The Psychology of Christianity 3.3

Science has conquered one field after another, until now it is entering the most complex, the most inaccessible, and, of all, the most sacred domain—that of religion.
E D Starbuck, The Psychology of Religion (1899)

Psychology and Religion—Conclusion
Pros and Cons of Christianity

Abstract

Why do people believe? The question is one of psychology. Is belief an assortment of psychological delusions, differing from the psychological delusions of other religions only in cultural details? William James explained psychology as looking into our minds and reporting of feelings, cognitions, reasonings. Belief involves these and so is a legitimate subject for psychological enquiry. But one has to take care who is enquiring. A Christian will not give honest inquiry at all but Christian apologetics. Children brought up with no religion at all can be astonished by the bizarre rituals of their religious cousins, something the Christian indoctrinated into these habits from infancy cannot comprehend. Religion is a social phenomenon, forced on to people by society as a convention, using psychological methods usually from an early age. Christianity is fed infants with their mothers’ milk. They have no choice in the matter. That is indoctrination.

Psychology and Religion: Conclusion

If the psychologist can explain all the facts of the religious consciousness by scientific laws then there is no psychological proof of God’s presence and influence in our lives.
Professor J B Pratt

Religion can be explained by normal psychology. If religious people think that is not true, that psychology is inadequate to explain religion, then they must show why they think so. They must offer evidence, but Christians have a great problem with evidence. They do not need it themselves, so find it difficult understanding why anyone else does. Essentially belief is wish fulfilment butressed by certain psychological phenomena that are sufficient for the uneducated and uncomprehending sheep. Christians claim some benefits from religion, and there are some, but they go on to say that therefore it is true. There is evil in the world, explained by the Devil, but broadly it seems pleasant, so it must be made by a benevolent God. That is nice and easy and they can understand it, but it is not true. Evolution makes our relationship with the world a necessity, not God, but it is far too difficult for most Christians to understand. The ones that can understand it are often paid by the religion directly or indirectly, and so will not admit it, or are even paid to present flimsy contrary “evidence” that the sheep lap up, even though it is baseless.

The wish for a God the Father, a father figure for grown up children, and the hope to be a god, immortalized by the supposed afterlife, are wishes that religion claims to fulfil on the basis of an ancient myth, but for which there is otherwise not a jot of proof. That, though, to Thouless is not proof they are not true! And it is not, but it is evidence, and to believe something is true because it has not been proven false would mean that Christians ought to believe many things that are utterly abhorent to them. Islam claims to be a further revelation beyond Christianity, and what proof is there that it is false? if there is none, Christians ought to believe it, if their belief in their own religion is a general principle. It would be better if it were for all religions because then religionists would not be trying to kill each other but would be obliged to accept each other’s views.

Out of loyalty to Christianity, his faith, Thouless, though a scientist, avoids the scientific question entirely. Why is God and the supernatural needed when natural and mental pshonmena can be adequately explained without them? Are we to pander to ignorance?

That much of religious experience comes from the well established phenomenon of autosuggestion, Thouless dismisses because autosuggestions are not necessrily false! Nor are they, but they often are and are far from usually true. Of course, autosuggestion might motivate useful behaviour, and doubtless often is harmless behavior, but sometimes it is unquestionably wrong, or it is if you do not have a warped outlook. Suggesting that children are sinful to make them overwhelmed with guilt cannot be right. Only warped Christians can believe it is. The truth of notions fed to people by suggestion or by autosuggestion in prayers and hymns ought to be impecable, and that truth has to be established before experiments are made on children’s minds. That applies to religion and drugs to control children’s behaviour. Suggestion and autosuggestion explain why people believe. Supernatural reasons are just superfluous.

The sense of something coming from outside, being revealed or given, comes from the incubation of thoughts and feelings in the subconscious. The mind works on things subliminally. Problems can be solved by sleeping on them. Solutions come to the prepared mind. There is a mass of evidence that the subconscious mind deals with problems unknown to the thinker. The same is true of emotional problems and conflicts, and when the subconscious produces a solution, it is often a eureka moment. It seems to come by revelation, and revelation is an appropriate metaphor for it. The difficulties are juggled in various ways in the mind until sooner or later the right pattern presents itself and the solution can be seen. It is called gestalt. Alternatively an emotional tension might be released, as it is in the conversion experience. Either way, the sense of given is because it has emerged from the subconsious perfectly formed. That looks divine. Sometimes the psychology gets distinctly abnormal as in the case of many mystics, and then they hear voices and see visions that seem real.

The supposedly outside origin of religious experiences may reasonably be explained in the same way… Where the mystic postulates God, the psychologist need only postulate the subconscious.
R H Thouless.

The difference between God and the subconscious is that there is evidence for the latter. Thouless will not give up his belief in God but admits that the “givenness” of religious experience is no evidence of Him. Those who believe it are “unreflecting people who do not argue about their experiences at all”.

He means that a small degree of reflexion shows that the outcome of these experiences is not always good, so how can God be considered responsible for them. As a minor example, recall the “born again” who loved everyone but would not walk on the same pavement with them. The result is too often pride, smugness, self-righteousness, and the rest of that complex of back-slapping superiority that the Christian god in the bible said condemned people to the back of the queue for salvation because they were not humble! Too bad for their salvation that Christians believe their Satanic ministers and do not read their bibles themselves. Swanking about being saved is not the way to do it. If these experiences were from outside, then they must be—as Spurgeon said about revivalist hysteria—from the Devil. Thouless concludes:

We have no reason for supposing we shall be able to found a satisfactory apologetic on religious experience alone.

It is true that all hypotheses are corrigible and not absolute, but they are based on observable things in reality. Theology and metaphysics are purely speculation, and can only get beyond it by testing their conclusions. They cannot be tested on metareality so the tests have to be their consequences for reality. In other words, they must be tested like anything in Nature on Nature. There is nothing else accessible to us to test anything on. Thouless himself tried an old test of metareality by devising a code and a message in it to carry with him to his grave. His idea was that he would appear to someone and tell them the solution. He has been dead for several decades and no one has yet claimed the prize for solving the coded message. Houdini and others have done the same, but none have been solved. That is a test in reality of metaphysics and of theology and they failed it.

If the explanation is that these alternative realities are not accessible to us then religion is condemned because it claims revelations from them. Otherwise they are pure conjecture with no basis of truth one way or another. On the basic thesis of science that nothing should be accepted unless demonstrated, these other realities cannot be accepted. They might be there somewhere but we cannot know about them so they are irrelevant to our existence. They might be right, but then so might some other alternative and incompatible conjecture. No one can tell, and yet people hate and kill each other over these absurd indistinguishable distinctions. There is no criterion of truth for them. Science has a criterion of truth and there is none better. If the scientific criterion is inadequate for religion then nothing is adequate for it. In such a situation the sensible thing is to opt for the best. That is science.

Evidence might be brought forward against the belief in God but the religious man could reply there was a chance (however small it might appear) that he was right, and on the strength of this chance and by the demands of his passional nature, he intended to regulate his life on the assumption that the religious hypothesis was the true one.
R H Thouless

Thouless is at least honest if this is the basis of his belief, but it ought not to be good enough for a scientist. Scientists do not accept things on the basis of incalculably tiny possibilities, but rather begin with skepticism about such things precisely to exclude the unlikely from pressing into their time and wasting it. Nor should this argument be good enough for anyone religiously inclined because it is a gamble, and not even a good one, and religious folk have always set themselves against gambling as irresponsible and ungodly. A great scientist, Einstein, said God does not play dice, but evidently Christians think He does! Moreover, anyone who nevertheless based their life on this argument with its low possibility of success, ought to be more circumspect about foisting this weakly held belief on to others.

Thouless ends up justifying his unscientific belief on the ground that it rationalises experiences. Yet the experiences discussed in his book are all capable of a full explanation by psychology without any recourse to God. The myth of God might rationalize all of the experiences he discusses but it is not needed and it is no good. He even claims that the rationalization is validated because it explains more than one type of experience:

When different experiences covering a wide range of rationalizations, which are all essentially the same, the probability of error is less.

It is absurd and fallacious. The hypothesis of God explains everything, and at one time when religion was all powerful, it did in practice. Strange that it coincided with the times of utmost misery in the depths of the Dark Ages. God is not an explanation. You might as well say the hypothesis of Humpty Dumpty explains everything. It explains nothing.

If there were extra-human sources of knowledge and superhuman sources of human power, their existence should, it seems, have become increasingly evident. Yet the converse is apparently true. The supernatural world of the savage has become a natural world to civilized man. The miraculous of yesterday is the explicable of to-day. In religious lives accessible to psychological investigation, nothing requiring the admission of superhuman influences has been found. There is nothing… not a desire, not a feeling, not a thought, not a vision, not an illumination, that can seriously make us look to transcendent causes.
Leuba, A Psychological Study of Religion

Any supernatural figure can be invented to do something but it is an invention, not an explanation. Thouless has shown that the facts of religion, whether personal or social, can be explained without needing God. He tries to preserve God by the usual Christian special pleading. His emotional desperation is plain and surely sad for it is not clever desperation. All it demonstrates is the power of religious conviction, usually brought on by childhood indoctrination, to hold people against all reason. Religion is a neurosis that society does not consider pathological, and the reason is that it has obvious political value.

Pros and Cons of Christianity

Christians claim they make people better, meaning more socially adjusted. The evidence on this is mixed, perhaps because it is true only of some people. The church constantly emphasises that its devotees are servants or, properly, slaves of God, and Marx saw in this a deliberate attempt to reduce worshippers’ self-esteem. The aim is to make the believer think of themselves as dependent. Freud saw religious belief as a refusal to face reality, and its substitution for reality of a fantasy means that believers are less sure, more dependent, less adequate and less assertive in real life, whilst being prone to guilt and anxiety. Only in missionary mode do they recover their confidence.

The evidence, however, especially among older people registers benefits too. Regular church attenders often have better physical health and are less suicidal than the average. Partly, this is because they are less inclined to use abusive substances like cigarettes, alcohol and drugs. Mutual support among church members—the community aspect—is also a positive influence of religion. Against these, religious devotion leads to a narrowing of perspective, appearing as authoritarianism and dogmatism.

C W Ellison (1983) considers that spiritual health leads to feeling “generally alive, purposeful, and fulfilled”, but must be accompanied by psychological health. Spiritual Well-being (SWB) is “the affirmation of life in a relationship with God, self, community and environment that nurtures and celebrates wholeness”. Some Christian psychologists are trying to inveigle such non-scientific ideas into therapy, but such as A E Bergin (1991), and E H Cadwallader (1991) caution that the relationship between religion and mental health is complex and mixed, and that religion can be unhealthy.

Nor can greater suggestibility be considered as beneficial. Nor is it beneficial that religious attitudes detract from acceptance of scientific discoveries, a factor perhaps dependent itself on dogmatism and suggestibility. Nor can the feelings of discomfort over sex, and the concomitant feelings of anxiety and inadequacy. Religion serves a social function in keeping people disciplined, restrained and set on longer term objectives rather than immediate gratification, a clear conflict with modern marketing methods. The church offers a long term way of life that people can commit themselves to, but non- or quasi-religious world views, like Adelphiasophism, can do the same with the possibility of less psychological harm, and the absurdity of having to accept ancient and inappropriate rule books like the bible.

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Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.