Many people at Daily Kos find discussions of theology deeply disturbing. These diaries will not make them happy, so it's okay if they don't want to read them. For those who are interested, in a series of theological reflections, I am attempting to show that much theological thought is inestimably smarter and more coherent than the stuff folks hear from Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell.
The day before yesterday, I observed that it is important to engage a culture as it exists and to recognize that, as Bernard Longergan says, "Concepts have dates." Our cultural did not spring complete from the Big Bang; it is a collection of artifacts from history in a process of continuous dialogue and reconstitution.
Yesterday, I pointed out that Christianity grew up in a Hellenistic view of the world and that the development of modernism from the 17th through the early 20th century presented a great jolt to Christian theology. Today, I am going to describe a couple of ideas that arose as the result of modernism that have varying degrees of currency in modern culture. It can be useful to understand the cultural and time conditioning that attends viewpoints that enjoy varying degrees of cachet even today.
Natural Religion-The key characteristics of the Enlightenment were its commitment to reason and its search for irrefutable truths. If someone wanted to defend religion, Enlightenment thinking ran, she or he needed to demonstrate how empirical reason supports religion. This perspective proved a very popular trend in 17th and 18th century. Locke and Kant both held that there is a reasonable form of religion, and that reason must undergird any system of belief. Reason, in their minds, demanded an assent to the proposition that miracles, resurrection, and revelation all were untenable. The Enlightenment liberated reasonable minds from the heavy yokes that church and scripture impose on their adherents.
The proponents of natural reason couldn't quite agree on the core of reasonable religion, but by-and-large, they held that (1) God exists; (2) God has written universal moral laws into nature; (3) humans can have access to these laws through reason (but not through Bibles, priests, preachers, or ancient documents); and (4) life should be lived in accord with these laws discernable in nature. The avatars of rational religion called this, "pure Christianity." Given their assumption that Jesus was an eminently reasonable guy, they needed a theory about where Christianity went wrong. Early Enlightenment thinkers reached certain conclusions about what Jesus really must have said and dismissed all the nonsense in the Christian message as Paul's monstrous imposition on Jesus' rational position.
Religion as Unnatural-The second part of the Enlightenment occurred during the 18th and 19th centuries. In this second phase of the Enlightenment, there was a diminished impulse toward an updated religion and the emergence of movements that sought a world without religion because, well, frankly, religion is anti-human in some way. Marx, for example, observed that religion actually serves no function but to oppress powerless people.
One of the central protagonists of the "religion as unnatural" movement, however, was Sigmund Freud whose basic insight that with human beings, what you see is not what you get, remains a towering contribution to human understanding. Freud was influential in his lifetime. Even today, he is an important name, and everyone of us has internalized many of his ideas. Even some of his religious ideas are part of the lingua franca despite the fact that people do not appear to recognize the origin of their notions.
The following discussion is drawn from Freud's The Future of an Illusion. In that thin but consequential book, Freud essentially asks a series of questions: Why do people have religion? Why do people have religious beliefs today? What can be done to cure the situation? His answer essentially is tri-fold: one part goes to the social contract, another to the Oedipal Complex and the third part, to the Enlightenment myth of uninterrupted human progress.
If I promise to be good, will you promise not to hurt me? Freud observed that nature is hostile, and to cope with this hostility, we personify the forces of nature. We create civilization to hold back nature's hostile forces. Freud also observed that we compete with one another for resources. We need civilization to coerce us out of acting out on our hostile instincts: civilization is the social contract to which we have pledged our troth that we won't kill, maim, rape, pillage, burn, and so on to achieve the satisfaction of our needs. It goes without saying that we have these instincts to behave in these messy ways, and unfortunately, if we don't act on them, we are beset by tension. We create religion to reward ourselves for not relieving our tension. According to Freud, compensation for the demands of civilization is a key part of why religion exists.
I want my Daddy. Now there is this thing, the Oedipal Complex, which is our hidden motive. The state of childhood is one of helplessness, threat, and a need for protection. The need is satisfied by the father figure. As an adult, we still want the father to protect us. The one who protects us is a figure both to be loved and feared. Religion, according to Freud, is the adult reversion to the childhood mechanism; it worked when we were kids, and we revert to it when we are adults. We have a continued longing for protection against the forces of nature, especially death.
You're not getting older; you're getting better. The Enlightenment held a quaint notion that the movement of civilization is one of uninterrupted progress. (A reminder of modernism's accomplishments in the Soviet gulags and the Nazi concentration camps might raise some doubts about that claim. Dunno. Just sayin'.) Freud points out that religion arises from the authority of ancestors, and let's face it, no matter what nice things you want to say about Moses, Homer, Cicero, Isaiah, or Lao Tsu, these people really were just plain stupid. They had all kinds of misinformation and wrong beliefs. They knew nothing about white phosphoros or Zyclone-B as we far better advanced human beings can appreciate. If we only face facts, everything will get better: religion is a universal neurosis. Look around you: every child develops neurosis, the conflict that arises as we tame our instincts. But things get better as we grow up: we overcome neurosis in the process of development. In the natural course of development, we work these things out. When we were infants, the intellect was too weak, and reliance on authority preserved our lives when we were children. Then reason took over, and we saw into the problem. Analogously, Freud concludes that as humanity develops, religion will whither away. As people become smarter, they will become less religious. The progress of humanity will inevitably result in the end of religion.
Gosh. I feel better already.
In making his case, Freud calls religion an illusion. To understand the word he chose, we need to make three distinctions. There are errors, illusions, and delusions:
- What is an error? A false belief, like, "The world is flat." That is wrong. It is just a mistaken fact. No real harm in it. If I make the claim, I just misrepresent the way things are.
- What is an illusion? A belief that arises (a) specifically from the need to satisfy a deep desire and (b) held without rational ground. It's important to note that Freud acknowledges an illusion may be true.
- What is a delusion? A delusion is a false belief that arises from a deep desire.
Freud does not choose "error" or "delusion" to characterize religious belief; he chooses the term "illusion" to describe religious belief. Freud knows that religious beliefs are not necessarily false. Concerning the reality of most religious beliefs, we can neither prove nor disprove anything. For this reason, he selects the term, "illusion."
Freud partially claims that religion is an illusion, because it reflects a deep wish. That religion is a deep wish clearly is true; that it is without rational grounds is highly debatable, and I intend to pursue remorselessly the reasonableness of religion over the next month or two.
Freud is a doctor and sees a problem. He wants to propose a cure. Reason is on the way to cure religion! Freud as a psychotherapist sees the importance of needs that religion addresses, to fulfill our deepest wishes and preserve civilization. But harm from religion includes damage to rationality and morality. People are creatures of instincts, and religion deals with this. Freud says, come on, guys, let's just try going without religion. Freud observes that he has not proven that religion is false. He gives only natural causes for belief: we're a bunch of fraidy cats, and the witnesses for religion were a bunch of benighted primitives. My problem with this sort of argument is that the notion of grace finds no place in this program.
The genetic fallacy says that if the origin of something is defective, the thing itself is defective. This clearly is not the case. A completely uneducated five year old is capable of making a true statement. Freud rejects religion based upon its origins, but his argument is much more subtle than even this: (1) He say religion is an illusion because we can't prove or disprove it; but (2) it will be good when it is gone. This is just inconsistent. His advocacy is that religion could be true or could be false, but best to get rid of it either way. Part of Freud's suspicion is that religion portrays the world the way we want it to be: we want a God, and we see a God. But mind you, because I am hungry does not make Safeway a figment of my imagination.
On a practical level, Freud treats religion as absolutely false. On a theoretical level, Freud makes assertions but does not demonstrate that religious beliefs have no good rational basis for believing them. Freud's arguments result from a correlation in his mind between calculus and psychoanalysis; no such correlation exists in the real world. Freud's take on what religion considers evidence is very narrow: he does not consider the possibility that the mind can come rationally to a belief in God. Freud never looks at religious experience in the sense of a careful analysis of the structures and claims of religious experience.
His trend is to find the most absurd strawman he can find.
Religious experience in Freud's mind is the sickness that needs to be explained. Freud never gets to the real nub of things: we are creatures possessed of transcendence: nothing ever satisfies us; we always want to more; I never have as much happiness as I need. This is an empirical phenomenon, and Freud never accounts for it. Freud never asks what is a human being? Why does whatever we achieve never completely satisfy us? There is no commitment we ever make that allows us to say, "This is all I need." Freud never asks any questions beyond the fear of death and nature. It is not empirically honest to deny the possibility that religion is more than addressing death and the desires we have to give up. Freud never asks about our ability to know or our desire to be more than we are.
This diary has gotten way too long, and I need to work. Tomorrow, I will start to address the relationship between faith and reason. Over the weekend, I need to be out-of-town, so after Friday, my next diary is on Monday.