Download CHALLENGES TO BELIEF IN GOD FROM SOCIOLOGICAL AND

CHALLENGES TO
BELIEF IN GOD, FROM
SOCIOLOGICAL AND
PSYCHOLOGICAL
POINTS OF VIEW
Introduction - 1
 In the literature it is usually the case that
articles about psychological and
sociological perspectives on religion offer
Naturalistic explanations of religious
belief.
 In other words, these are presented as
critical of the claim that religious belief is
grounded in objective spiritual or
supernatural reality.
Introduction - 2
 For a naturalist, the claims of some psychologists
and sociologists offer explanations of religious
belief. A key question is whether, once these
insights have been taken on board, whether they
offer a complete explanation or not?
 If not, then theists can learn from the psychology
and sociology of religion without feeling
threatened by them.
 It is one thing to explain aspects of belief from a
particular viewpoint. It is quite another thing to
say that thereby religion is explained away.
The core of theistic belief
 Theism entails the metaphysical belief in a
reality that transcends the empirical world.
This is the eternal, ever-present, creative
source and sustainer of the universe.
 In major theistic religions this God of the
philosophers is identified variously as
YHWH (Judaism), the Trinity (Christianity)
and Allah (Islam).
Naturalism
WATCH THE SPELLING!
Not NATURISM
Get this right in exams!!
 Naturalism opposes the claims of those who
believe in spiritual realities. Thus theism is
rejected (a form of supernaturalism), as is even
Theravada Buddhism (no God nor worship, but
spiritual realities).
 Naturalism is therefore atheistic.
 If successful in its understanding of everything
being ultimately physical reality, naturalism must
offer an account of religion.
A rogues gallery of naturalism
Freud
Hobbes
Marx
Hume
Russell
The naturalist critique
 It is assumed by leading naturalistic
philosophers, such as Kai Nielsen, that the
Enlightenment critiques of religion by the
likes of Hume and Kant have refuted the
classical arguments for the existence of
God.
 Add to this the accounts of religion in such
as Freud and Marx and it can be assumed
that traditional realist versions of theism are
redundant.
Naturalistic explanations for
religious belief: main players
19th cc
Ludwig Feuerbach
Friedrich Engels
Karl Marx
Max Stirner
Friedrich Nietzsche
20th cc
Emile Durkheim
Max Weber
Axel Hägerström
Sigmund Freud
Bronislaw Malinowski
Antonio Gramsci
Typical naturalistic program
 Given the persistence and psychological
appeal of religion we should look for
reasons for this and causes of religious
beliefs and behaviour.
 Here questions of the origin and function of
religious beliefs become central.
 Also need to examine the logical and
conceptual status of religious beliefs.
Feuerbach
 True explanation of religious belief is found in
anthropology not theology.
 Religion is a projected image of humanities
essential nature.
 ‘God’ is the projected idealised essence of human
beings rather than a mysterious supernatural
power.
 ‘God’ really exists only in the imagination of the
believer, who treats ‘God’ as an objectively
existing entity.
Freud - 1
 Religion again discussed in psychological and
anthropological terms.
 Religion is the mass obsessional delusion of
mankind, not recognised as such by believers for
understandable emotionally compelling reasons.
 Freud says religious beliefs depress the value of
life and distort “the picture of the real world in a
delusional manner”. Religion may spare many an
individual neurosis “but hardly anything more”.
Freud - 2
 Thus religion is the “universal obsessional
neurosis of humanity”
 It emerges from the Oedipus Complex.
“God is the exalted father and the longing
for the father is the root of the need of
religion”
 Religious beliefs are “illusions, fulfilment
of the oldest, strongest and most insistent
wishes of mankind.”
Freud - 3
 Unconsciously reverting to our infantile
attitudes, we create the gods.
 Religion functions to exorcise the terrors of
nature, reconciles us to the “cruelty of fate,
particularly as shown in death” and “make
amends for the sufferings and privations
that the communal life of culture has
imposed on man”.
 God is an imagined idealised father with the
characteristics attributed to the God of
Judaic-Christian theism.
Engels and Marx - 1
 Whereas for Feuerbach and Freud religion
was to be understood in anthropological or
psychological terms, for Engels and Marx
religion is about society.
 Religions function principally to aid the
dominant classes in controlling the
dominated classes, whether either group is
aware of it or not!
Engels and Marx - 2
 Religion, as ideology,serves to reconcile the
dominated to their condition and give them
an illusory hope of a better spiritual world
to come.
 Thus wealth is legitimated and the
potentially rebellious classes are pacified.
Society is ‘unified’ and sanctioned.
Durkheim - 1
 Durkheim saw religion as genuinely
unifying society.
 Talk about ‘God’ is really talk about society.
 Religion is social in three broad ways:
– [1] as socially determined;
– [2] as embodying representations of social
realities;
– [3] having functional social consequences
Durkheim - 2
 This is an utterly naturalistic account. God
and gods “are nothing other than the
collective states objectified; they are society
itself seen under one of its aspects.”
 Religion is a mode of comprehending social
realities for Durkheim.
Crudely summarised ….
 All of these naturalistic accounts are
reductionistic. Religion is “nothing but”…
 For Freud religion is psychological
 For Feuerbach religion is anthropological
 For Marx religion is socio-economic
 For Durkheim religion is social
 In truth, it is a mixture of all of these factors
in these thinkers, with differing emphases in
each one.
Cleverly summarised ….
Steven Lukes, for example, would say that
all naturalistic theoreticians of religion
refuse to take religious symbols at what
orthodox believers take to be face-value.
They seek to go ‘underneath’ the symbol to
the reality it represents and which gives it
its true meaning. They seek to show that all
religions answer in their different ways to
the given conditions of human existence.
The role of religion in the lives of
human beings
 This is not the same question as we have
been examining above.
 Hitherto, the issue has been one of the truth
or coherence of religious beliefs.
 Here these matters are put in brackets.The
question is one of the role that religion
plays in people’s lives, regardless of
whether what they believe is true or not.
Role - 2
 Durkheim himself seemed hesitant to push
the naturalistic critique too far: ”whoever
does not bring to the study of religion a sort
of religious sentiment has no right to speak
about it”.
 It is fair to suggest that if a believer realised
that what he believed was false, there would
be no point in carrying on with it.
 Who “would continue to pray if he knew he
was praying to no-one?” – Gustave Belot
Role - 3
 BUT, many naturalistic thinkers want to say that in
fact there is something real underlying religious
beliefs, namely facts about human beings and
society. It just that this reality is not what the
religious believer takes it to be!
 This may seem empathetic and a sensitive
viewpoint, but it still boils down to “you religious
guys are wrong in what you believe in”!
Final word from Kai Nielsen
“Naturalistic explanations are of course
incompatible with religious belief…the account
explains the religions’ origins, explains its claim to
truth, explains how that very claim is in error, the
depth of that error, its persistence in spite of that in
various institutional contexts and in the personal
lives of human beings, its various cultural and
historical forms, how and why it changes and
develops as it does, and its continuing persistence
and appeal in one or other form.”