The Varieties & Illusions of Religious Experience: Chapter 2, The Future of an Illusion

i.
In 1927 Sigmund Freud published his definitive analysis of religious belief. The Future of an Illusion is a short book but it represents the most powerful distillation of Freud's thought concerning religious belief and its origins.

As we noted in our last post, biological accounts regarding the function of religious belief provide us with interesting theories about how the human mind might have evolved to become religious. But despite the plausibility of these biological accounts they fail to explain how psychologically vital religious belief can be. That is, these theories might provide cogent accounts concerning the rise and spread of proto-religious ideas but they fail to explain why this raw material gets worked up into the psychological, existential, ethical and metaphysical edifice known as religion. Some extra impulse, beyond the biological accounts, is needed. Some motive force is required to grow and expand religious belief beyond primitive and nascent speculations about where we "go" after death.

In The Future of an Illusion Freud attempts to provide this supplemental account. As with the biological accounts, the focus is on the function of religious belief. But now the functions are psychological. Freud's essay attempts to explain how religious belief might perform a specific kind of psychological function in the minds of religious believers. If we can specify and analyze this function we might be in a better place, according to Freud, to evaluate the origins and nature of religious belief. We might discover, through this analysis, that religious belief is no longer necessary for modern people, at least for the mature and psychologically healthy amongst us.

ii.
Freud's functional analysis of religion in The Future on an Illusion is powerful and continues to be influential. Many noteworthy contemporary critics of religion are simply restating Freud's basic conclusions as framed in The Future of an Illusion. That is, the contemporary arguments critiquing religion, at least on the psychological issues, haven't evolved much since Freud.

In what follows I want to quote liberally from The Future of an Illusion to both summarize Freud's basic argument and to demonstrate just how fresh it still sounds to modern ears.

The Future of an Illusion is divided into ten small chapters. In Chapters 1 and 2 Freud opens with comments about the rise and function of civilization. In Chapter 3 Freud takes up the subject of religion. He opens Chapter 3 with this question:

In what does the particular value of religious ideas lie?

Let's pause and consider this question given what we've been talking about in the preceding essays. Notice how Freud focuses upon the function of religious belief. The question isn't "Is religious belief true?" That is the classic question of apologetics. Rather, Freud asks if religious belief has a "particular value." Specifically, is religion helping us in some way, performing some important function for us? If so, what is that function?

As noted in the first essay in this series, this is a destabilizing question. It sweeps past justification, evidence and warrants and begins, for Freud, with an investigation into the mind and motivations of religious belief. The answer to our questions concerning religion are to be found in the psyche. Suddenly, the ground has shifted as the religious believer isn't presumed to be an expert in human motivation. Particularly not his own. The judge and jury of this debate is the psychoanalyst. This is a startling, daring and breathtaking move on Freud's part. With one simple question--In what does the particular value of religious ideas lie?--Freud completely reconfigures the conversation about religion. Conversations about faith haven't been the same since.

After beginning Chapter 3 with his question, Freud discusses how nice it would be if we could live without civilization, with all its rules, laws and prohibitions. The fantasy is that we could live as Rousseau's noble savage. But these are naive fantasies. Freud is clear that civilization is actually protecting us from the cruel severity of nature:

But how ungrateful, how short-sighted after all, to strive for the abolition of civilization! What would then remain would be a state of nature, and that would be far harder to bear. It is true that nature would not demand any restrictions of instinct from us, she would let us do as we liked; but she has her own particularly effective method of restricting us. She destroys us--coldly, cruelly, relentlessly, as it seems to us, and possibly through the very things that occasioned our satisfaction. It was precisely because of these dangers with which nature threatens us that we came together and created civilization, which is also, among other things, intended to make our communal life possible. For the principal task of civilization, its actual raison d’être, is to defend us against nature.

Part of this "defense against nature" is psychological. Nature is terrifying and it mocks human pretensions. A basic and existential anxiety about our vulnerabilities in the face of Nature is a universal feature of the human experience:

But no one is under the illusion that nature has already been vanquished; and few dare hope that she will ever be entirely subjected to man. There are the elements, which seem to mock at all human control: the earth, which quakes and is torn apart and buries all human life and its works; water, which deluges and drowns everything in a turmoil; storms, which blow everything before them; there are diseases, which we have only recently recognized as attacks by other organisms; and finally there is the painful riddle of death, against which no medicine has yet been found, nor probably will be. With these forces nature rises up against us, majestic, cruel and inexorable; she brings to our mind once more our weakness and helplessness, which we thought to escape through the work of civilization.

And this isn't simply a generic condition, the particularities of life, our own biography with death, disease and tragedy are also difficult to bear:

For the individual, too, life is hard to bear, just as it is for mankind in general. The civilization in which he participates imposes some amount of privation on him, and other men bring him a measure of suffering, either in spite of the precepts of his civilization or because of its imperfections. To this are added the injuries which untamed nature--he calls it Fate--inflicts on him. One might suppose that this condition of things would result in a permanent state of anxious expectation in him and a severe injury to his natural narcissism. We know already how the individual reacts to the injuries which civilization and other men inflict on him: he develops a corresponding degree of resistance to the regulations of civilization and of hostility to it. But how does he defend himself against the superior powers of nature, of Fate, which threaten him as they threaten all the rest?

The answer to this question is that humans need a form of consolation. This consolation is twofold. First, it attenuates our anxiety about existence. And second, it is a source of answers, a way to answer the big "Why?" questions of existence:

Man’s self-regard, seriously menaced, calls for consolation; life and the universe must be robbed of their terrors; moreover his curiosity, moved, it is true, by the strongest practical interest, demands an answer.

This consolation, aimed at anxiety reduction and source of metaphysical "answers", eventually takes the shape of religion. That is, Nature is no longer seen as malevolent, random and ending in death. Rather, Nature was benevolent, Providential and promised a life hereafter. Each facet of this worldview is aimed at reducing basic human insecurities in the face of Nature, Fate, and Death. Freud summarizes the basic religious stance:

And thus a store of ideas is created, born from man’s need to make his helplessness tolerable...Here is the gist of the matter. Life in this world serves a higher purpose; no doubt it is not easy to guess what that purpose is, but it certainly signifies a perfecting of man’s nature. It is probably the spiritual part of man, the soul...Everything that happens in this world is an expression of the intentions of an intelligence superior to us, which in the end, though its ways and byways are difficult to follow, orders everything for the best that is, to make it enjoyable for us. Over each one of us there watches a benevolent Providence which is only seemingly stern and which will not suffer us to become a plaything of the overmighty and pitiless forces of nature. Death itself is not extinction, is not a return to inorganic lifelessness, but the beginning of a new kind of existence which lies on the path of development to something higher. And, looking in the other direction, this view announces that the same moral laws which our civilizations have set up govern the whole universe as well, except that they are maintained by a supreme court of justice with incomparably more power and consistency. In the end all good is rewarded and all evil punished, if not actually in this form of life then in the later existences that begin after death. In this way all the terrors, the sufferings and the hardships of life are destined to be obliterated.

In the end, these beliefs are so deep and vitally held that many could not live without them:

...ideas which are religious in the widest sense are prized as the most precious possession of civilization, as the most precious thing it has to offer its participants. It is far more highly prized than all the devices for winning treasures from the earth or providing men with sustenance or preventing their illnesses, and so forth. People feel that life would not be tolerable if they did not attach to these ideas the value that is claimed for them.

The believer will not let his belief be torn from him, either by arguments or by prohibitions. And even if this did succeed with some it would be cruelty.

iii.
Summarizing, and still quoting liberally from The Future on an Illusion, according to Freud the goal of religious belief is consolation. Religion helps attenuate the daily terrors--biological and existential--of human existence. Freud groups these anxieties under the experience of "helplessness." This experience of helplessness is a primal human anxiety. It is the experience of childhood, of being small and powerless. It is the feeling of being controlled by powerful, external forces.

According to Freud, we escape these fears during childhood by seeking out and clinging to a loving, powerful parent. For Freud, the fearful child clinging to the parent is the prototype of the human religious experience. Existence is terrifying and we, even as adults, seek out a Parent that can protect us. This is why Freud compares religion to a "childhood neurosis":

...the terrifying impression of helplessness in childhood aroused the need for protection for protection through love which was provided by the father; and the recognition that this helplessness lasts throughout life made it necessary to cling to the existence of a father, but this time a more powerful one. Thus the benevolent rule of a divine Providence allays our fear of the dangers of life; the establishment of a moral world-order ensures the fulfilment of the demands of justice, which have so often remained unfulfilled in human civilization; and the prolongation of earthly existence in a future life provides the local and temporal framework in which these wish-fulfilments shall take place.

These childhood wishes continue into adulthood through our experience with Nature, Fate, and Death creating an illusion, a fantasy-based coping mechanism: The belief in a Providential and Loving Parent.

What is characteristic of illusions is that they are derived from human wishes.

Freud goes on to state that illusions are not, by definition, false. Like many beliefs an illusion might be true. But for Freud the central issue is how the illusion/belief came to be. What is motivating the belief? Evidence, reason, logic? Or a primal human need? A wish? According to Freud a belief is an illusion when a wish is motivating it:

Thus we call a belief an illusion when a wish-fulfilment is a prominent factor in its motivation...

Why would this be problematic? When a wish is motivating a belief the belief become disconnected from any potential for falsification. The belief becomes radically disconnected from evidence and argument. Nothing, absolutely nothing, can be said or shown to the religious believer to get him to relinquish the belief system:

...and in doing so we disregard its relations to reality, just as the illusion itself sets no store by verification. Having thus taken our bearings, let us return once more to the question of religious doctrines. We can now repeat that all of them are illusions and insusceptible of proof.

Once the illusion (a wish-driven belief) is in place people cannot be trusted as rational and honest conversation partners:

Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanour.

In the end, for Freud, the fact that the very thing we vitally wish for is precisely the thing we believe to be the case seems a bit too coincidental:

We shall tell ourselves that it would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent Providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be.

All this leads to Freud's famous conclusion:

[T]he effect of religious consolations may be likened to that of a narcotic...