The Psychology of Atheism

On Freud, religion, atheism, and wish-fulfillment

dEmilio Zaldivar (2012)

The ordinary man cannot imagine this Providence in any other form
but that of a greatly exalted father, for only such a one could
understand the needs of the sons of men, or be softened by their
prayers and placated by the signs of their remorse.
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

The Freudian psychoanalytic analysis of religion is an attempt to

explain religious belief as a form of wish-fulfillment and of satisfying
an underlying desire for a father figure. These ideas, commonly
characterized together as the security blanket concept of religion,
are common claims made by many prominent atheists today, claims
that deserve to be seriously examined.

What I aim to show is that if belief in a God is indeed a mere comfort

blanket for believers around the world, then, by the atheists own
criteria, atheism itself has deep psychological roots that manifest
themselves in the atheists rejection of the divine. Let me be clear: I
am not claiming that the security blanket concept of religion is false;
nor will I argue here that its converse, that atheism itself is a form of
wish-fulfillment, is true. Instead, my purpose is to show that if you
accept the security blanket concept of religion, then accepting it can
only be done on the basis of embracing certain Freudian
psychoanalytic ideas, and if you accept those, then, by Freuds own
criteria, you must then accept that atheism is also a form of wish-
fulfillment: in this case, atheism stems from the subconscious desire
to kill the father figure.

Once again, to avoid misunderstanding, I am not arguing that the

claim atheism is a psychological form of wish fulfillment is true. I
dont think it is. I am instead arguing that the conditional claim If you
think religious beliefs are a form of wish fulfillment, then you must
also believe, upon pain of inconsistency, that atheism is as well.
Failure to appreciate this subtler point will lead to confusion about
the aims of this post, so it is absolutely crucial to clarify it from the
outset.
I do not find psychological explanations for religious belief to be
helpful or useful when what were interested in are questions about
the truth or falsity of religious claims. Further, I do not think we have
much, if anything, of value to learn from Freud on the matter. Its
puzzling then to find skeptics and atheists invoking Freudian ideas
about the source of religious belief meanwhile relegating him to the
realm of pseudoscience in other matters.

The argument that religion is a projection of our subconscious

desires into the world originates from the writings of Ludwig
Feuerbach in his book The Essence of Christianity. Feuerbach
argued that:

What man misseswhether this be an articulate and therefore

conscious, or an unconscious, needthat is his God.

He further claimed that:

Man projects his nature into the world outside himself before he
finds it in himself.

And that:

To live in projected dream-images is the essence of religion.

Religion sacrifices reality to the projected dream.

The essence of his teaching is that humanity constructed its own

religious ideals for its own convenience and consolation. However, it
wasnt until Sigmund Freuds The Future of an Illusion that this view
gained wide popularity. Freud notes that:

Religious ideas have arisen from the same needs as have all the
other achievements of civilization: from the necessity of defending
oneself against the crushing superior force of nature.

Therefore, religious beliefs are:

Illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes

of mankind. As we already know, the terrifying impression of
helplessness in childhood aroused the need for protectionfor
protection through lovewhich was provided by the father. Thus
the benevolent rule of a divine Providence allays our fear of the
danger of life.

The first thing one should note when one reads Freud is that this is
an instance of the genetic fallacy. Put in more formal terms, Freuds
argument goes like this:

(1) The development of the human mind through natural history has
provided those minds with a number of special properties.
(2) When considering the natural and social world, these properties
encourage humans to believe in gods.
(3) Therefore, the development of human minds has produced belief
in gods (i.e., God).
(4) Therefore, belief in gods is false, as it is an accident of evolution.

This type of reasoning aims to argue for the truth or falsity of a belief
simply from considerations about the origin of the belief itself. But, of
course, perfectly true beliefs can emerge even from crazy sources.
To see why this line of reasoning is flawed, imagine telling someone
that you believe democracy is the best system of government. The
person youre talking to, however, replies that the only reason you
believe that is because you were born in a democratic country.
Therefore, he or she concludes, democracy is not the best system of
government. This line of reasoning is obviously problematic.
Democracy can still be the best system of government despite the
fact that the only reason you believe that is due to where you were
born.

Once we grant this it becomes easier to see why its equally

fallacious when we invoke it to answer questions about God. One
quick point on this should suffice, as Michael Murray notes:

Lets look at the argument again, taking out the underlined word
Gods and replacing it with any of the following: human minds,
rocks, rainbows, the past, that science can discover the truth, etc.
Surely the conclusion of the argument in each case seems wrong.
Human minds naturally form beliefs in those things and in doing so,
we think, they get things right. So why not conclude that they get
things right when it comes to belief in God? What makes this case
different? One could say: Well, because religious belief is false.
But that is not much of an argument, it just begs the question.

So, we can see that Freuds argument doesnt get us any closer to
answering the metaphysical question of Gods existence. At most,
what he has engaged with is religious epistemology, that is, he has
at most explained how it is that we could have acquired a belief in a
God. But he hasnt actually done anything to show why belief in the
existence of God isnt warranted, and neither has he shown that
Gods existence is improbable or impossible. He has simply started
out with the assumption that God does not exist, and proceeded to
argue full circle until he came back to his starting assumption.

However, even if we ignore his fallacious reasoning, isnt it possible

that belief in God really is caused by a longing for a father figure?
After all, many people admit that their belief gives them strength;
that without God, their lives would crumble and lose all meaning.

Is Life Absurd Without God?

Exploring the concept of ultimate significancearcdigital.media

So it seems as if there is some truth to what Freud observed.

Yet, we can ask, is it possible that atheism itself comes from a deep,
unconscious childish desire?

Faith of the Fatherless, by Paul Vitz.

The psychologist Paul Vitz argues yes.

One of the central concepts in Freuds work is the so-called Oedipus

complex. In psychoanalytic theory, the Oedipus complex is a group
of largely unconscious (dynamically repressed) ideas and feelings
which center around the desire to possess the parent of the opposite
sex and eliminate the parent of the same sex.

Here are the essential features:

Roughly in the age period of three to six the boy develops a strong
sexual desire for the mother. At the same time the boy develops an
intense hatred and fear of the father, and a desire to supplant him, a
craving for power. This hatred is based on the boys knowledge that
the father, with his greater size and strength, stands in the way of
his desire. The childs fear of the father may explicitly be a fear of
castration by the father, but more typically, it has a less specific
character. The son does not really kill the father, of course, but
patricide is assumed to be a common preoccupation of his fantasies
and dreams. The resolution of the complex is supposed to occur
through the boys recognition that he cannot replace the father, and
through fear of castration, which eventually leads the boy to identify
with the father, to identify with the aggressor, and to repress the
original frightening components of the complex. According to Freud,
the Oedipus complex is never truly resolved, and is capable of
activation at later periodsalmost always, for example, at puberty.
Thus the powerful ingredients of murderous hate and of incestuous
sexual desire within a family context are never in fact removed.
Instead, they are covered over and repressed. Freud expresses the
neurotic potential of this situation: The Oedipus complex is the
actual nucleus of neuroses. What remains of the complex in the
unconscious represents the disposition to the later development of
neuroses in the adult.
In short, all human neuroses derive from this complex. Obviously, in
most cases, this potential is not expressed in any seriously neurotic
manner. Instead it shows up in attitudes toward authority, in dreams,
slips of the tongue, transient irrationalities, etc.

Vitz argues that:

In postulating a universal Oedipus complex as the origin of all our

neuroses, Freud inadvertently developed a straightforward rationale
for understanding the wish-fulfilling origin of rejecting God. After all,
the Oedipus complex is unconscious, it is established in childhood
and, above all, its dominant motive is hatred of the father and the
desire for him not to exist, especially as represented by the 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
and replace him with oneself. To act as if God does not exist is an
obvious, not so subtle disguise for a wish to kill Him, much the same
way as in a dream, the image of a parent going away or
disappearing can represent such a wish: God is dead is simply an
undisguised Oedipal wish-fulfillment.

Vitz goes on to argue that the Oedipal dream is not only to kill the
father and possess the mother or other women in the group, but to
also displace him, and we can see evidence of this in humanistic
philosophies that place man at the top and as the sole arbiter of
what is good and evil.

Of course, not all humanistic philosophies elevate man; for example,

Peter Singer is an atheist and he argues vehemently that any
attempt to elevate man above the animals is speciecism that must
be done away with. Yet one can see the outcome of this desire to
replace the father figure and put man at the top in many non-theistic
religions and secular philosophies. Much of Vitzs scholarly work has
been on this psychoanalytic theory of atheism, which he calls: The
theory of the defective father.

One should note that it was Freud, not Vitz, who made the
connection between ones father and God. Freud wrote:

Psychoanalysis, which has taught us the intimate connection

between the father complex and belief in God, has shown us that
the personal God is logically nothing but an exalted father, and daily
demonstrates to us how youthful persons lose their religious belief
as soon as the authority of the father breaks down.

Vitz comments that:

Freud makes the simple easily understandable claim that once a

child or youth is disappointed in and loses his or her respect for their
earthly father, then belief in their heavenly Father becomes
impossible. There are, of course, many ways that a father can lose
his authority and seriously disappoint a child. Some of these ways
for which clinical evidence is given beloware:
1) He can be present but obviously weak, cowardly, and unworthy of
respecteven if otherwise pleasant or nice.
2) He can be present but physically, sexually, or psychologically
abusive.
3) He can be absent through death or by abandoning or leaving the
family.

In order for his hypothesis to work, Vitz must find instances in the
lives of many prominent atheists in which they expressed their
dislike, hatred, or talked about the absence of their fathers in their
homes, and Vitz finds many such examples in the lives of some of
the biggest names in the history of atheism. I will not cover all of
them for the sake of brevity, but a few should suffice:

Karl Marx made it clear that he didnt respect his father. An

important part in this was that his father converted to Christianity
not out of any religious convictionbut out of a desire to make life
easier. He assimilated for convenience. In doing this Marxs father
broke an old family tradition. He was the first in his family who did
not become a rabbi; indeed, Karl Marx came from a long line of
rabbis on both sides of his family.
Ludwig Feuerbachs father did something that very easily could have
deeply hurt his son. When Feuerbach was about 13, his father left
his family and openly took up living with another woman in a
different town. This was in Germany in the early 1800s and such a
public rejection would have been a scandal and deeply rejecting to
young Ludwigand, of course, to his mother and the other children.
Let us jump 100 years or so and look at the life of one of Americas
best-known atheistsMadalyn Murray OHair. Here I will quote from
her sons recent book on what life was like in his family when he was
a child. The book opens when he is 8-years old: We rarely did
anything together as a family. Hatred between my grandmother and
mother barred such wholesome scenes. He writes that he really
didnt know why his mother hated her father so muchbut hate him
she did, for the opening chapter records a very ugly fight in which
she attempts to kill her father with a 10-inch butcher knife. Madalyn
failed but screamed, Ill see you dead. Ill get you yet. Ill walk on
your grave!
The names are many: Baron dHolbach (orphan by the age of 13),
Bertrand Russell (father died when he was 4 years old), Friedrich
Nietzsche (lost his father at 4 years of age), Jean-Paul Sartre (father
passed away before his birth), and Albert Camus (1 year old when
his father passed away).

Of course, much more evidence would be needed in order to

provide strong credence to this theory, but the point is absolutely
clear: if belief in God is nothing more than a desire for a father
figure, then atheism is nothing more than a desire to kill that father
figure.

Finally, there is also the early personal experience of suffering, of

death, of evil, sometimes combined with anger at God for allowing it
to happen. Any early anger at God for the loss of a father and the
subsequent suffering is still another and different psychology of
unbelief, but one closely related to that of the defective father.

This could apply to some atheists, whereas to some other atheists, it

may have nothing at all to do with their childhoods. But this is just
the same as the claim that belief in God is a desire for a father
figure, or a desire for a comfort blanket.

Many people have no such desire; many actually find that religion
makes life not easier, but rather introduces a dynamic to life that
consists of obligations toward others, guidelines which no person
would willingly choose to impose upon themselves, some of which
include restrictions and limitations on ones sex life, dietary habits,
etc. You cannot have a one-size-fits-all description of why belief in
God arises, but once psychologists and atheists undertake the
project of theorizing and speculating on the sources of such belief,
one can find that those very same theories can account for the origin
of a rebelliousness and rejection of that divine figure and alleged
source of authority.

As the theologian Alister McGrath comments:

Feuerbach argued that humanity constructed its own religious ideals

for its convenience and consolation; in Milozs argument, we can
see the recognition that both belief in God and a refusal to believe in
God are themselves the result of human longings; the former a
consolation and a longing for immortality, and the latter a longing for
autonomy and a lack of accountability. Both are opiums of the
people, different groups of people, but both needing their respective
opiums.

Ultimately, this type of psychological theorizing proves nothing. The

philosophical question of Gods existence cannot be solved by
examining how we ourselves come to believe or disbelieve in some
form of deity. What books like these do show is that none of us is
free from deep psychological influences that can sway our
dispositions to either believe or disbelieve.

The best we can do is engage in honest self-reflection of our

underlying motivations and attempt to judge the evidence on its own
merits.