ARGUMENTS AGAINST GOD AND RELIGION — Part II
ARGUMENTS AGAINST GOD AND RELIGION — Part II
The Psychological Argument
Atheistic thinkers dismiss religion as being unfounded in fact. They maintain that it springs from man’s desire to find meaning in the universe. While the urge to find an explanation is not in itself wrong, they hold that the inadequacy of our predecessors’ knowledge led them to wrong conclusions, namely, the existence of a God or gods, the notions that creation and destruction were a function of the godhead, that man’s fate was of concern to God, that there was a life after death in heaven or hell, as warranted by the morality of man’s life on earth, and that all thinking on these matters must necessarily be regulated by religion. Here we examine the psychological arguments against God or religion.
The Psychological Argument
After the revelation of natural causes, the need to posit, and to believe in the existence of God, or a supernatural force, vanished in and of itself. If the rainbow is merely a reflection of sunlight in minute droplets of water in the air, it is not, in any way, a sign placed in the sky by God. If the plague is inevitably an outbreak of this disease, it can no longer be looked on as a sign of divine wrath. If animals and plants have slowly evolved over hundreds of millions of years, there is no room for a ‘Creator’ of animals and plants, except in a metaphorical sense–quite different from that in which the word was originally and is now normally used. If hysteria and insanity are external symptoms of disordered minds, there is no place left in them for possession by devils. Citing such events in support of his argument, Julian Huxley observes with great conviction: “If events are due to natural causes, they are not due to supernatural causes.”
It does not follow that because agnostics possess
only one yardstick by which to measure reality,
there exists, de facto, one and only one such yardstick.
He holds that their ascription to Supernatural Beings is merely due to man’s ignorance combined with his passion for some sort of explanation. Subsequent research carried out in the field of psychology further strengthened this point of view, as it revealed that religion is the creation of man’s subconscious self rather than the discovery of some external reality. In the words of an atheistic scholar: “God is nothing but a projection of man on a cosmic screen.” The concept of another world was nothing but “a beautiful idealisation of human wishes.” Divine inspiration and revelation were merely an “extraordinary expression of the childhood repressions.”
All these ideas are based on the premise that there is something called the subconscious. Modern research has revealed that the human mind is divided into two major parts, one being termed the conscious mind, the centre of those of our ideas, which take shape in a state of consciousness. The other part is the subconscious. In this part of the mind, ideas are not usually alive in the memory, but exist below the surface and find expression either in abnormal circumstances, or in sleep, in the form of dreams. Most human thoughts are buried in this subconscious cell, the conscious part of the mind being the smaller part. The subconscious is like the eight-ninths of the iceberg, which remain below water, while only one ninth, the conscious part, is visible.
It is a general weakness of modern thought that it jumps
to extraordinary conclusions on the basis of facts which
carry no weight from the logical point of view.
After extensive research in psychology, Freud discovered that, during childhood, certain happenings and ideas are repressed in our unconscious minds, which can later result in the irrational behaviour of adults. The same applies to the religious concepts of the hereafter, heaven, hell, etc., which are but echoes of those very wishes which were born in the child’s mind but never fulfilled, circumstances being unfavourable, and consequently, repressed in the subconscious. Later, the subconscious, for its own satisfaction, supposed the existence of a dream world in which its unfulfilled wishes would be realized, just as, deep in sleep, one dreams of wishes coming miraculously true. When childhood fancies, which had been thoroughly repressed, suddenly burst through to the surface, producing a state of frenzy or hysteria, or other abnormal behaviour, people mistakenly attributed this to supernatural forces, which had found expression in human language. Similarly, the generation gap and the ‘Father complex’ in a family gave rise to the concept of God and slave. Thus what was simply a social malaise was carried to the cosmic scale in order to forge a theory. In the words of Ralph Linton:
The Hebrew picture of an all-powerful deity who could only be placated by complete submission and protestations of devotion, no matter how unjust his acts might appear, was a direct outgrowth of this general Semitic family situation. Another product of the exaggerated superego to which it gave rise was the elaborate system of taboos relating to every aspect of behaviour. One system of this sort has been recorded and confided in the Laws of Moses. All Semitic tribes had similar series of regulation differing only in content. Such codes provided those who kept them with a sense of security, comparable to that of the good child who is able to remember everything that his father ever told him not to do and carefully abstains from doing it. The Hebrew Yahveh was a portrait of the Semitic father with his patriarchal authoritarian qualities abstracted and exaggerated. Such a judicial concept which believes in God being a political authority has occupied a central place not only in Judaism, but is also incorporated in the religious concepts of Christianity and Islam as well.
Analysis of the Psychological Argument Against God and Religion
The psychological argument holds that far from being a reality, the concept of God and the life hereafter is a myth, a mere fiction, a stretching of the human personality and human wishes to the cosmic scale. What possible basis can there be for this claim? Moreover, if we were indeed to claim that human personality and human wishes did, in fact, exist on a cosmic plane, it is doubtful if anyone would have sufficient factual data to refute this claim.
The unconscious mind stores only experiences whereas
Prophets proclaimed great unknown truths.
Talking of scales, let us see what is happening at the atomic and sub-atomic level, where we are dealing with infinitesimally small distances. According to the Bohr atomic model, the atom possesses an internal structure similar to our solar system, with electrons revolving around a nucleus in discrete and stable orbits, in the same way that planets revolve around the sun. How vastly different are the scales; for in the solar system, distances are measured in millions of miles. Yet, in spite of the scales being so different as to boggle the imagination, the systems are similar. Would it be any wonder then if the consciousness, which we as human beings experience existed on a cosmic scale but in a totally perfect form? As an intellectual exercise, it is no more difficult to accept this, than to accept the notion that genes, although only microscopic elements in the human embryo, control the growth and development of an adult human being. Might not the human and natural desire for a world immeasurably vaster than our own be an echo—spiritual and otherworldly—of a world already existing in this universe in a form invisible to human eyes?
Psychologists are right in holding that sometimes ideas are repressed in our minds during childhood, which erupt at a later stage in an extraordinary form. But to infer that it is this very characteristic in humans which has given birth to religion is to jump to wrong conclusions. It is a misinterpretation, if not an actual distortion of a perfectly ordinary fact. It is as if observing a potter designing an image of clay, we deduce that it must be he who has created human beings. Image making and the creation of the human body differ from each other in so qualitative a fashion that to draw any parallels with God’s creativity would be utterly preposterous. It is only minds which see fit to make such analogies which look upon religion as a result of the inchoate ramblings of mentally deranged individuals.
Religious thoughts expressed in prophetic diction are
virtue and purity par excellence.
It is a general weakness of modern thought that it jumps to extraordinary conclusions on the basis of facts which carry no weight from the logical point of view. An emotionally disturbed individual may babble abnormally under the influence of thoughts repressed in the unconscious, but how does this prove that the knowledge of the universe revealed to the prophets is also a ‘babbling’ of the same nature—a ‘miracle’ of the unconscious? It is possible to accept incoherence in sleeping and in waking as the result of mental disturbance, but to assert the same about divine revelation is to descend to illogical and unscientific argument. It merely shows that those who reason in this way are hard put to find any other criterion by which to judge the extraordinary words of the prophets. It does not follow that because agnostics possess only one yardstick by which to measure reality, there exists, de facto, one and only one such yardstick.
The thoughts and wishes, suppressed in the unconscious, are mostly such evil designs as could not be realized for fear of punishment and or social ostracism. Now, if the subconscious part of the mind of a 30 Spirit of Islam Issue 26 February 2015 mentally disturbed person begins to find an outlet, what is likely to come gushing out of it? Obviously the afflicted person will talk incoherently while attempting to give expression to those same hostile feelings and evil desires, which had remained suppressed in his subconscious. And, if we are to think of him as a prophet, it will be as a prophet of evil, certainly not of good.
Religious thoughts expressed in prophetic diction are, by comparison, virtue and purity par excellence. The true prophet is, himself, the epitome of virtue and his purity in thought, word and deed has no parallel. His ideas, moreover, exercise such a powerful influence upon people that the very society from which, at one time, the prophet had initially to conceal his ideas—out of fear—is now so greatly attracted towards them, that even after a lapse of centuries together, it still steadfastly adheres to them.
From a psychological point of view, the unconscious mind is actually a vacuum. In it, nothing initially exists. It receives all impressions through the conscious part of the mind. This implies that the unconscious stores only those experiences to which people have been exposed at one time or the other. The unconscious can never become a repository for facts which have not been experienced. But, surprisingly, religion as proclaimed by the prophets, contains truths which were previously unknown to them and for that matter, to the entire human race. It was only with the advent of the prophets that certain facts could be propagated. Had the unconscious been the repository on which they drew, they could not have become the purveyors of great, but hitherto unknown truths.
The religion proclaimed by the prophets contain
a great body of knowledge, touching, in one way
or the other, all branches of learning.
The religion proclaimed by the prophets contain a great body of knowledge, touching, in one way or the other, all branches of learning, such as astronomy, physics, biology, psychology, history, civilization, politics and sociology. No individual, however gifted, whether drawing on the conscious or subconscious minds, has ever been able to produce such an all-embracing discourse, free from erroneous decisions, vain conjectures, unreal statements, miscalculations and unsound logic. But religious scriptures are admirably and miraculously free of such deficiencies. In their approach, reasoning and decisions, they encompass all of the human sciences. Over the centuries, succeeding generations have sifted through the finding of their predecessors, examined them, considered them from all angles, and often disproved and rejected what their forebears had considered truths as firm as rocks. But the truths, which are enshrined in religion, remain unchallenged to this day. So far, it has not been possible to point out a single error, or even discrepancy in them worth the name. Those, who have ventured to attack the bastions of religion have eventually been forced to fall back without scaling its battlements, for they, themselves, have finally been proved to be in the wrong. o
Does God Exist?
The main reason why people fail to attach themselves to religion in the modern age is that they cannot see God so they do not believe in Him. This argument was valid when science had reached only the macro world and when ‘only what was observable was the reality’.
At that time the atom was considered to be the smallest unit of the observable material world. But when the atom was split, it was confirmed that it was nothing but a mad dance of energy waves or electrons, which could not be observed. Scientists however continued to believe in the concept of the atom, albeit unobservable.
A new logic then came into being. Not only was the direct or observable argument thought to be valid, but inferential arguments or the invisible sources of visible effects were also considered valid. An example of the latter is that X-rays are not visible to the naked eye, but their effect can be seen when we observe the X-ray film. Using the valid inferential argument, if you can believe in the unseen X-rays as you can see their effect, why can you not believe in an unseen God, whose meaningful creation – the Universe you see all around you?