A friend, “Richie,” heard me mention in passing some thoughts on Sigmund Freud’s critique of religion. He asked if I would expand on the passing remark. In the following, I do just that. After summarizing how I understand the Freudian critique, I explain how Alvin Plantinga replies to Freud. Building on Plantinga, I then draw what I think is a notable and important contrast between Freud’s explanation of religion and C. S. Lewis’ in The Problem of Pain. Please subscribe and support my work!
Dear “Richie,”
I’m happy to flesh out my thoughts on Freud’s critique of religion. I spent a bit of time with his writings during my doctoral studies, and the passing remark you heard was a summary of my conclusions. I’m not sure that what I am about to share is terribly original. Nonetheless, perhaps you’ll find something of value.
Allow me begin by laying out Freud’s position, as I understand it. Freud’s critique of religion is less a proof that God does not exist and more an explanation for the phenomenon of religious belief. In other words, Freud takes atheism to be so obvious that it is nearly axiomatic. But given this presumption, Freud faces the question, Why do so many people gravitate to a belief that is obviously contrary to the facts of our world?
This question is the focus of several of Freud’s works. The basic claim throughout his anti-religious writings is this: The world is such a terrifying and perilous place that humanity feels compelled to search outside of itself for some source of security; and this search results in the false belief in a transcendent father figure, who is good, loving, powerful, and concerned for mankind. In short, theism is wish fulfillment.
Freud’s argumentative strategy toward this end is to explain the emergence of belief in God through purely psychological means. He does this in several different accounts of the origin of religion. The first of these religious “histories” comes from Freud’s Totem and Taboo. Freud tells a story of patricide that gives rise to the idea of God and to the phenomenon of conscience. So the story goes, there was once a father who bore unhindered rule over a “primal horde.” He retained exclusive claim to all the women, and to consolidate his power, he either drove away his sons or killed them. One day, the surviving sons banded together to kill and devour their father. But the act held an inner tension for the sons. On the one hand, their father was their enemy; on the other hand, he was an ideal to be emulated. The tension produced an unexpected effect. Following an initial power struggle, there arose in each son the sense of an invisible watcher — their deceased father, the very ideal they sought to emulate. With this there also came remorse for having murdered him. So the brothers called a truce. They struck an agreement, forming a clan under “ordinances of totemism” to prevent anyone from ever repeating what they had done to their father. They instituted a totem meal to serve as a reminder of their dreadful deed, and this memorial of wrongdoing gave rise to moral consciousness, including a consciousness of an original sin.
Clearly, Freud does not present this story as an account of some actual historical event. The story represents the type of psychological event that Freud thinks could give rise to religious beliefs in ancient man. The murder of a father gives rise to a sense of being haunted by the ghost of a paternal ideal; the act of murder instills remorse that demands religious ordinances, memorialist reminders, and fosters a sense of guilt; and tradition passes all of this down to future generations. Whether the birth of religion was actually brought about by such an event is of little consequence to Freud; the point is to explain how religious beliefs and practice could emerge from purely psychological events — nothing supernatural required.
This same approach can be found in Civilization and Its Discontents. Freud forwards the rather — well — Freudian notion that fire, to the ancient mind, was a phallic symbol — the tongues shooting upward like an erect male member. Running with this idea, Freud suggests that early man (in the gender specific sense) harbored a repressed homoerotic desire, which manifest in the practice of putting out fire by urinating on it. But Freud points out that the first man to resist this urge would also be the first to let fire endure, thereby harnessing its power for other purposes. Thus was born the psychological connection between resisting temptation and cultivating power. This, Freud suggests, is the root of the religious impulse to deny one’s natural desires.
Again, Freud makes no claim to have historical proof of such a connection. His aim is simply to offer a scenario by which such a psychological connection could be made — without supernatural mumbo jumbo. If such a narrative is plausible, we need not apologize for embracing the obvious fact that God does not exist and rejecting religion as primitive superstition.
Now, in addition to these hypothetical origin stories, Freud offers a more normative account of religion as wish fulfillment in The Future of an Illusion. Therein, he suggests that early humanity faced two great perils: the natural world and his fellow man. Beginning with the former, early humanity finds itself overwhelmed by the forces of nature, which made fear and the sense of helplessness the hallmark of early human experience. Humanity’s coping mechanism, Freud suggests, was to anthropomorphize the elements, placing deities behind these otherwise uncontrollable forces. By doing so, humanity could assuage its sense of helplessness by trying to appease these terrifying forces.
Freud’s explanation for this psychological tendency is twofold. The first is man’s natural tendency to project his own inner experiences on the outside world. The second tracks with Freud’s theory of childhood development, specifically the Oedipus complex. The theory presumes a child is born with a natural inclination toward patricide, as the child sees his father as a competitor for the mother’s sexual affections. But this impulse, says Freud, is eventually overshadowed by the child’s felt need for a protector. Religious anthropomorphisms are an amplified social form of this search for a protector — the culmination of which is monotheism.
What proof does Freud have for this theory? Quite simply, Freud thinks the proof of his theory is the naïveté of the religious worldview. He finds theism to be so grossly optimistic, running so contrary to the obvious facts about our world, that it could be nothing but wish fulfillment. One cannot reasonably look at the darkness of human nature; the chaos, violence, and pain of our world; and the natural terrors that surround us on all sides and reasonably conclude that these arise from an all-Good, all-Loving being who with is concerned for mankind.
But why, if theism is so obviously false, does it endure? Freud’s answer is utility. First, religion is useful in satisfying the psychological need for a protector. Second, religion helps curb humanity’s natural impulses, allowing us to establish social expectations of behavior that would otherwise be unpalatable. Hence, both our personal needs and societal needs reinforce the religious impulse.
Now, Freud’s critique of religion faces numerous problems. Putting aside the facts that there is very little science to Freud’s scientific account of religious belief and that it is fallacious to move from p could happen to p did happen, Freud’s stories concerning the origins of religion quite simply beg the question he is addressing. As a brief aside, folks today tend to misunderstand the phrase beg the question. Many presume it means that a claim naturally raises or beckons a followup question. This is a misunderstanding of the phrase that has become so common that it is now an accepted meaning. But the more technical meaning of the phrase concerns a logical fallacy. When one uses their desired conclusion as one of the premises in establishing that conclusion, the argument begs the question being asked. Freud commits this fallacy often. For example, when seeking to explain the rise of conscience by suggesting that the sons who committed patricide feel remorse, Freud presumes the presence of conscience in his explanation of the origin of conscience. After all, how could the sons experience remorse for what they had done if they did not already have a sense of conscience to tell them they ought not to have done it? This same fallacy occurs often in these types of late-Modern critiques of religion. Nietzsche, for example, commits the same fallacy in his On the Genealogy of Morals, when discussing the rise of “slave morality” by suggesting the Jews shamed those over them for abusing their power. But how could these overlords feel shame for an abuse of power if some part of them did not already know an abuse was wrong?
In addition, Freud’s genealogy of religion is often out of step with the actual evolution of religion, historically speaking. For example, his explanation of sexual repression as a religious value of primitive man faces the real problem that the resistance to sexual desire is not a trait of the most primitive religions; it is a much later development in philosophic-religious thought and practice. The most primitive religions indulged sexual impulse. Likewise, one could critique Freud’s claim that monotheism is driven by wish fulfillment, given that the great monotheisms of the world often include a great many doctrines that run entirely contrary to what man might wish. In other words, there are plenty of criticisms that could be leveled against the specifics of Freud’s efforts to psychologize away religion. But these problems — while well worth noting — are not where I would like to focus.