Religion and Theism

The Forwood Lectures Delivered at Liverpool University, 1933. Together with a Chapter on the Psychological Accounts of the Origin of Belief in God

Clement C.J. Webb

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415822329
• eBook ISBN: 9781134047185
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Four lectures on the Philosophy of Religion are included in this compact book along with an extra chapter on the psychology of belief in God. In a search for an acceptable theism, the author examines religious faith and human personality via many theories and facets of thinking, referring to psychologists, theologians and philosophers who have battled with similar questions. Originally published a year after the lectures were presented, this is an interesting classic volume by a well-known theorist of the early Twentieth Century.

IV

PSYCHOLOGICAL ACCOUNTS OF THE ORIGIN OF BELIEF IN GOD

THE authors whom I have selected for discussion in the foregoing pages have, as we have seen, assailed Theism as, on the one hand, exalting our human nature overmuch by envisaging the ultimate power in the universe in the likeness of man and, on the other hand, degrading this same human nature of ours by refusing to recognize it as, in its kind, the most exalted thing within our experience, with nothing above it to which that kind of respect which we are accustomed to pay to it might be due in a higher degree. These arguments of theirs against belief in God, mutually opposed, though perhaps not mutually contradictory, do not appear to depend upon any particular theory of the origin of that belief. But I do not think it can be reasonably denied that the wide acceptance with which such a rejection of Theism as they champion undoubtedly meets among our educated contemporaries is greatly promoted by the general prevalence of an impression that psychologists, exploring (whether by the method specifically known as psycho-analysis or otherwise) the constitution of the human mind, have found an adequate explanation of the origin of the belief in a God or gods and of the consensus gentium to which that belief can unquestionably appeal, as an illusion almost inevitably generated at a certain stage of culture by the circumstances affecting that mind’s development. The present chapter will be devoted to a brief consideration of this alleged explanation and of its sufficiency to invalidate the conviction of which it professes to exhibit the genesis.

No attempt will be made here, nor am I competent to make such an attempt, to examine the credentials of psycho-analysis as a method of therapeutics, or as a means of ascertaining the antecedents in the lives of individuals which are causally connected with their sentiments, habits, and beliefs. It is obvious that, apart from confirmation which can rarely be had, the evidence afforded by a psychotherapist’s interpretation of another person’s dreams, or of what may be elicited from his patients, whether under hypnosis or by the method of “free association,” as to events in forgotten periods of their infancy may be exposed to much justifiable scepticism. But, so far as I can venture to express an opinion, the light which has been shown by the investigations of psycho-analysis upon the genesis of phenomena in the lives of us all to which but little attention had previously been paid, is too great to permit of a wholesale rejection of theories which yet, as advanced by their best-known exponents, are fertile in mythology, and stand in much need of a strict philosophical criticism.

The discussion of them in this chapter will, however, make no pretence of supplying this latter criticism. I shall confine myself to indicating what seem to me to be limits set by the nature of things to the availability of such methods as psycho-analysts pursue for the interpretation of human thought; and in so doing, to suggesting that such interpretation is not to be had from psychology alone, of whatever school. In this connexion it will be necessary to say something of theories which, although not based upon the special doctrines of the psycho-analytic school, agree with those so based in finding, if not in religion in general, at any rate in the belief in God, an illusion susceptible of being dispelled by a more thorough acquaintance with the laws governing the genesis and development of the human mind, individual and social. Such a theory is, for example, maintained with much ability, on a basis of wide reading in the records of religious experience, by Professor Leuba, who is by no means prepared to adhere to the particular views characteristic of any school of psycho-analysts.

It has been explained in the first Lecture that the special subject of this book is the rejection of Theism by thinkers who are not concerned to reject Religion in every sense of the word. In taking this as our theme, we have already found some difficulty in ascertaining its limits. This difficulty has arisen from the fact that many, both among the opponents and among the defenders of religion, are in the habit of associating it so closely with a belief in a God or gods that they cannot recognize as entitled to bear the name any view which is expressly atheistical. Nor is anyone who (like the present writer) holds that belief in God is characteristic of the highest form taken by religion concerned to deny that there is much justification for this habit. Yet the history of religion makes it impossible to deny that an attitude towards life which is essentially religious may be found apart from any explicit belief in the existence of a being or beings to whom the name would naturally be applied; and this book is primarily concerned with a mode of thought which allows such an attitude apart from such a belief to be reasonable. We are now, it is true, about to discuss certain views of the origin of the belief in God which imply, I think, that religion, in any sense which claims to place us in relation with a sphere of being inacessible to exploration by the methods appropriate to the natural sciences, is of necessity an illusion. But the most eminent upholders of these views are ready to admit that the part played by religion in the past as a guide to human life has been largely beneficial, and that it is a matter of urgency that, in a world where (as they hold) the belief in a God or gods which has so often, if not always, been bound up with religion is destined to disappear before the advance of science, a motive power should be discovered which, apart from any such belief, may accomplish—perhaps better than religion has ever actually succeeded in accomplishing—the function, so far performed, when performed at all, by religion, of establishing, amid the changes and chances of human life and the fears and distractions which these inspire, a much-needed sense of confidence and unity in the life alike of societies and of individuals.

How then, we may begin our task by enquiring, is religion held to have hitherto performed, or essayed to perform, this important function? In the main, by setting before men the image of a Being who, wearing their own likeness, and capable, like another human being, of arousing the emotions of fear and love, is both—to use a phrase often employed by Professor Pratt in his valuable work on The Religious Consciousness—“the determiner of destiny” and the controller of their environment. The belief in such a being becomes, no doubt, increasingly difficult as it becomes more and more plain that there is no such empirical evidence of his existence as there is in the case of other objects of our fear and love, whose bodies we can see with our eyes, whose voices we can hear with our ears, and with whom we can enjoy mutual converse. “No man”—the saying is not, we may note, that of an atheist, but of a New Testament writer¹—“hath seen God at any time.” The imaginations of God are traced either to a “sense of presence” due to peculiar conditions of the worshipper’s own mind and feelings, or (as with Freud) to memories of our parents as they appeared to us in our infancy. With the discovery of the illusory nature of any belief in the reality of the Being thus imagined, the power of such a belief to discharge the useful functions in the economy of human life which it discharged in the past must decay and perish, to be replaced, if at all, by a comprehension of the attainable aims which a man can set before himself, and an agreement with our fellows to order our lives so as to promote those which may afford us such satisfaction in the present and assurance of satisfaction in the future as the conditions of our existence permit.

Within the limits at my disposal it is impossible to do more than offer some observations upon these psychological explanations of the origin of the idea of God which, whatever their differences in detail, agree in denying objective validity to this idea. These observations will be directed to suggesting, not that the facts brought to our notice by psychologists do not contribute much that is of value for our better understanding of our religious experience, but that they do not really dispose of its claims to be a genuine experience of a reality other than our own “psyche” or soul. I shall endeavour to show that the assumption of such a reality in the case of God is parallel assumptions made by the critics of Theism themselves in other cases. I shall point out that the explanations offered by psychologists of the nature of the idea of God do not answer the question about the origin of that idea put by such thinkers as Descartes, who found no satisfactory solution except in the assertion of the reality of such a Being as the idea in question represents to us. I shall suggest that certain facts about the mystic’s “sense of presence” which appear to Professor Leuba to rule it out as evidence of the reality of a “transcendental object” are not incompatible with taking that “sense” along with other features of our religious consciousness as contributory testimony to the reality of our communion with a God who is no mere fantasy of our own creating. Lastly, I shall attempt to argue that the connexion which is not to be denied (and which indeed is openly emphasized in many authoritative expressions of religious experience) between the child’s attitude to his parents and the mature man or woman’s attitude to God is susceptible of an explanation which in no way necessitates the atheistical conclusion which has been drawn from the psychological premises.

To the remarks, the general character of which I have now outlined, I will prefix a short consideration of what appears to me to be a caution very requisite to be borne in mind in dealing with all psychology, whether it be that which (until some other school shall arise with a better claim to the designation—for we can scarcely expect that it will, like Newcastle-on-Tyne, or New College at Oxford, retain it when invested with the glamour of a venerable antiquity) rejoices in the title of the “new pyschology,” or whether it be that of a period as yet ignorant of the methods of psycho-analysis. I mean that, while it is obvious that, of all the activities of the human soul (if, waiving certain familiar objections, we may provisionally so call that with which the science of psychology is concerned), none is more important than knowledge; nevertheless, any psychology which, following the precedent of the other “natural” sciences, ignores questions which are strictly rather philosophical than “scientific,” must inevitably be embarrassed by the appearance of this activity among the phenomena with which it has to deal. For, from the nature of the case, it can only trace out the antecedents of knowledge in individual cases, and describe what (so to put it) it feels like to know. Yet knowledge must have a reference external to itself; one cannot know what is not real, and as it will scarcely be denied that men sometimes suppose themselves to know when they do not, a criterion would seem to be imperatively demanded by which genuine knowledge may be discriminated from pretenders to the name. The psychologist may indeed be at first inclined to say that this discrimination is not his business; that, as a psychologist, he is no more concerned with the problem of the nature of knowledge as such than is the chemist or the mathematician. Yet he cannot, we may say with confidence, maintain this position to the end. The chemist or the mathematician assumes throughout that his investigations, rightly pursued, lead to knowledge; but knowledge is not a function or activity of the very object which he is investigating, while, in the case of the psychologist, it is certainly such. At the same time he must, like every other man of science, assume that there is such a thing as knowledge; for, except upon this assumption, his own investigations have no raison d’être; and hence it is not open to him to regard it as an open question whether the phenomena of knowing, or those of believing, doubting, and so forth, which derive their whole significance from their relation to knowledge, have any objective reference. For his own proceedings, and those of every scientific enquirer, would be mere “sound and fury, signifying nothing,” unless the possibility of knowledge and our acquaintance with its nature be taken for granted at every step. From these considerations it seems to follow that psychology cannot dispense with the recognition, in the soul which is the object of its study, of something having that absolute character which takes us at once out of the sphere of what in modern usage is called “science” into that of philosophy. From reluctance frankly to admit this disturbing peculiarity of their branch of study, and to draw from it would seem to be its inevitable consequence, namely, that psychology can never be a purely “natural science,” psychologists are not unnaturally attracted by the thought that “knowledge,” so far as they are concerned with it at all, may be identified with correspondence between our thoughts and feelings on one side and sensible experi ence on the other. It is the seeming refuge offered by this identification from the plunge into the gulf of metaphysical speculation to which their inability to escape the problem of the nature of knowledge invites them that leads to what may well strike us as a strange result. I mean the result that psychologists, such as those of the psycho-analytic school, whose own methods of enquiry would seem to depend entirely upon the recognition of a psychical principle of unity distinct (though not, it may be, separable) from that of the material body, as that is considered apart from the soul which constitutes it not merely a “body” but an “organism,” are sometimes found to profess a strict materialism, and to treat perception by the senses as the ultimate test of reality, regardless alike of the liability of the senses themselves to illusion (of which no one can be better aware than such psychologists), and of the difficulty of reconciling with such an outlook any such confidence as they are probably, as a rule, quite ready to place in the conclusions of mathematical science.

I have prefixed these observations to my discussion of the attempts of psychologists to explain the origin of the idea of God because I believe that what I suspect to be a confusion of thought that has haunted psychology throughout the modern period of its history has no small part in disposing psychologists to regard the results of their study of the development of that idea alike in individual minds, and in the traditions of the race as incompatible with belief in an objective reality revealed to us through its presence therein.

We ought, then, to be on our guard against this besetting temptation of psychology, and to recognize that the power of apprehending objective reality, or, in other words, the capacity for knowledge, is an attribute of the human mind which can only be denied to it if we are content to embrace a complete scepticism and empty of all meaning every “science,” including the very psychology which has induced our doubts. This recognition by no means carries with it the justification of every claim put forth on behalf of any conviction whatsoever to be an apprehension of objective reality. However great the difficulty which it may present to philosophers, it is impossible to deny the fact of illusion; and the contention that the belief in God rests upon illusion must be dealt with on its own merits.

The best-known exponent of psycho-analysis after Dr. Freud, the celebrated founder of that method, is certainly Dr. Jung. This writer tells us¹ that “every man has eyes and all his senses to perceive that the world is dead, cold, and unending, and he has never yet seen a God, nor brought to light the existence of such from empirical necessity.” We will not now enquire how we perceive with the senses that the world is unending, but we will note that the last clause of the sentence seems to be intended to cover inferences from what is perceptible to the senses to what is not, of the kind which we make when we conclude that the moon has another side than that which we see, though it is never turned towards the earth, and thus is always invisible to human eyes. The purport of the statement is plainly that the senses are the sole source of our knowledge; and that therefore, apart from the testimony of the senses to its existence, or its implication in the existence of what enjoys that testimony, there can be no good reason for believing in the reality of anything which may be alleged to exist. The matter is not, however, so simple as Dr. Jung appears to assume; and I may again remind my readers that, at least according to t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Orginal Copyright Page
• PREFACE
• CONTENTS
• I. THE NOTION OF RELIGION AND THE IDEA OF GOD
• II. RELIGION WITHOUT THEISM
• III. RELIGION WITHOUT THEISM
• IV. PSYCHOLOGICAL ACCOUNTS OF THE ORIGIN OF BELIEF IN GOD
• V. A VINDICATION OF THEISM
• INDEX