his ‘The System of Nature’, D’Holbach attempted to show that religious
belief was incoherent on the following grounds:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
God was created by humans;
An infinite being cannot relate to a finite being;
God allows evil to exist;
The revealed word of God is incoherent;
God takes sides and is not impartial.
1. God was created by humans.
D’Holbach argued that humans have a tendency to believe that what they are
not capable of fully understanding is much more noble than things that we
can understand. It is this belief, d’Holbach argues, that gave rise to belief in
God:
‘These prejudices in man for the marvellous, appear to have been the source that gave
birth to those wonderful, unintelligible qualities with which theology clothed the
sovereign of the world.’
Humans, fully aware of their own inadequacies, created a God who was
exempt from all of those failings, who was absolutely perfect in every way.
Like Dawkins and Russell after him, d’Holbach argued that it was fear that led
us to create this supernatural superbeing.
2. An infinite being cannot relate to a finite being.
But, according to d’Holbach, this infinite being caused a problem. By making
all the attributes of God perfect, we had put God out of our reach. D’Holbach
argued that sensing this problem, the Church re-clothed God with human
qualities. However, d’Holbach argued that this was a mistake:
‘[The Church] did not see that a God who was immaterial, destitute of corporeal organs,
was neither able to think nor to act as material beings, whose peculiar organizations
render them susceptible of the qualities, the feelings, the will, the virtues that are found in
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them. The necessity it felt to assimilate God to his worshippers, to make an affinity
between them, made it pass over without consideration these palpable contradictions.’
D’Holbach argued that the Church was trying to force together two things
that did not belong together: the finite and the infinite. He argued further
that the Church claimed that humans could have a relationship with God,
when this was impossible: if God was immutable and perfect as the Church
argued, how could humans have a relationship with God as a relationship
necessarily involves change; give and take? D’Holbach also argued that it
would be impossible for us to emulate divine, perfect qualities such as
goodness, wisdom and justice as these qualities are perfect in God, but we
cannot experience God. They might be present in humans, but human justice
is surely different from divine justice.
3. God allows evil to exist.
D’Holbach begins his discussion of this, by mentioning the religious belief
that evil and suffering are the just punishment from God for human sin. He
attempts to refute this by arguing that if this is the case, then humans can
inflict harm upon God. To offend someone presupposes a relationship with
them: if humans offend God by sinning, then they have harmed God. If
however, the finite can have no effect upon the infinite, how can this be
possible?
‘To offend anyone is to diminish the sum of his happiness; it is to afflict him, to deprive
him of something, to make him experience a painful sensation. How is it possible man
can operate on the well-being of the omnipotent sovereign of nature, whose happiness is
unalterable?’
D’Holbach continues by arguing that God is a tyrant; that God dispenses pain
and pleasure according to whim: the innocent suffer and bad people escape
unscathed. For d’Holbach, the presence of evil in the world makes God’s
attributes of justice and goodness incoherent.
4. The revealed word of God is incoherent.
D’Holbach argues that the fact that God has revealed certain truths necessary
for human happiness over time, implies that God has been happy for us to
exist unhappily without them before their revelation. Take the 10
Commandments for example, which outlaw murder, theft and adultery.
Presumably, according to d’Holbach, God was content for some time for
these things to continue prior to revealing that he was not. D’Holbach also
argues that religious scriptures contain irrational language and stories of
God’s iniquity and cruelty to whomever was not on his side. This is
inconsistent with the perfect attributes of wisdom, justice and goodness.
‘This granted, all revelation is contrary to the notions they give us of the justice or of the
goodness of a God, who they tell us is immutable, and who, without having occasion to
reveal himself, or to make himself known to them by miracles, could easily convince and
instruct men, and inspire them with those ideas which he desires.’
5. God takes sides and is not impartial.
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This last part of d’Holbach’s critique of belief in God argues that God is a
being who quite clearly takes sides and protects some from suffering in
order to leave others to the cruelty of nature.
Throughout, d’Holbach has attempted to show that it is incoherent to believe
in the God that is promoted by the Church. Unlike Voltaire however, he was
not content to hold belief in deism; that God created the world and left it to
its own devices. D’Holbach wanted to remove all belief in God.
Karl Marx and Social Unbelief.
Karl Marx was a philosopher and social theorist and is one
of the most influential thinkers to have ever existed. Marx
was a materialist: he believed that every aspect of human
life is determined by social and economic factors; material
and social need determines the way that we live our lives
and the values that we hold.
Before you spend any time thinking about Marx, it is
important to try to forget many of the things you have
heard about him and about Marxism and Communism.
Communism does not agree with Capitalism and as a result, Communism has
been given a bit of a bad name over the last century.
What Marx wanted to achieve.
Marx was thinking and writing during the 19th Century. It was during this
period of time that the Industrial Revolution was really taking hold in Europe.
Huge cities were emerging in which people were working, some as young as
8 or 9 years old, in appalling conditions, for long hours, for very little pay. All
around him, in the ‘developed’ world, Marx saw people who were oppressed,
exploited and alienated. Marx wanted this to stop.
Alienation.
Marx was not the first philosopher to be concerned with alienation.
Alienation is when one is separated from something of one’s own e.g. one
can be alienated from one’s family, friends, possessions or in Marx’s view,
one’s humanity i.e. the things that make us human.
Marx believed that there were certain things that alienate humans from their
human nature. He believed that once these were removed (by a Communist
revolution) humans would be free from oppression and alienation. The things
he wished to remove were:
 Personal property
 Capitalism (exploiting the skills of others to make money for an
individual)
 Individual ownership of the means of production: factories/machines,
but also intellectual production such as education
 State religion
 Idealism in philosophy (he was a materialist).
Marx and Religion.
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Marx famously wrote of religion:
‘Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress
and also the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the
oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit
of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.’
Marx saw religion as an indication that something else was wrong (the sigh
of the oppressed creature) which he believed to be capitalism and the
capitalist state. He worried that Christianity, with its emphasis on hard work
and heavenly rewards in an afterlife, contributed to the continuation of
oppression and was a distraction from the need for revolution. He saw it as a
painkiller (opium). Marx believed that the idea of God is a human attempt to
cope with the harshness of human life and the pain resulting from social and
economic deprivation.
Many people falsely believe that Marx wished to abolish religion full stop; he
did not. (‘We no longer regard religion as the cause, but only as the
manifestation of secular narrowness’) Marx believed that many people were
no longer connected to the real world in which they lived and that anything
which distracted people from the real world had to be abolished because it
prevented humans from being free. Marx wanted to get rid of religion in the
following circumstances:
1. When religion is promoted by the state: states must be secular (nonreligious);
2. When religion is an illusion or distraction from the conditions of
oppression;
3. When religion prevents humans from being humans: e.g. when people
feel that Jesus Christ or God have achieved things in their lives, when
really it is the people themselves who have achieved this (projection).
Marx was of the opinion that once society was reformed and people were
freed from oppression, once people saw each other as fellow human beings,
not as means to another end, once this happened religion would take care of
itself and if it survived would be a true reflection of human nature. Any
religious feelings would have nothing to do with the heavens, but would
become Humanism or Socialism.
Projection.
Projection was an idea that Marx adopted from a man
called Ludwig Feuerbach. Feuerbach believed that
humans had created religion and God by selecting all the
positive human attributes, magnifying them into
perfections and worshipping them as a god. (‘Jesus
Christ is the intermediary to whom man transfers the
burden of all his divinity.’) God is therefore a projection
of human virtues. For many at the time, this was the decisive proof that God
does not exist. Marx disagreed with Feuerbach on many other things, but
saw this theory as a way to start clawing back to humans the attributes that
were rightfully theirs, which had been taken away and given to God: most
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religions teach that everything we have comes from God and that it is to Him
that we owe our thanks.
Sigmund Freud and Naturalistic Unbelief.
Naturalistic unbelief is the view that religious belief is false because its
origins can be explained. It is argued by those who hold this view, that if we
can explain why religious belief arose or was invented in the first place, we
can show it to be false. Many people have argued that religion arose to meet
the needs of social groups: for example, that the idea of God was invented to
coerce people to behave in particular ways through threats of supernatural
violence or eternal punishment for sin. Others have argues that it arose out
of a misunderstanding of the way that the elements worked e.g. that rain was
operated by supernatural forces that humans had to appease.
One person who has argued towards naturalistic unbelief
was Sigmund Freud. Sigmund Freud is often referred to as
the father of psychoanalysis, which is the discipline in
psychology of trying to establish the cause(s) of neurosis
and to resolve them. Freud was interested in the way
religion developed in primitive society and felt that if we
could work this development out, it might help to explain
modern psychological problems.
Freud’s work on religion underwent a long process of
development, largely due to the criticisms levelled at his work and his need
to revise and develop his arguments. His work can be split into two main
areas, the first being based on his book Totem and Taboo and his later
work, The Future of an Illusion.
Totem and Taboo.
Freud wrote ‘Totem and Taboo’ in 1917. He wrote after a
long succession of academics had made visits to
‘primitive’ civilizations to study the habits of ‘natives’ and
‘savages’ (their terms!). People like J.G. Frazer, McLellan
and Robertson Smith had done research into the
significance of totems and Freud believed that the totem
held significance for understanding religious belief. Freud
believed that there must be a motive behind religious
beliefs i.e. a reason why people hold them in the first
place and believed that ancient societies held the key to
solving this problem.
‘One day the brothers who had been driven out [by their father] came
together, killed and devoured their father and so made an end of the
patriarchal [father led] horde…Cannibal savages as they were, it goes without
saying that they devoured their victim as well as killing him. The totem meal,
which is perhaps mankind’s earliest festival, would thus be a repetition and
commemoration of this memorable and criminal deed, which was the
beginning of so many things – of social organization, of moral restrictions
and of religion.’
Totem and Taboo
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A totem is a species of animal or more rarely, a type of plant. Members of a
clan were forbidden from killing the totem animal except for during an
annual ritual, where all the male members of the clan were expected to take
part in the ritual killing of the totem animal. The death of the animal was at
first mourned, then a celebration took place afterwards. In return, the clan
expected protection from the totem animal and also help in sickness.
Freud wondered where the practice of totemism began and suggested the
story above. He believed this to be the case as totemic religion had two
prohibitions: 1. Murder was forbidden and 2. It was forbidden to have sex
with anyone else in the clan. Freud thought that these prohibitions came
from somewhere and suggested the guilt felt by the young males who had
murdered their father. As a way of making the feeling of guilt easier, they
created the totem animal to represent their father and then made the two
prohibitions. The prohibition of incest came because of the reason for the
boys murdering their father in the first place; because the father kept all the
females to himself and the boys wanted them. After they had killed their
father, they made the feeling of guilt easier by giving up their claim to these
women.
Freud believed this to be the origin of religion (although he later denied this).
The totem eventually became what we understand to be God today; a father
figure who protects and a religious system that prohibits us from doing
things we really wish or desire to do. He also believed that the guilt
associated with this first murder was passed on to all humans. He found
evidence of this in something called the Oedipus complex; a desire he
thought young men have to kill their father and take his place with their
mother. However, this is very problematic.
Whilst a great deal of what Freud says about how religion has developed
makes perfect sense, there are a number of problems with Totem and Taboo.
Primarily, there is no evidence that this murder ever took place. Freud has
suggested a reason for the existence of totemic religion, the reasons why we
see God as a father figure and the existence of rules against murder and
incest existing in the most primitive societies; he has looked at a state of
affairs now and tried to establish a past reason for this current state of
affairs. As such then, he may be guilty of the genetic fallacy. Also, to claim
that all religious feeling results from problems with man’s relationship with
his father, severely underestimates the complex ideas people may have about
God.
The Future of an Illusion.
Freud wrote ‘The Future of an Illusion’ in 1927. In this
book, he claimed that religion is an illusion based
upon wish-fulfilment. He saw that life is hard and
causes a great deal of unhappiness in humans. He also
believed that religion offers a sense of protection from
this unhappiness. The wishes he thought humans
wanted fulfilled were as follows:
 To be able to predict the behaviour of other
humans and guarantee that they will do us no
harm.
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





To be able to master and control the cruelty and destructiveness of
nature.
To be able to not fear death.
To know what fate has in store for us.
To have otherwise inexplicable events explained for us.
To be rewarded for good and have evildoers punished.
To always have a father to protect, as in childhood.
Freud believed that humans had created religion and the gods to fulfil these
wishes. The gods, Freud thought, had three main tasks:
1. They must remove the terrors of nature
2. They must make the cruelty of fate easy to bear and help humans
understand it, especially in death
3. They must reward humans for the struggle of life with other humans
and provide a morality.
Freud therefore believed that religion was a creation by humans to give a
psychological sense of protection. He suggested that this need for protection
was a feeling that originated in childhood and at that time was fulfilled by the
father. It is for this reason that God is like a father; he offers protection but is
also an individual to be feared. He also argued that divine revelation was an
illusion and used to strengthen the claims of religion.
Freud also tried to show that it is irrational to hold religious beliefs (not that
the beliefs themselves are irrational). This is known as an ad hominem
critique, one that criticises the believers believing, not the belief itself. He
wrote that we are told to have religious beliefs for three reasons:
1. We should believe because our ancestors did
2. We have proof of these beliefs handed down from these times (Bible
etc.)
3. It is forbidden to raise the question of their authenticity at all.
He dismissed them as follows. Reason 3 should make us suspicious if we are
forbidden from questioning. Reason 1 is poor as our ancestors were more
ignorant than us and may have been mistaken; they did believe the earth to
be flat after all. Reason 2 is also poor as the Bible is full of contradictions and
cannot be trusted.
Freud argued that religion is an illusion created by human wishes or
desires. He argued that illusions are not errors but a skewed perception of
reality arising from a desire for something to be so and used the example of
Christopher Columbus’ who believed he had discovered India, when in fact
he had found America.
Freud in effect claimed that religious need is the product of an unhealthy
mind. If a person is basically fulfilled by life, they would have no need of the
sense of protection offered by religion.
‘We know approximately at what periods and by what kind of men
religious doctrines were created. If in addition we discover the motives
that led to this, our attitude to the problem of religion will undergo a
marked displacement. We shall tell ourselves that it would be very nice if
there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent
A2 Religious Studies: Developments (Paper 3) Philosophy of Religion.
Providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an afterlife; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to
wish it to be.’
The Future of an Illusion
Problems.
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Freud’s starting point for his criticism of religion is the Oedipus
complex, which he established from psychoanalytical observations. He
therefore projects a problem observed in a few patients onto
humankind as a whole.
There is no proof of his connection between totemism/religion and the
murder of an imagined father and the feelings of guilt that went with
this.
Paul Ricouer has pointed out that psychoanalysis involves how religious
beliefs work, not whether or not they are true.
R.S. Lee has argued that psychoanalysis can be used to help believers
discover subconscious motivations for belief and allow them to arrive at
a better understanding of faith.
Life is not just about enduring misery and many people take part in
religion for different reasons than Freud suggested.
Freud basically tricks people into doubting their own sanity; he claims
that for someone to need religion, they must have a defective
relationship with their father.
Freud would have known little or nothing of Buddhism, a religion which
does not claim belief in a father-like God and aims to create mental
stability through meditation and correct living.