Inventing God

Psychology of Belief and the Rise of Secular Spirituality

Jon Mills

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317218432
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Filosofía de la religión

In this controversial book, philosopher and psychoanalyst Jon Mills argues that God does not exist; and more provocatively, that God cannot exist as anything but an idea. Put concisely, God is a psychological creation signifying ultimate ideality. Mills argues that the idea or conception of God is the manifestation of humanity's denial and response to natural deprivation; a self-relation to an internalized idealized object, the idealization of imagined value.

After demonstrating the lack of any empirical evidence and the logical impossibility of God, Mills explains the psychological motivations underlying humanity's need to invent a supreme being. In a highly nuanced analysis of unconscious processes informing the psychology of belief and institutionalized social ideology, he concludes that belief in God is the failure to accept our impending death and mourn natural absence for the delusion of divine presence. As an alternative to theistic faith, he offers a secular spirituality that emphasizes the quality of lived experience, the primacy of feeling and value inquiry, ethical self-consciousness, aesthetic and ecological sensibility, and authentic relationality toward self, other, and world as the pursuit of a beautiful soul in search of the numinous.

Inventing God will be of interest to academics, scholars, lay audiences and students of religious studies, the humanities, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, among other disciplines. It will also appeal to psychotherapists, psychoanalysts and mental health professionals focusing on the integration of humanities and psychoanalysis.

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Chapter 1
God as a metaphysical question

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God does not exist. God is merely an idea—a mental object, the invention of imaginative thought championed by reason yet conditioned on desire. We as humanity have devised this myth and it is likely here to stay because world masses cannot live without it. Although there is a rational tenor to predicating God’s existence, reason is ultimately mediated by fantasy.¹ God is the product of a collective ideological fantasy fueled by unconscious illusion ensconced in the basic desire for wish-fulfillment. It is easy to appreciate why the human psyche is compelled to invent the notion of God as an ultimate metaphysical reality, because billions of people have a profound need for God. People want consonance, love, enjoyment, satiation, perpetual peace, joy—no one in their right mind would deny these universal yearnings! Yet for believers, a secular existence fails to meet this felt necessity. It is deeply comforting to believe in an Ideal Being, for one’s anxieties, conflicts, and emotional pain are mitigated by believing in a divine beneficence that promises a satisfying afterlife. This hegemonic fallacy—the belief or faith in such an afterlife—makes personal, daily existence more tolerable with the dream, that deep down, sometime in the future, when you perish you will have everything you desire but are deprived of in your momentary life. Death no longer becomes an ending in-itself, but rather an Eden where all cherished wishes and values are realized—the Perfect World. God is a signifier for flawlessness, salvation, everlasting tranquility, or any qualitative value that signifies perennial happiness or bliss. As the product of fantasy life, God is solely a coveted fiction.

Proof and negation

Every reflecting mind must allow that there is no proof of the existence of a Deity.

—Percy Bysshe Shelley²

Certain philosophers may claim that you cannot prove a negation, namely, God’s non-existence. But I would ask, How is it that you cannot prove the non-existence of something when by definition there is nothing there to prove? We do not need to prove a negative, especially when there is nothing present. Negation is self-evident by virtue of absence. It doesn’t take a natural scientist to demonstrate objective reality. Negation or absence is obvious and indisputable, a plain truism. There is nothing there to predicate other than negation. The burden is in proving how there is something out of nothing, how there is when what appears or manifests is not, literally no-thing. We do not even have a proper predication because we are positing (concrete) existence (not ideation) in the face of nothingness, a so-called hidden presence when there is salient absence. If the only thing that presents itself is absence, how can the predication of existence negate this apparent negation? In other words, if God is predicated to be yet is occluded, does this not beg the question of what constitutes the properties of existence? If anything, negation is the one thing that you can prove because nothing appears. Here we may side with Hume: “It is an infinite advantage in every controversy, to defend the negative.”³ Translation: that which is not evident needs no coaxing.

The philosopher is never called upon to prove a negative, for the burden is on the one predicating existential affirmation, here God’s existence. The laws of induction and inference speak of reasonable and common sense ratios of probability to support likely conclusions based upon evidence some believers wish to categorically disqualify as truth or knowledge because it does not yield absolute certainty. However, is that good justification to negate a negative, let alone a good reason to live one’s life by, when there is no evidence (which is missing, hence does not exist) to support such a supposition? Just because something cannot be proved with absolute certainty does not make it ipso facto false. Moreover, theists or deists would have us believe: “Because it is not certain that God cannot exist, it is at least equally certain that God exists.” According to this way of thinking, any concession to the limits of proving a negation provides proportional (if not equal) logical grounds for positing an affirmation (which at most is an inference, and a poor one at that, based on a non sequitur where the conclusions do not follow from the premises). This reasoning is further based on the value of abstract possibility (itself a mental construction) rather than on mere probability, as if the possible supersedes the probable, especially when there is no tangible data to warrant this leap to metaphysical heaven.

Positing divine being to annul non-being (itself the negation of negation) is to privilege a lop-sided logic that assertion itself cancels negation when the assertion is a vacuous statement that lacks a present referential object; while the negative is self-evident by virtue of the fact of nothing being present. Rather than set the bar to zero as a mutual inference based on the laws of induction, the predication of the existence of an absent object does nothing to negate this apparent absence. I do not grant that the proposition of God’s existence holds the same level of probability as the apparent nothingness of the (mental) object we are positing. And when philosophers are called upon to prove a negation, they wittingly revert to the proof from modus tollens:

If (p) God exists, then (q) God would not be absent.

(q) God is not present, hence absent.

Therefore, (p) God does not exist.

Although this is a valid proof based on propositional logic, all one has to do is quibble with the premises to manipulate the desired outcome one wants. But here I am appealing to empirical facts: God’s lack of presence gives no evidence for God’s existence. To quote the new atheists, “the absence of evidence is evidence of absence.” Given that most knowledge claims and scientific discoveries are built upon induction and inference, only to be supported or refuted by empirical evidence, does it make logical sense to affirm the existence of a supreme being when no inductive or deductive support can be indubitably established by appeal to all available evidence? Since when does the criterion of absolute certainty garner the respect to warrant the negation of negation in favor of affirmative belief in asserting “God exists!,” especially when there is evidence to the contrary, namely, the absence of the very object in question. The burden of proof is on the one proclaiming existence, not on the one questioning whether something exists. Here negation is self-evident because nothing is present; and in order for something to exist, it must appear in order for it to be.⁴

The Christian philosopher and apologist William Lane Craig states that the theist need not have to appeal to evidence to know God exists, which is brought about through the inner workings of God’s “Holy Spirit . . . wholly apart from evidence,” and by “miracles,” one of which he notes is Christ’s resurrection from the dead, as well as the canons of natural theology. Instead, rather than offering cogent or plausible proof, he insists that “it is incumbent on the atheist to prove that if God existed, he would provide more evidence of his existence than what we have. This is an enormously heavy burden of proof for the atheist to bear.”⁵ How so? Apart from this rhetorical challenge, I do not think the presence of nothing requires anymore proof than what is self-evident, namely the absence of an object, which is tantamount to the absence of evidence. Appealing to the subjectivity of belief as epistemological justification for knowing God’s existence based on the invisible workings of a divine ghost is not sound (nor even reasonable) evidence to warrant such a conclusion. Neither is the presupposition of miracles that are said to have historically happened, which defy all natural physical laws; nor is scriptural or theological doctrine proffered as good evidence, let alone the imagined intentions or psychological motives attributed to a fantasy object that is presumed to exist. Craig’s “proof” is merely the self-projection of his mind. Without providing persuasive argumentation commensurate with verifiable evidence, the theist is simply reasoning in a solipsistic circle.

An assertion of predication is affirmative, but one has the burden of proof. What is it? Where is it? Why does it not stand out or manifest? A proposition is not a proof of itself. And I certainly do not give any credence to Nathan Schneider’s definition of proof as “that which makes good,”⁶ which relegates evidence, truth, and reason to the scrapheap of relativism. Existence is not a predicate: it cannot be defined into actuality. Existence as a hypothetical construct cannot be assigned or unconditionally conferred Being as if it is merely a logical statement that needs no actual proof or substantial demonstration. Logic in itself is a decorous system of abstract inferences that lack substantive properties—an empty formalism, the content of which is arbitrarily supplied by our minds subject to convention. Just because you predicate something does not make it so. One cannot dismiss the request for spatial-temporal location and subsistence when predicating something substantive, such as in the substantive verb to be. If we appeal to arguments that God is immaterial and incorporeal, or non-temporal—outside of space and time, ethereal, eternal, and infinite, hence eluding all naturalistic indicators of experiential evidence, then we are positing the presupposition of a being that has never displayed its manifest existence. The premise itself is illegitimate, for there is nothing to predicate other than a missing object, pure nothingness. Here God becomes a hypothetical mental construct that is hypostatized or reified as a concrete subject (a person, no less). If it is only in one’s mind, then how can it be real independent of mind? In other words, just because we think it does not make it an extant reality.

At most we can say is that mind as ideation posits a cognitive (mental) object as the subject matter of its predication, but we cannot ontologically justify the leap from internal ideation (even as coherent logical relata) to external actuality. At best God is a hypothesis, an educated guess or speculative conjecture that is empirically unverifiable. Yet thoughts themselves are empirical (experiential) phenomenon, and the parameters of their content and properties can be scientifically studied and objectively recognized. But with the God hypothesis we have no empirical object other than a mental concept, which is not sufficient to justify (let alone establish) the existence of an autonomous object that inhabits a mind independent metaphysical reality.

A negation, on the contrary, has no onus because nothing is predicated. There is no interlocutor engaging a subject, other than one’s own mind. Therefore, an affirmative predication is, at best, a psychological object. If you assert that a negation does not provide proof of a possible or potential object to manifest, then by definition it does not currently exist and the whole argument devolves into possible or potential futures that have not occurred, despite the presumption that you cannot rule out their possible future occurrence. But to me this seems to be eluding the present condition of predication and actuality. Possibility is a mental occasion or instance of futurity—pure hypothetical abstraction, while actuality is real presence not limited to a cognitive object of predication.

The main problem in predicating God’s existence independent of any tangible evidence is that it relies on a form of argumentation that attempts to deduce existence from the mere concept of existence. These a priori arguments do not rely on sense experience to lend any credibility to the form of argumentation, but rather on an analysis of concepts alone and their logical relations that pretentiously confer the domain of Being to hypothetical objects of thought, which are held to be knowable independent of empirical encounters. Yet these conventions are confined to the domain of ideas: when we deliberate ontology we must separate our conceptual schemes and what they designate from that which is truly extant. Predication and empirical reality are two different things: one is confined to mental operations, the other to facts.

It is generally known that Kant forcefully challenged the ontological argument by claiming that existence is not a property or a real predicate, namely, that the proposition “exists” is not a properly defining predicate of God.⁷ Because existential propositions are synthetic in nature, existence becomes a logical predicate when such judgments are contingently performed.⁸ In other words, the notion of existence is only meaningful when objects of experience substantiate the predication. A concept alone does not confer existence: it is impossible for my idea of God to contain any real properties a priori without an experiential correlate to ground my epistemic judgment that God actually exists as a real object or acquires existence outside of my concept alone.⁹ In other words, we cannot conclude that the exact object of my concept exists independent of empirical reality.

Existential statements typically either affirm or deny that something exists. Positive existential statements assert existence, while negative existential statements negate existence. The existential statement “God does not exist” is therefore a negative one. But we must keep in mind, as we have just shown, that God is a concept and not an object. There are no good grounds to think of God as anything but an idea, for there is no counterpart in material reality that would substantiate God as an empirical object. Therefore when theists speak of God as existing, they are in actuality referring to the concept of God as a psychic object. From this vantage point, there is a special relation that is said to exist in one’s subjective mind independent of the ontological (external) reality of the concept in question. Therefore the God posit or introject can have different functional distributions in a person’s psyche dissociated from the ontological status of God as a real object, and may serve myriad psychological purposes. Perhaps, some would argue, this is a sufficient condition to exonerate the notion of God from the question of ontology. But the God function is still merely a mental relation. It is not a necessary condition adjudicating the question of the existence of God. If a mental relation is all that is justified to establish a communion with the divine, then this phenomenon can extend to practically anything, which potentially imports a whole host of other illusions and sundry problematics. Despite the fact that the Go...