It is well known that Christian Fundamentalists believe that the Bible is the actual word of God (whatever that means), and further that it should be interpreted literally. It is hard for most people, including many Christians, to take such ideas seriously. Even worse, this offers atheists the opportunity to dismiss religion out of hand, since believers like these appear so ridiculous, making them an easy target. The Bible remains an incredibly important document, worthy of serious study, but this should be done from a different perspective than that of the Fundamentalists; only then can we assess its true worth. With that in mind, I am going to write a series of articles which will attempt (and probably fail) to get to the bottom of Genesis 1, thus the process of creation.

    A few preliminary remarks are necessary:

• we have no idea for certain who wrote the text.
• scholars have noted that the Old Testament has been subjected to various edits. We therefore have no idea to what extent the text of Genesis 1 is the original, or whether it was edited before it became the one we now use.
• we have various translations. If there are different versions, this would suggest how difficult it was to translate the original. Things get lost in translation, therefore some speculations about the original author’s intentions may be necessary.
• given that the text purports to describe the creation of the universe (with special reference to the Earth), it is incredibly short and simple. It is hard to believe that such a process could be summarised in so few words. It surely cannot do the subject justice, and may need some amplification.

    I’ll begin with the problem of literalism. The text is full of the words earth, waters, light, day, night, sky, with which we are very familiar. It would therefore be easy to think that these words refer to what we normally understand by them, and on some occasions it would seem that they do. However, it will be obvious to anyone with an understanding of the language of symbolism that these words do not always have their usual meaning. To take one simple example, Genesis 1.7 says: “So God made the dome and separated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome”, and then at 1.9: “And God said, ‘Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear’ ”.

    Certain Christians have taken this literally and (I swear I am not making it up) have arrived at the following conclusion: “It has become almost a recent-creationist dogma that ‘the waters which were above the firmament’ of Genesis 1.7 formed a vast canopy of water vapour above the earth’s atmosphere. This, they say, was all precipitated in the days of Noah, thus causing the Flood… The idea was popularized by Whitcombe and Morris in their classic, The Genesis Flood. They have so much to say about it that there are about twenty page-references to it in their index”. I am quoting Alan Hayward (1), who then says that these authors “do not offer a single calculation in support of their idea”. He goes on to demolish the idea from a scientific perspective, even though the idea is so ridiculous that this should not be considered necessary.

    What should we really understand by ‘the waters’? It seems obvious, to me at least, that Genesis 1 is describing the creation of a hierarchical (multi-level) universe. The word ‘heavens’ is therefore a symbol for the higher, divine spiritual realms, the ‘waters’ the lower non-material levels, thus the psyche (other relevant words might be astral, or etheric), and the ‘earth’ the material universe. At the very least, this scenario would fit more closely with what other spiritual traditions have to say.

    More thoughts on Genesis 1 will follow.

Footnote:                                                                                                                                                                              (1) Creation and Evolution: The Facts and the Fallacies, Triangle, 1985, revised 1994, p151

    This follows on from my post on Bertrand Russell, and here we meet another gloomy individual. In a previous article The ‘Enlightenment’ — Where It Has Taken Us, having quoted Bertrand Russell, Stephen Weinberg, and Jacques Monod, offering their extremely depressing assessments of the human situation, I then quoted the opening of Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy”. (Sisyphus was a mythical figure, who was subjected to an eternal punishment of having to carry a very heavy stone up a hill every day, which then fell back to the bottom.)

    Camus was a highly influential philosopher and novelist of the 20th century, attracting many followers. My series is an exploration of the work of the psychologist Paul Vitz, whose Defective Father Hypothesis suggests that intense atheism can be traced back to traumatic events in childhood in relation to the personal father. Vitz names Camus as one of his intense atheists (see footnote 1 for discussion).

    Here is what Vitz has to say about Camus: “His father, Lucien, died in 1914 at the Battle of the Marne, when Albert was one year old. Camus reveals the importance of this loss in his autobiographical novel The First Man… His father is a central preoccupation of this work”. The protagonist is called Jacques. Part one is called “Search for the Father”, and “chapter five is completely about his father”. “Camus describes an important teacher and father figure…: ‘This man [his teacher] had never known his [Jacques’s] father, but he often spoke to Jacques of him in a rather mythological way, and in any case at a critical time he knew how to take the father’s role. That is why Jacques had never forgotten him’. In short, a melancholy search for his father runs through this last and strongly autobiographical work — a sadness broken by Jacques’s commitment to life, love, and a kind of solidarity with all people” (2).

    All this would seem to confirm Vitz’s hypothesis. Further evidence of a traumatic childhood is provided by Camus’ novel The Outsider (L’Etranger), in which the main character Meursault seems devoid of emotion when he learns of his mother’s death. The opening line is dramatic: “Mummy died today” (Aujourd’hui, maman est morte). Camus’ mother has been described as “an illiterate house cleaner”, which presumably was very disappointing for him, and they “lived without many basic material possessions during his childhood in the Belcourt section of Algiers” (3). Meursault goes on to commit an act of random violence, revealing a psychopathic tendency, and possibly primal anger.

    As in the case of Russell, again we see how a philosophy of life emerges from depressing, traumatic events of childhood. Meursault and Camus would both have benefited from therapy.

    This article follows on from The Psychology of Atheism, and makes best sense if readers are familiar with it.

    In Faith of the Fatherless (1) Paul Vitz developed his Defective Father Hypothesis. He explains that those he calls ‘intense atheists’, especially those who are hostile to Christianity, which focuses upon the idea of God as a loving father, have all suffered disappointment in and resentment of their own fathers which “unconsciously justifies (their) rejection of God”. It is especially significant when a father dies while the child is alive, which is worst when it happens between the ages of three to five. In simple terms, traumatic events in early childhood, especially those in relation to the father, are likely to lead to extreme atheism.

    In my previous post in this series I discussed Sigmund Freud in the light of the above. I’m now going to highlight, in the context of Vitz’s hypothesis, some of the philosophers and scientists who have appeared in my recent articles, beginning with the philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell. He was one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. A significant title is Why I am not a Christian. An intense atheist philosopher friend of mine describes him as one of his greatest influences.

    In my article The ‘Enlightenment’ — Where It Has Taken Us, I quoted Russell describing his understanding of humanity and the universe: “That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling can preserve an individual life beyond the grave … (continues) All these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built” (2).

    Here is what Vitz has to say about Russell (3). His father died when he was four years old. “Young Bertrand was present at the end… To make matters worse, Russell’s mother had died two years earlier. Bertrand was subsequently cared for by his grandparents… but his grandfather… died in 1878 when Bertrand was six”. His grandmother was known as the “Deadly Nightshade”. She was his “greatest childhood influence, was by birth a Scottish Presbyterian, by temperament a puritan. The atmosphere of her religion was ‘a mournful Christian humility’ ”. “Russell’s only other parent figures were a string of nannies to whom he often grew very attached: when one of his beloved nannies left, eleven-year-old Bertrand was ‘inconsolable’ ”.

    Russell “very early became an agnostic or atheist”. Vitz says that “for men, God seems to function primarily as a principle of justice and order in the world… we would expect… that men who become atheists will find a new absolute principle with which to order the world. Thus, we expect male atheists to be quite explicitly atheistic and to have a new ‘divinity’ that takes the intellectual place of God. As a consequence, atheistic men should be intense believers in such alternative principles as reason, science, progress, humanism, socialism, communism, or existentialism”.

    It seems therefore that human beings have a need, or at least a strong tendency, to worship; if they reject God, a substitute will be found. Russell’s daughter Katherine is quoted: “I believe myself that his whole life was a search for God, or, for those who prefer less personal terms, for absolute certainty”. Vitz says that she “was quite aware of his search for certainty in mathematics as a religiously motivated substitute for God”. Russell himself is quoted: “I wanted certainty in the kind of way in which people want religious faith”, and Vitz says that “the early deaths of his parents and grandfather, plus his frequent ‘lost’ nannies, could easily be the source of his incredible desire for certainty”.

    The events of his early life clearly left him traumatised and, it would seem, profoundly affected his adult character: “Bertrand Russell’s arrogance, intense hatreds, psychopathic coldness, and his frequent lies are discussed in a major recent biography by Ray Monk” (4). He avoided human warmth and relationships, saying: “I am conscious that human affection is to me at bottom an attempt to escape from the vain search for God”. Instead, he soon discovered that “one way out of the sadness of these constantly changing companions was reading, retreating into a distant and increasingly abstract world”.

    We can see from the above that religious questions, despite his professed atheism, completely dominated his life (5). One can only feel sympathy for Russell, given the extremely distressing circumstances and events of his early childhood. I am still left wondering how a severely depressed, gloomy individual desperately in need of therapy became one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century. I assume he was an impressive mathematician, but his philosophy, which was built on a “firm foundation of unyielding despair”, emerged from the depressing events of his own life, and should not have been projected onto humanity. The sentiments he expressed from within his neurosis have nevertheless been accepted by materialist science, and have become the dominant philosophy of our times. Such, it would seem, is the strong appeal of atheism.

 

Footnotes:

(1) Spence Publishing Company, 1999

(2) The Free Man’s Worship, 1903, https://users.drew.edu/jlenz/br-free-mans-worship.html

(3) for what follows see pp26–28 and p110

(4) Vitz, p142. He is referring to Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude, 1872–1921, Free Press, 1996

(5) This was also the case with Freud, the subject of my previous article. Vitz had previously devoted a whole book to that topic, Sigmund Freud’s Christian Unconscious, in which he explores his fascination with Roman Catholicism. (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1988)

    Recently, Jack Preston King published a fascinating article on Medium.com entitled Is God Imagination? (1), in which he referred to a book Natural Supernaturalism by M. H. Abrams (2), subtitled Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. This was so inspiring that I’ve bought a copy of the book, and have decided to make a start on this new theme by doing a series of brief posts.

    In many books that I read, the author quotes poets, especially the Romantics, who display an extraordinary spiritual understanding; they were truly in touch with something profound. Of course, they are not restricted by the scientific method which measures and analyses, and which is dominated by intellectual thinking, the faculty of reason. They are free to exercise their intuition and imagination which, according to spiritual thinking, are higher faculties than the intellect.

    The poets who will feature in this series are therefore the Romantics — including Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge, Blake — W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and others.

    When I say ‘scientists’ in my title, I am referring to those addicted to the philosophy of materialism, thus ‘Enlightenment’ scientists. They tend to see their type of science as the only true knowledge, and are dismissive of anything outside their box. While accepting the importance and validity of the scientific method, I would nevertheless like to suggest that it reduces the scope of science by severely limiting the field of investigation to the material world. These scientists should therefore, instead of insisting that the material world is the only reality, accept that science is only one method of enquiry into the nature of reality amongst others which are also valid. The universe is far more complicated than materialism allows.

     I understand, of course, that not all modern scientists think in this way, and that a new paradigm is emerging. The materialist Enlightenment scientists that I am criticising therefore belong to an old paradigm, which is hopefully dying away.

    So here, to begin, is a striking passage from Wordsworth, writing about the incarnating soul, which is the beginning of stanza 5 from a poem with an extraordinary title: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:                                                                                                                                    The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,                                                                                                                                Hath had elsewhere its setting,                                                                                                                                                  And cometh from afar:                                                                                                                                                                    Not in entire forgetfulness,                                                                                                                                                              And not in utter nakedness,                                                                                                                                                            But trailing clouds of glory do we come                                                                                                                                      From God, who is our home:                                                                                                                                                        Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Footnotes:

(1) https://medium.com/@beyondtherobot/is-god-imagination-3430cde27c1a

(2) Norton Library, 1973

Paul C. Vitz: “What I attempt to do here is to show how Freud’s anti-religious beliefs and theories are to be understood as an expression of his own unconscious needs and traumatic childhood experiences. This explanation of Freud’s rejection of religion is not an interpretation restricted only to him; the analysis is general enough to have applicability to the motives of many who reject God today” (1).

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    This is a follow-up to The Psychology of Atheism, and it would be helpful if readers were familiar with its contents. If you wish to start here, however, I offer a brief summary.

    It was an exploration of Paul Vitz’s Faith of the Fatherless (2), where he noted that “various atheists do not bother to argue whether religious beliefs are true or false. Instead, they ask what motives would lead people to hold such beliefs” (p143). “Many atheists are famous for arguing that believers suffer from illusions, from unconscious and infantile needs, and from other psychological deficits” (p4). The argument is therefore about the underlying psychological motivations of the believers, and he points out that “this mode of inquiry is equally applicable to them and their ideas” (p143). He goes on to develop a theory to explain intense atheism, especially hostility to Christianity, that he calls the Defective Father Hypothesis. Noting that Christianity is distinctive in its presentation of God as a loving father figure, he traces the hostility towards God to events in the early lives of those concerned, thus their personal psychology. He gave several examples which I mentioned. However, his work on Freud, who is the best known name associated with the theory mentioned above, is so extensive that it is worthy of this separate article.

    Freud’s critique of religion can be found especially in the two books The Future of an Illusion and Totem and Taboo, but also elsewhere. He wrote that:

• “religion is a universal obsessional neurosis”, that “religious doctrines, psychologically considered, are illusions — that is, projections of infantile needs that comfort people unable to face suffering, uncertainty, and death” (3).
• religious beliefs are “illusion, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind”. He talks about “…the need for protection — for protection through love — which was provided by the father… Thus the benevolent rule of a divine Providence allays our fear of the dangers of life” (4).

    Freud is therefore “seen as a pessimistic free-thinker, an unrepentant atheist, a scientist-humanist, a skeptical realist” (p1). The main purpose of Vitz’s earlier book is, despite these unambiguous statements, to establish Freud’s unconscious  attraction to religion, specifically Roman Catholicism. This is very interesting, given his publicly professed atheism and hostility towards religion, but it is not directly relevant to my purpose here. While exploring this, however, Vitz reveals some fascinating biographical details relevant to his theme in Faith of the Fatherless, that intense atheism, especially strong hostility to Christianity, can be traced to rejection of the personal father.

    As his biographer Ernest Jones says “Freud has taught us that the essential foundations of character are laid down by the age of three and that later events can modify but not alter the traits then established” (5). It would therefore be interesting to have a look at the first three years of Freud’s life.

    Before considering the role of his father, which is more important for Vitz’s hypothesis, there are other traumatic circumstances in relation to his mother. “Freud must have found his mother, Amalia, relatively unavailable to him from the time he was a little under a year old until he was close to three years old” (p6). There were two pregnancies, two births, including a sick child who died. (Vitz believes that, because of these circumstances, Freud was deprived of proper breastfeeding.) As if this was not enough to occupy her time, it seems that she also worked in a warehouse.

    For all these reasons Freud, from early on, had a nanny or nursemaid named Resi Wittek, until he was at least two years and eight months old, although Vitz believes it was until he was three. She became his primary mother, and strongly influenced him, especially in matters of religion. Vitz says that he loved her “as only a young child can love”. She was then suddenly dismissed for theft, thus removed from his life; he was abandoned “at a most impressionable age”. He was later told that it was for stealing from him, which would have shocked him if he believed it (but that may not have been the real reason, see below). This was a “disappearance that he did not understand. Even if he had understood, it would have made little difference to his feeling of great loss” (p22). Having been neglected by his own mother, he had now been abandoned, possibly betrayed, by the substitute. Vitz concludes that Freud would have suffered from separation anxiety, and provides some evidence related to his phobia.

    Turning now to the main question, Vitz says that “in very fundamental ways, Freud rejected his father” (p36), who was a great disappointment to him. “Jakob was far from a business success. The poverty of Freud’s early years left a life-long mark on him. Apparently, Jakob lacked real energy and focused drive, since these characteristics did not show in his business (or elsewhere, for that matter)”. He was “not a strong and manly figure”. There was a move from Freiberg to Vienna which “must have been rather shocking”. “In Freiberg Jakob was the head of his own business, and was on a par with other Jewish businessmen… In Vienna, the situation was quite different… (He) was no longer an independent businessman… worked for others… he was not very successful”.

    Although it cannot be proved beyond doubt, there are strong reasons to believe that Freud’s mother Amalia was having an affair with her stepson Philipp (Jakob’s son), “and that Sigmund was a (literal) witness to it”. He may even have suspected that his stepbrother was the father of a new baby. If the evidence for the affair is not absolutely conclusive, even though it is strong, Vitz argues that it “was at least psychologically real for young Freud”, and strongly agrees with his source, the writer on Freud Marianne Krüll, “that the reason for the move from Freiberg was that Jakob learned of or began to suspect the affair between Amalia and Philipp. The move was thus motivated to a significant extent by the desire to put a stop to this liaison”. He was perhaps, therefore, unable to assert himself and demand a stop. This leads to “another interpretation of why the nanny was so suddenly fired”. She was “the one adult most likely to know about this affair” (6). There is therefore a suspicion that she may have been falsely accused of theft in order to get rid of her. If Freud were aware of this at any level, he would have thought of his father as plotting against him, removing the one he loved.

    The young Freud was therefore, in addition to being ‘abandoned’ by both his mothers and disappointed by his father, caught up in a family intrigue and scandal, and was powerless at his age to do anything about it. We can only speculate about his feelings, but deep pain and primal anger would be a reasonable conclusion.

    The essence of Vitz’s hypothesis, as outlined in Faith of the Fatherless and discussed in my previous article, is that circumstances such as these would unconsciously lead the victim towards atheism, i.e. hatred of the father-figure, the desire to kill him. This is indeed what happened to Freud. “The period of Freud’s academic studies… was a time of great enthusiasm for science — and enthusiasm permeated by an ideological commitment to materialism, rationalism, and determinism. (This ideological kind of science is known as ‘scientism’.) As a student and young scientist, Freud imbibed much of this attitude, and it was one that in important respects remained with him all his life”(p48). It never seems to have occurred to him, however, that this was an unconscious reaction to his early childhood.

    Having examined Freud’s early life, let’s have a look at the ideas that he developed later, the purpose being to show how the former influenced the latter. In general terms, Vitz thinks that this early biography “certainly helps to explain Freud’s persistent interest in sexuality in childhood, in great figures of ambiguous parentage, and in sexual conflict between father and son, as well as to shed light on Freud’s rejection of his father” (7).

    His best-known theory, the Oedipus complex, is worthy of examination in more detail. Its prominent features are a longing in a young boy for sexual union with the mother, and an unconscious desire to kill the father. Vitz interprets the latter personally in respect to Freud: “the central psychoanalytic concept of the Oedipus complex is one powerful expression of this rejection of his father” (p36). Furthermore, as we have seen, Freud had two mothers, the biological and the nanny. It is therefore interesting that Oedipus, his fundamental preoccupation, also had two mothers: his biological mother, Jocasta, and his functional mother, Merope. As noted above, Freud may have suspected, albeit incorrectly, that his named father was not his real father. “The tragedy Oedipus Rex itself focuses emphatically on the ambiguous parentage of Oedipus”. He is quoted: “My parents again! Wait: who are my parents?” (p27). Freud was also fascinated by Moses; Michelangelo’s statue was his favourite work of art, and his last book was Moses and Monotheism. Moses also had two mothers, a biological Hebrew, and a functional Egyptian princess. It is also interesting that his real mother was forced to abandon him because of a decree by the Pharaoh that “all male Hebrew babies were to be killed”, which may suggest one of Freud’s unconscious fears.

    It would be helpful if this theory had been developed on the basis of Freud’s observations in his clinical experience. I am not sure whether or not he claimed this to be the case. However, he journeyed into even more dubious territory when he developed a highly speculative, bizarre, and therefore controversial theory about early human societies in order to support his theory: “Freud elaborated a cultural-historical model of this complex in Totem and Taboo… proposed an Oedipal and totemic origin of religion”; he suggested an early stage of society as a primal horde (8).

    Vitz says that this model “is thoroughly rejected by anthropologists” because “there is simply no evidence”, referring specifically to the work of Wilhelm Schmidt. “No totemic theory — much less the Oedipal one — can account for the origin of religion. Freud’s theory of how religion arose is a kind of ‘just-so story’ ” (9). As Vitz had argued in his earlier book, far from being rooted in the ancient human psyche, “Freud’s Oedipus complex would have been derived from a very important core of his own childhood experience. It would have been his older half-brother Philipp — not some remote aborigine — who ‘first’ had the idea of sexually possessing the mother, and by implication of killing the father. And it is Philipp’s behavior that would have raised the Oedipal issue, not Freud’s unprimed unconscious of its own volition. Freud’s introduction to the primal group of sons hostile to the father (as in Totem and Taboo) would have been in his own family, when he was about three years old” (10).

    In Faith of the Fatherless, Vitz further exposes the weaknesses in Freud’s position in relation to religion. He points out that “because Freud is the author, somehow the findings of psychoanalysis are assumed to support the theory”. However, this is not the case: “His critical attitude towards and rejection of religion are rooted in his personal predilections, and his interpretation of religion… is not supported by specifically clinical concepts”. Freud is quoted accepting this, but nevertheless implies that “he is very familiar with the psychology of belief in God”, which is not the case: “He never presented publicly any serious psychological evidence for his projection theory or for his other ideas about religion” (pp9–10).

    Because his theories seem so obviously to be based on his personal psychology, Vitz argues that “Freud inadvertently developed a straightforward rationale for understanding the wish-fulfilling origin of the rejection of God. After all, the Oedipus complex is unconscious, it is established in childhood, and above all its dominant motive is hatred of the father (God) and the desire for him not to exist, something represented by the boy’s desire to overthrow or kill the father. Freud regularly described God as a psychological equivalent to the father, and so a natural expression of Oedipal motivation would be powerful, unconscious desires for the nonexistence of God. Therefore, in the Freudian framework, atheism is an illusion caused by the Oedipal desire to kill the father (God) and replace him with oneself. To act as though God does not exist reveals a wish to kill Him… The belief that ‘God is dead’, therefore, is simply an Oedipal wish-fulfillment — the sign of seriously unresolved unconscious motivation” (p13).

    At this point it is appropriate to mention the three authors John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York. In a recent post The Decline of Humanism, I criticized them for misrepresenting the Italian Renaissance as a revival of materialist ideas. I gave them the benefit of the doubt and wondered whether they were merely ignorant, or whether they were deliberately lying. (In a response on medium.com Jack Preston King assured me that they were lying!) In the same book, Critique of Intelligent Design (11), they praise Freud, obviously thinking that he is an authority who should be listened to. They repeat, and treat as truth the ‘primal horde’ theory from Totem and Taboo. Having said that Freud’s influences included Darwin, Haeckel, and J. G. Frazer who, I would say, are very dubious and controversial authorities, they then spend several pages outlining Freud’s theory, and conclude: “Although religion was always, for Freud, an illusion, i.e. a system of belief founded on wish-fulfillment, his history of this illusion in Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism led him to conclude that behind it lay a concrete ‘historical truth’ ” (p145). This ‘historical truth’ had been exposed by Vitz 20 years earlier as a fantasy emerging from Freud’s personal psychology, and as a just-so story. I would therefore suggest again that these authors are willing to clutch at any straws in order to advance their atheistic ideas.

    I’ll end up where I began by quoting Vitz’s preface: “The purpose of this book… is to show how the curious and sometimes traumatic events in the life of one small Jewish boy growing up in Central Europe over 100 years ago have cast a very long shadow over the religious life of the modern West” (Pxii).

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Afterthought

    None of the above prevented the BBC from producing a programme describing Freud as a genius of the modern world! (12) As I suggested in an earlier post, this can only have been because he was an atheist, not because he had any real claim to such praise. This just shows the way the world is going.

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Footnotes:

(1) Sigmund Freud’s Christian Unconscious, William B. Eerdmans, 1993, Preface, Pxii

(2) Spence Publishing, 2000

(3) quoted by Vitz, as (1), p1

(4) The Future of an Illusion, translated by J. Strachey, Norton, 1961, p30

(5) The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, Basic Books, 1953, p13

(6) as (1), see pp36–45

(7) as (1), p44

(8) as (2), p11

(9) ibid., p12–13

(10) as (1), p42

(11) Monthly Review Press, 2008

(12) first shown June 30th 2016

    This is the first in a series of posts, the purpose of which is to bring to readers’ attention the work of Paul Vitz (1). I hope that these will be an important contribution to the debate between religion and atheism, especially for those unfamiliar with his work. It is also a follow-up to my recent articles The Decline of Humanism, and The ‘Enlightenment’ — Where It Has Taken Us. My overall theme has been the modern trend towards atheism, and in the second of these articles I suggested that the prominent atheist intellectuals mentioned would benefit from psychotherapy in order to explore the source of their obvious severe depression. Vitz offers that therapy, although it was of course never asked for.

    He is an American Psychology Professor who has written two books relevant to my theme: Sigmund Freud’s Christian Unconscious (2) and Faith of the Fatherless, the Psychology of Atheism (3). They were published in 1988 and 1999, but it will suit my purposes to consider them in reverse order, since the second one deals in general terms with the issue. The first is a biography of Freud and a detailed critique of his atheism, which will be considered separately.

    In his preface Vitz notes that the presumption of atheism has become typical of modern life, and that this has been a very recent development: “Atheism… has been a central assumption of many modern ideologies and intellectual movements — communism, socialism, much of modern philosophy, most of contemporary psychology, and materialistic science” (Pxiii).

    “In particular, there seems to be a widespread assumption, throughout much of our intellectual community, that belief in God is based on all kinds of irrational, immature needs and wishes, whereas atheism or skepticism flows from a rational, grown-up, no-nonsense view of things as they really are” (Pxiv). Sigmund Freud is the best-known name associated with this theory.

    Vitz’s aim is to challenge the psychology of this viewpoint, pointing out that this same approach can also “be used to explain their unbelief” (p4). He develops what he calls the Defective Father Hypothesis. He notes that “Christianity is in many respects distinctive in its emphasis on God as a loving Father” (his italics, p7), and goes on to explain that those he calls intense atheists, especially those hostile to Christianity, have all suffered disappointment in their own fathers which unconsciously justifies their rejection of God.

    There are three categories:

• a dead father, one who dies before the child is born
• far more significant, one who dies while the child is alive, which is worst when it happens between the ages of three to five
• other reasons for resentment or extreme disappointment, for example abandonment, abusive behaviour, inadequacy etc.

    He focuses on philosophers and cites as examples of those fitting the first two categories: Nietzsche, David Hume, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Arthur Schopenhauer. As examples of those who had weak or abusive fathers, he mentions a further nine males, including Freud. He concludes: “Looking back at our thirteen major historical rejectors of a personal God, we find a weak, dead, or abusive father in every case” (p57).

    He then goes on to look at the childhoods of well-known believers from the same historical periods. He provides 21 examples who he says “make a very representative list of the prominent defenders of belief in God. These are many of the major theists from the seventeenth to the twentieth century”. Apart from one where biographical information is limited, the “list is one of clearly positive father-son relationships — or of good father-substitute-and-son relationships”. “There is only one case of serious estrangement, Kierkegaard’s, which was resolved in a way that provides direct support for the present hypothesis. Kierkegaard’s reconciliation with his father led the great Danish thinker to express an understanding of how the father complex is related to belief in God” (pp92–93).

    My own understanding of this phenomenon is as follows. The persons in question have experienced great pain, anger and frustration in relation to their fathers. This happens at a time in their lives when they, as young children, are completely powerless to do anything about it. These painful feelings remain but are suppressed, and in later life are displaced, redirected, and hit the wrong target (God the father-figure), in order to avoid having to face the pain of having been rejected. This whole process takes place in the unconscious.

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    Vitz believes that there are psychological differences between men and women on this issue. Because “for men, God seems to function primarily as a principle of justice and order in the world… we would expect… that men who become atheists will find a new absolute principle with which to order the world. Thus, we expect male atheists to be quite explicitly atheistic and to have a new ‘divinity’ that takes the intellectual place of God. As a consequence, atheistic men should be intense believers in such alternative principles as reason, science, progress, humanism, socialism, communism, or existentialism”. Vitz provides his own examples, but there are better ones which have emerged since he wrote. How about the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, or this recent book by Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress? This is almost a direct quote from Vitz, who also says: “Many atheists today are well known as believers in science: they treat science as a worldview or personal philosophy, not just as an important methodology and type of knowledge” (p110). Thus science has become for some a religion, in which they have faith at least as strong, and sometimes irrational, as believers in the various religions. This attitude is called  scientism.

    I said at the conclusion of a recent article: “ Humanism now means something like, in the absence of God humans taking centre stage, elevating humans to the status of gods, without having to take into account any higher powers”. Vitz says something similar: “Modern atheism has attempted to accomplish this (displace the father). Man, not God, is now the consciously specified ultimate source of goodness and power in the universe. Humanistic philosophies glorify him and his ‘potential’ in much the same way religion glorifies the Creator. … Man, through his narcissism and Oedipal wishes, has seated himself on the throne of God. Thanks to Freud, we may more easily understand the deeply illusory and thoroughly neurotic Oedipal psychology of unbelief” (p14).

Conclusion

    None of this, I hope it is clear, has anything to do with the question of whether God actually exists or not. It is merely interesting to note that the explanation for intense, vehement atheism seems to lie in the personal unconscious of those concerned. I am left wondering why atheism and its close relatives — existentialism, communism, materialistic science — have been so seductive, despite their many obvious flaws. Is it because the public have the same psychological issues as the influential figures they are so easily persuaded by?

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Footnotes:

(1) I first became aware of him through an excellent article on Medium, with the same title as mine, by Andrés Ruiz, who was himself referring to the subtitle of one of Vitz’s books.

(2) Hardback 1988, my copy is William B. Eerdmans, paperback, 1993

(3) Hardback 1999, my copy is Spence Publishing, paperback, 2000

    I’ve been inspired to put this article together by a recent brilliant poem by Jack Preston King on Medium (click here). I especially loved the line he chose by W. B. Yeats for his epigram: “The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper”. This suggests that there is a hidden world which most people with their everyday vision, including me, just can’t see. This hidden world is none the less real. I believe that its observable manifestations are what I would call paranormal events, and what Jack in his poem is calling magic.

    Someone whose vision is not restricted in this way would be called a clairvoyant, literally someone who can see clearly what is really going on. Here are some examples of people who seem to have been able to see this hidden world, or have been aware of its reality.

    I’ll begin with William Blake, whose art was inspired, contrary to what one might think, by actual experiences, not his imagination. The Blake expert Kathleen Raine says: “Such visualizations seem to have come from some intermediate realm… peopled by shifting forms and images”. “There is the suggestion of an interpenetration of worlds or modes of consciousness” (1).

    William Wordsworth seemed to understand all this in his famous poem: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood. This is the beginning of stanza 5: “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: the Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, hath had elsewhere its setting, and cometh from afar. Not in entire forgetfulness, and not in utter nakedness, but trailing clouds of glory do we come from God, who is our home. Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close upon the growing boy”.

    There is also Plato’s famous allegory of the cave, taken from his book The Republic. He compares the human condition to prisoners in a cave chained so that they can only look straight ahead of them and cannot turn their heads. All they can see is a wall onto which are projected shadows of figures who are in reality standing behind them. Since that is all they have known, they take these shadows to be reality, and do not understand that what they are seeing is something emanating from elsewhere, a byproduct of a different level of reality.

    So both Wordsworth and Plato use the image of either a prison or a prisoner to describe the perception of a normal adult. This is the human condition that Yeats was referring to above, a state in which our senses are not developed enough to see, and are therefore prevented from seeing, or according to Wordsworth have lost the ability to see, the hidden world beyond. (See the appendix below for a further, lengthier, example.)

    Jack Preston King and I are both engaged in a battle against materialist, naturalistic (i.e. atheistic) science. Scientists of that persuasion claim that they are the authorities, they know what is true, and mock foolish people who cling to ancient ‘superstitions’. They think that we should all have grown out of them following the so-called ‘Enlightenment’.

    I am currently writing a series of articles about Christianity, and have recently been reading a book by Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus Christ and Mythology (2). Although not a scientist himself, he talks like them, and makes many statements typical of them. I’ll choose just a couple. He rejects the conceptions of heaven/earth/hell, miracles, the intervention of supernatural powers in the course of events and the inner life of the soul, and possession by evil spirits. He says: “This conception of the world we call mythological because it is different from the conception of the world which has been formed and developed by science since its inception in ancient Greece and which has been accepted by all modern men. In this modern conception of the world the cause-and-effect nexus is fundamental”. “There are still many superstitions among modern men, but they are exceptions or even anomalies. Modern men take it for granted that the course of nature and of history, like their own inner life and their practical life, is nowhere interrupted by the intervention of supernatural powers”. (I am astonished by his supreme confidence, or should I say arrogance? On the contrary I – and I assume Jack Preston King – take it for granted that supernatural powers do intervene in everyday life. It is depressing, however, that Bultmann should be advocating the prison-house as the optimum mode of being.)

    From the perspective of this article, such scientists are trapped in the prison of their own minds, yet they actually celebrate this, arrogantly railing against those who have escaped the shades of the prison house, and seen the light.

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Appendix

    For one more example of someone who can really see, I can’t resist recounting my favourite story in the Bible, that of Elisha’s servant, found in the Second Book of Kings chapter 6. The situation is as follows. The king of Aram is at war with Israel, and makes various plans. Unfortunately for him Elisha seems to have clairvoyant abilities, and keeps warning the king of Israel about what the king of Aram is up to. Suspecting a traitor in his own ranks, he questions his officers, who tell him that there are no traitors, rather that “it is Elisha, the prophet in Israel, who tells the king of Israel the words that you speak in your bedchamber”. The king’s response is to send an elite force to surround the city where Elisha is staying. The next morning Elisha’s servant gets up, goes outside and sees the siege. Understandably perturbed, he calls out to him, “Oh no! Master! What will we do?” Elisha replies, “Stop being afraid, because there are more with us than with them!” Obviously the servant does not know what Elisha is talking about, so Elisha prays, asking the LORD, “Please make him able to really see!” And so when the LORD enabled the young man to see, he looked, and there was the mountain, filled with horses and fiery chariots surrounding Elisha!

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Footnotes:

(1) William Blake, Thames and Hudson, 1970, p178

(2) SCM Press, 1960 — the quotes which follow are on p15 and p16.

    What follows are relatively superficial reasons. I think that the issue goes much deeper, but that would be a topic for a later post. (But in the meantime there is a brilliant article on Medium by Andrés Ruiz The Psychology of Atheism.)

 

 

    According to Carl Jung, one of the main inspirations behind my thinking, human beings are naturally religious. This could also be stated in these terms: “There is a religious instinct in all human beings – an inherent striving towards a relationship with someone or something that transcends human power (a higher force or being)” (1). A similar sentiment was expressed by Helena Blavatsky, co-founder of the Theosophical Society: “It is one of the most undeniable facts of psychology, that the average man can as little exist out of a religious element of some kind, as a fish out of the water” (2). This instinct or striving is often closely associated with a desire for meaning in life. Thus Einstein has been quoted as saying: “If a man finds a satisfying answer to the question what is the meaning of his life, this man I would call religious” (3). (Let us note in passing that this is a very unspecific idea, not related to any deity, especially the Christian God.)

    Atheistically inclined scientists will of course reinterpret this idea and say that we are “hard-wired to believe”, and see this natural instinct as a gross error, a serious problem which they are fortunate to have overcome, and which others need to. Here, however, I’m going to turn this round and suggest that it might be the atheists who have the problem; why are they denying this natural (and true) instinct? If humans are naturally religious, why are so many people anti-religious?

    It may be something so simple as being told as children to believe things that are perceived to be ridiculous. Someone I know from a Roman Catholic upbringing remembers thinking it was all “mumbo-jumbo”. Adults may find it strange to see others still believing these ideas with such conviction.

    Along these lines, an interesting case is that of the French existentialist writer Simone de Beauvoir, who at age fourteen, having had a religious upbringing, suddenly decided that she was an atheist, a decision which stayed with her for the rest of her life, influencing her whole career. It is reasonable to ask whether at that age her powers of judgement were fully developed; after all she wouldn’t even have been allowed to vote in elections. It is an interesting example of how consciousness can become gripped by contents of the mind.

    People may have suffered in their childhoods, had bad experiences at the hands of a particular Church. This is perhaps most commonly associated with Roman Catholicism (sexual abuse by priests, beatings, the Magdalene Laundries/Asylums and so on), but is not unheard of in other churches. Violent physical beatings used to take place in camps associated with the Church of England, although not organised by it (4), and, at the time of writing an enquiry has just found that it was involved in a cover-up of sexual abuse (5). Also, in Jeanette Winterson’s (at least partly) autobiographical novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, a Pentecostal Church subjects teenage girls to exorcisms in order to free them from their lesbian tendencies. Even if people have not experienced such horrors themselves, they may be put off when hearing such stories, especially when they hear that the abuses have been covered up by the organisations concerned. It may not be easy to separate the ideas they stand for from the organisations’ behaviour.

    An interesting example was the appearance of the comedian Jimmy Carr on Desert Island Discs (6). It wasn’t stated whether he had had such experiences himself, but as the one song he would save he chose I’ll Follow You into the Dark by Death Cab for Cutie. He described it as an “atheist hymn”. Here is a relevant verse:

    ‘In Catholic school, as vicious as Roman rule, I got my knuckles bruised by a lady in black.  And I held my tongue, as she told me “Son, fear is the heart of love”. So I never went back’.

    Interestingly Kirsty Young had earlier asked him “When did you start having doubts about Catholicism?” rather than, say, doubts about God or religion. Just because one religion is perceived to be at fault does not say anything about religious ideas in general, or whether God exists, or about spiritual truths.

    Another commonly stated reason for rejecting religion is that in the past appalling violence has been committed in its name – wars, torture, brutal execution of heretics. While agreeing that this is appalling and delusional, it still has to be pointed out that what is appalling is the human behaviour, which has nothing whatsoever to do with the truth or otherwise of religious/spiritual beliefs. All true religion seeks an end to such violence.

    Among my circle of acquaintances there are those who cannot stand any mention of religion. Such a response does not make the dislike of religion valid, even if the person concerned thinks so. This reaction is very similar to a phobia. There is nothing inherently frightening about closed spaces (claustrophobia), open spaces (agoraphobia), spiders (arachnophobia) and so on, yet certain people have extreme psychological reactions in these circumstances. In order to understand the underlying causes and be cured they might choose to seek help from a psychotherapist. It would perhaps be more appropriate to do the same in cases of a phobia of religion, rather than assume the validity of the response.

    The reasons I have offered above are relatively superficial, so I’ll try now to dig a little deeper and suggest what my hypothetical psychoanalysis might uncover. The first thing to say is that an over-the-top abusive attitude often conceals unconscious fear. (This is similar to the well-known phenomenon of projection, where we react to, protest against something in the outside world because we cannot acknowledge it in ourselves.) So the denial of religion, or the supernatural, masks a fear of it.

    What exactly are people afraid of? Humans are attached to freedom, the need to feel in control. They also fear the suggestion of supernatural agencies. Carl Jung was very aware of this problem:

    “A man likes to believe that he is the master of his soul”.

    “The one thing we refuse to admit is that we are dependent upon ‘powers’ that are beyond our control”.

    “Consciousness naturally resists anything unconscious and unknown”. (7)

    Yet the irrational forces do not disappear merely through being denied. As one of his followers Aniela Jaffé says: “Whether known or unknown, it is the hidden operator behind our lives… Called or uncalled, affirmed or denied, the god will be present” (8). This is very similar to an inscription Jung had over the door of his house in Zurich: ‘Whether summoned or not, God will be present’ (Vocatus atque non vocatus, Deus aderit). I will take the liberty of rephrasing this: God (or, if you prefer, the Supernatural) exists, whether people believe or not. Wanting something to be true does not make it true.

    If people deny religion because they are afraid of it (while remaining unconscious that this is what they are doing), then the next question is why religion, or the term I prefer spirituality, is perceived to be so frightening. After all, one of the main accusations by atheists is that believers seek false comfort in religion. That’s a question that I may come back to in a future post.

Footnotes:

1. http://www.philosophyzer.com/jung-on-religion/                                                                                                    2. Isis Unveiled, volume II, Theosophical University Press, 1972, p25                                                                        3. Quoted by Victor Frankl in Beyond Reductionism, Arthur Koestler and J. R. Smythies (eds), Hutchinson, 1969, p419                                                                                                                                                                                  4. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/02/justin-welby-church-england-john-smyth-abuse-claims                                                              5. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jun/23/child-abuse-church-of-england-peter-ball-archbishop                                                                                                                                                                      6. BBC radio4 5/3/2017, repeated 10/3/17, available as a podcast                                                                              7. Jung, Carl Gustav: Man and His Symbols, 1964 this edition 1978, Picador, pp 72,70, 17                                        8. The Myth of Meaning, Penguin, 1975, p93

 

 

 

    In another post I have criticised the BBC’s presentation of science (The BBC and Science). Here is some further related material on the subject of modern culture.

    BBC2 broadcast a series of three programmes entitled Genius of the Modern World, which was presented by Bettany Hughes (1). The three figures deemed to be worthy of this extravagant compliment were Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. I don’t know if they were her personal choice or the channel’s, but the decision was interesting. We have one figure whose economic and political theories have never been successful – when any society tries to implement them and “liberate the proletariat”, the most frequent outcome seems to be that a dictatorship ends up killing and repressing the human rights of the very people it sought to liberate. The second was someone who ended up mad – it is interesting to speculate whether he was ever sane (see below). The third was someone who, despite making some important breakthroughs, was not interested in scientific truth, rather in asserting his authority over his associates and students, trying to establish his highly debatable (false?) ideas as dogma. They tended, unsurprisingly, to desert him, the most famous example being Carl Jung, but almost equally significant are Alfred Adler, Otto Rank, and also worthy of mention are Wilhelm Reich and Roberto Assagioli.

    So why were these three chosen? Surely not because they were geniuses (albeit very influential) (2). The only thing they have in common, as far as I can see, is that they were all vociferous atheists! Marx is famous for saying “Religion is the opium of the people”. Nietzsche is equally famous for saying “God is dead”, but went on to assume the role of prophet of his own religion (Zarathustra is a thin disguise for him). In psychotherapeutic language he suffered from a severe ego-inflation (the archetype of the Self – the God-image in man – was denied and repressed and, remaining unconscious, was therefore free to wreak havoc); it is therefore no surprise that he went mad. Freud has variously described religion as a neurosis, thus a psychological illness, an infantile delusion, or wish-fulfilment.

    If the “modern world” is defined, as these programmes suggest, by its commitment to atheism, then it would seem that the modern world has passed its sell-by date, and it is time to move on to the next phase of the evolution of human consciousness, namely a return to spirituality. It is not clear yet who the new “genius” of politics and economics might be. In philosophy I would offer the figure of A. N. Whitehead, arguably the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century, although sadly neglected (presumably because he was not an atheist!). In Freud’s field of psychology and psychotherapy the obvious candidate for the title of “Genius of the Modern World” was and remains Carl Jung.

Footnotes:

1. June 16/23/30-2016, repeated April 26, May 3/10-2017

2. After all, as Andrew Marr said on Radio4’s Start the Week 3/7/2017, “if you go back a hundred years, I suppose there were three great ideas; there was Freudianism, there was Marxism, and there was Darwinism. (So Nietzsche doesn’t even get a mention.) And really Darwinism is the only one that has thrived and grown stronger in the intervening period”.