If this book is brilliant, it has to do with the believability of Freud’s view and how this view gradually and subtly insinuates itself. His view is hard to make out at first; then it strangely dawns. Moreover, when an atheist professes a little doubt here and there about the correctness of his proposal, it renders his opinion more believable because we are more inclined to accept a humble opinion than a proud one. Freud was a physician of the mind. His use of reverse psychology by a now and then self-deprecation of his hypothesis really works for him.
The ‘illusion’ for Freud is religion. The ‘future’ of this illusion is what he holds in question. He proposes that religion originated from man’s anxiety in the face of unpredictable nature. Man convinced himself of the reality of God or of gods in order to have some responsible being to vent his anxiety to—someone to adjure, appease, or bribe. (p. 20-23.) In short, man humanized nature’s forces in order to cope with her unpredictability. Man characterized nature as father because nature, like one’s biological father, is both fearsome and protective (p. 23.)
It is pertinent to affirm that religious ideas come to the individual by civilization, Freud says. Religious ideas come ready-made from the heritage of generations. Man comes to possess them as he does the multiplication table, geometry, &c (p. 30.) Mathematics and the invention of God are both elusive as to origin.
I will stop right there and consider those points. It is true that many of us get our religious concepts from our ancestors and surroundings. But we are speaking of origins. Math is a clever parallel for him to use because its origin is hardly traceable. I suppose that we might work out his view like so. Man invented geometry to make things that will resist the forces of nature; and he invented God to direct his anxiety to for those times when nature overcomes the things that he has invented to protect himself by. Freud claims that math and the idea of God are inventions by man. The truth is, math, like logic, is not invented. It is discovered. Religion is neither invented nor discovered. It is revealed. “Theology, on the other hand, relies upon a Divine influence over the human mind, which must be submissive to the truth of the Revealer” (John Owen, Biblical Theology, p. 8.) Those who want atheism to be the truth always make category mistakes that they hope will not be noticed. His argument is plausible so long as we allow for category mistakes. Allowing for category mistakes, of course it seems reasonable that math and God were invented to solve problems. It seems reasonable until you deduce and look into history. Suppose that mathematical formulas or systems were invented, for the sake of argument. Would that mean that God must be an invention too? There is no logical deduction there. Suppose that both God and math were invented. No one would dismiss a mathematical theorem without a good reason because theorems work. In like manner, the Christian would not give up believing God because faith works. Freud would have us jettison the idea that there is a God, even though the worship of God has proven to change lives for the better. To reject a mathematical formula would be one thing. Before we dismiss the idea that there is a God, though, it would be wise that we first discover somewhere in the annals of history that God was indeed invented—that God is really just an idea. Is God a being that was one day imagined and then propagated as an objective deity by some tormented man? What are the implications if we are wrong about that? Does Freud care? The question is, did anxiety one day prompt someone to invent God? Or does anxiety prompt all of us to think of the God who exists? On page 34 of Owen’s Biblical Theology, we read this from Cicero: “Where can you find a race or a nation so barbaric as to not have, if not formal teachings and doctrines, yet at least an innate awareness of the divine?” Innate awareness is not invention. In Christianity or Religion, Arno C. Gaebelein traces the origin and development of religion and persuades us by quoting historical records that the ancient belief in God was something else than a contrivance to help man cope with the fury of nature. Published in the same year as Freud’s book (though not to answer The Future of an Illusion or Freud directly), Gaebelein’s book is a handy refutation of Freud’s views on religion. Freud believed (not stated by him in this book) that religion proceeded from animism to polytheism to monotheism. By extracts from archaic annals, Gaebelein convinces us that religion regressed from monotheism to polytheism to animism. For those of us who believe in the Bible as God’s revelation to man, we are all the more induced to believe Gaebelein when we see that these ancient extracts confirm the testimony in Romans of this religious retrograde. If it appears that Freud is wrong about how religious practices proceeded with time, how risky is it to believe his idea that God is a mere invention? From page 34 of Owen’s Biblical Theology: “What insanity it would be to rest one’s trust upon the outworkings of a few loathsome deformities of the intellect of sinful men [insert Freud and the modern atheists here] in preference to the uniform testimony not only of good men, but even of nature herself?” Like the sophistic philosophers of old whose views were less pure than the views held by the multitudes (John Owen, Biblical Theology, page 107), Freud’s views are more base than the views of his day. They are more base than the views that prevail in 2014, for that matter. We might not all be Christians; but most of us are theists at least.
To say that religious ideas are divine revelation “ignores the known historical development of these ideas,” Freud says (p. 30.) But he tells us nothing about this historical development. He just states his point as an a priori maxim, or as a fact requiring no substantiation. He falsely supposes his bare word to be proof enough. Freud was of that generation in which many believed Christianity simply because their forebears believed (p. 39.) It is true that during that era inquirers who posed legitimate questions pertaining to what was believed to be gospel truth were simply told to never mind (p. 39-41.) In some measure, Freud’s book and view constitute a lashing out against that suppression.
Further into the essay, Freud broadens his theory a bit. The illusion, or ‘neurotic relic’ (p. 72), derives from man’s wish to be protected from himself as well as from nature (p. 47, 48.) Furthermore, he says, an ‘obsessional neurosis’(p. 76), or even a ‘childhood neurosis’ (p. 87), is what gave rise to the complexities of religion that form the basis of justice in societies. This is hard to believe for two reasons. (1) The sublimity of the Bible argues against its being a product borne out of illness. (2) A neurosis that gives rise to the specific idea that God should be invented seems unlikely to coincide among so many nations and tribes. Various peoples of the world testify to a longstanding belief in the existence of a God. But among whom do we find a traditional belief passed down to the effect that this God who is said to exist is an invention?
Freud’s objective is for ‘irreligious education’ (p. 80.) That is what he wants. A primary motive for his atheistic pedagogy seems to be his desire to make uninhibited sex acceptable (p. 79.) His hope that a society liberated from religious constraint would be tolerable for everybody and oppressive to no one (p. 82) has proven to be a vain hope since Freud’s day. Since his day, North American religious institutions have been made to accommodate homosexuals, for example, contrary to their beliefs. Liberation from religious constraint causes oppression to occur, then. Intellect (p. 88) and science (p. 90-92) have not yielded the utopia Freud hoped for. A good example of why secular intellect and secular science have failed may be gleaned by Freud’s own unscholarly methods. It is contrary to logic that deceptive schools of thought could yield safe societies, because deception is itself on the side of vice. Freud declares that religious texts (his attack is chiefly on the Christian text) are “full of contradictions, revisions and falsifications” (p. 40.) He gives us no intellectual reason to believe this. Yet he certifies that criticism has “whittled away the evidential value of religious documents,” and that natural science has “shown up the errors in them” (p. 63.) He gives us no scientific data that would confirm these things. Atheists are irrationally optimistic that we will believe what they affirm on so little evidence. In truth, they usually don’t believe their own theories.
There are a few positive things in this essay. Freud gives a just criticism of the practice of some of our philosophers. They “stretch the meaning of words until they retain scarcely anything of their original sense” (p. 51.) And I really appreciated him telling us how one of his children “would turn away with a look of disdain” (p. 44) upon being informed that the story just told him was nothing but a fairy tale. A lesson from a babe for all of us! We should desire to learn facts so much that fiction hardly gets a hearing.-------contributed by: Gaboora, an Amazon user, Dec. 12, 2014
