Reply #40: Antitheological psychobabble [View All]

[Stunster]

Ever since Marx and Freud, even people who are not Marxists or Freudians frequently offer those thinkers' theories as to the illusory nature of religious belief.

It is important to see how atrocious these sorts of psychologizing arguments are, as arguments. They are, despite their popularity, amazingly weak to the point of being rationally unusable.

Let me quote from philosopher Nicholas Rescher:


Of course, there still remains the well-trodden prospect of antitheological psychologizing. The general line is all too familiar: "You see the traditional monotheistic God as desirable merely because he answers a psychological need of yours. You have a psychological yearing for acceptance, validation, support. Your God is a mere parent-substitute to meet the needs of a weak and dependent creature." So argues the psychologizing opponent of axological theism. But this sort of facile sort of psychologizing ultimately cuts both ways. For the axological theist can readily respond along the following lines: You see the traditional monotheistic God as undesirable because you find the very idea threatening. You atheists too are "God fearing," but in a rather different sense. You are afraid of God. You have an adolescent's fixated fear of and a condemnation by authority. Your atheism roots in self-contempt. Recognizing what an imperfect creature you yourself are, you have a fear of being judged and found wanting. The very idea of God is threatening to you because you fear the condemnation of an intellige nt observer who knows what you think and do. You are enmeshed in an adolescent aversion to parental disapproval.

So runs the psychologizing counterargument. And this line is not without surface plausibility. Many people are in fact frightened by the prospect of a belief in God because they ultimately have a contempt of themselves. They feel threatened by a belief that God might exist, because they feel that, were it so, God would not approve of them. For them, atheism is a security shield of sorts that protects them against an ego-damaging disapproval by somebody who "knows all, sees all." Atheists are not infrequently people on whose inmost nature the vice of self-contempt has its strongest hold. Pretentions to the contrary notwithstanding, the atheist's actual posture is generally not a self-confident independence of spirit, but a fear of being judged. In this regard, then, there is simply a standoff in regard to a Freud-style psychologizing about religion. Those psychologizing arguments that impute rationally questionable motives that can be deployed against the believer are not difficult to revise and redirect as arguments against the atheists. Psychologizing is a sword that cuts both ways in regard to axiological theism. Both sides can easily play the game of projecting, on a speculative basis, a daunting variety of intellectually non-respectable motives for holding the point of view that they oppose.

And Alvin Plantinga says this:

Freud's jejune speculations as to the psychological origin of religion and Marx's careless claims about its social role can't sensibly be taken as providing argument or reason for... the nonexistence of God; so taken they present textbook cases (which in fact are pretty rare) of the genetic fallacy. If such speculations and claims have a respectable role to play, it is instead perhaps that of providing a naturalistic explanation for the wide currency of religious belief, or perhaps that of attempting to discredit religious belief by tracing it to a disreputable source. But of course that doesn't constitute anything like evidence for {the non-existence of God} or a reason to think theism false. One might as well cite as evidence for the existence of God St. Paul's claim (Romans 1) that failure to believe in God is a result of sin and rebellion against God.

In other words, if it is open to the atheist to speculate about the psychology that underlies theism, it is just as open to the theist to speculate about the psychology that underlies atheism. And of course some theists (e.g. St Paul, Pascal) have done just that. But at least they, unlike some atheists, don't make the blatant logical error of thinking that their psychological speculations are evidence or arguments for the falsity of atheism. Theists don't typically argue that atheism must be false because of the psychological motivations of atheists. They only point to those motivations to explain the occurrence of atheism, not its falsity.

Would that the reverse were true!