A friend, “Richie,” heard me mention in passing some thoughts on Sigmund Freud’s critique of religion. He asked if I would expand my thoughts on the passing remark. In the following, I do just that. In Part 1 of this letter, I summarize how I understand the Freudian critique, and I explain how Alvin Plantinga replies to Freud. In this second half of the letter, I build on Plantinga’s insight, drawing out a notable contrast between Freud’s explanation of religion and C. S. Lewis’ explanation in The Problem of Pain. I then take Lewis’ claims one step further, by applying a properly functioning faculties argument to them. Please subscribe and support my work!
Dear “Richie” continued:
Like Freud, C. S. Lewis offers an account of the evolution of religion. However, Unlike Freud’s de jure critique of religion, Lewis’ de jure defense of religion creeps up on a de facto implication concerning its origins.1
In the opening of The Problem of Pain, Lewis recounts the type of answer he used to offer, before his conversion, when asked why he is an atheist. His answer was strikingly like what we find in Freud, to wit, the dreadful nature of our world is prime facie support of atheism. Summoning the voice of his younger self, Lewis asks the reader to consider the vast empty space that is our universe, most of which is black and unimaginably cold. The ratio of life to vast deadness is such that, even if there were life on other planets, it would be difficult to see life as anything but a side effect of organic mutation. Moreover, when we consider the nature of life, we find that it consists of a steady stream of pain; animals and organism survive by feeding on one another, causing pain and death. With the emergence of humanity, there emerges something new, namely, a creature with the capacity to foresee its own pain, dread it, and recall in the midst of it former times when pain was absent. In short, with man there emerges a new type of pain — psychological suffering. And for whatever good humans are capable of producing through reason, they are equally (if not more) capable of producing greater evils. Civilizations may emerge from time to time to stabilize the human tendency for violence and produce a better quality of life, but ultimately all civilizations pass away; and while they are here, they cause as many problems and as much unhappiness as they solve. But even if this were not so, the cosmos is winding down, its creatures are destined to cease. So, young Lewis argues,
all life will turn out in the end to have been a transitory and senseless contortion on the idiotic face of infinite matter. If you ask me to believe that this is the work of a benevolent and omnipotent spirit, I reply that all the evidence points in the opposite direction. Either there is no spirit behind the universe, or else a spirit indifferent to good and evil, or else an evil spirit.
Clearly, young Lewis and Freud were cut from the same cloth, philosophically speaking. Yet, Lewis makes a simple observation about his former views:
I never noticed that the very strength and facility of the pessimists’ case at once poses us a problem. If the universe is so bad, or even half so bad, how on earth did human beings ever come to attribute it to the activity of a wise and good Creator? Men are fools, perhaps; but hardly so foolish as that.
Rather than attempting to refute the pessimist’s case, Lewis grants it. But what he cannot grant is that men could, in the face of this state of affairs, fool themselves into believing that a wise, good, and loving being produced so painful a world. In short, wish fulfillment as an explanation for theism is implausible, at best. Thus emerges Lewis’ thesis: Religion cannot emerge out of the physical facts about our world; it must emerge despite the facts.
Now, I admit that this setup for Lewis’ argument I find less interesting and less compelling than what follows. Admittedly, this may be due to the fact that I am writing in a time that feels worlds away from primitive man. As I type, I sit in a nice home, shielded from the elements; the temperature is meticulously controlled; I’m surrounded by aesthetic beauty; I have a refrigerator stocked with food; my children are in view, healthy, happy, and safe; threats of violence or disease are far from my mind. Perhaps if I were amongst primitive man, where the elements threatened my life and the lives of my children; food was scarce; leisure was foreign; the world was uncivilized; threats were on all sides, then perhaps I would find Lewis’ argument more compelling. I admit that even this small bit of imaginative reframing helps strengthen his case. However, whether one is persuaded or not is immaterial. The genealogy of religion Lewis goes on to offer does not hang on this opening point, and it is his genealogy of religion on which I wish to focus.
The first of Lewis’ fourfold explanation of the phenomenon of religion is taken from Rudolph Otto’s The Idea of the Holy. In particular, Lewis draws on Otto’s notion of the numinous. The numinous refers to a creature’s sense of creatureliness when encountering a supreme being, one infinitely superior to itself. The way Lewis helps the reader grasp the concept is by way of analogy. He says that if you were to be told that a tiger were in the other room (and believe it), you would feel fear, but were you to hear that there was a ghost in the other room (and believe it), you would feel a very different kind of fear, “for no one is primarily afraid of what a ghost may do to him, but of the mere fact that it is a ghost. It is ‘uncanny’ rather than dangerous, and the special kind of fear it excites may be called Dread.” This uncanny feeling approaches the numinous. Yet, the religious experience of the numinous is more profound, insofar as it concerns the sense of something far more overwhelming than a ghost. It is the feeling of an all pervasive spirit, which causes one to shrink until sensing one’s own nothingness in comparison.
This sense, Lewis points out, is not just a present phenomenon but is traceable to ancient times, noting examples in ancient literature. Granting the point, the sense of numinous is a widespread, if not universal, facet of human experience that no amount of scientific, social, or philosophical advancement has been able to snuff out. Even more queer is that this sense seems to have no apparent root in the physical nature of our world. What Lewis means by this is that there is no straight line from the physical facts of the event to the sensation. For, as Lewis has already pointed out, none fear ghosts because of the danger they pose; the special type of fear a ghost excites springs from the mere fact that it is a ghost. Anthropologists attempt to explain the phenomenon by drawing a throughline from the numinous to fear of the dead — in case of encountering a dead body, for example. But, as Lewis points out, they do so “without explaining why dead men (assuredly the least dangerous kind of men) should have attracted this peculiar feeling.” More than this, however, Lewis rightly notes that the special kind of fear a ghost or a dead man excites is categorically different from the fear of physical pain. Though we may refer to both as “fear,” the two experiences bear little to no resemblance. “When man passes from physical fear to dread and awe,” Lewis writes, “he makes a sheer jump, and apprehends something which could never be given, as danger is, by the physical facts and logical deductions from them.” Here, we reach the crux of Lewis’ case. The numinous is essentially a sixth-sense; it detects something about our world that cannot be delivered through the senses, namely, those transcendent realities which excites awe or dread. For this reason, this phenomenon brings us to a fork in the road. We may look at the numinous as either a biological anomaly, representing a universal malfunction in human faculties, or we may accept it as a properly functioning feature of our faculties, one meant to detect realities that escape our senses. In short, we may treat the sense of the numinous as a malfunction or as revelation.
This type of fork in the road — the fork between malfunction and revelation — is the pattern of Lewis’ case concerning religion. Each essential step in the evolution of man’s religiosity makes a logical leap, which leaves us with only one of two options: Either it is a malfunction or revelation. We see this in the second step of Lewis’ genealogy of religion, which concerns moral consciousness.