The Varieties & Illusions of Religious Experience: Chapter 5, Wish and Ontology

i.
The title of these essays is The Varieties & Illusions of Religious Experience. The title was selected because these essays will attempt to compare and contrast the accounts of religious experience in two of the seminal works in psychology of religion studies. These works are Freud's The Future of an Illusion and William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience.

We have discussed Freud's ideas in Part 1 of these essays. Now,at the start of Part 2, we will begin to compare Freud's analysis of religion with the ideas of William James.

Of all of James's books The Varieties of Religious Experience continues to be the most widely read and influential. Even today The Varieties is fresh and interesting. The novelty of The Varieties comes from the fact that James wrote an entire book about religion that ignored the organizational, historical and theological aspects of faith. Generally speaking, we consider these aspects of religion to be the most relevant. That is, when we think of "religion" we tend to think of churches, temples, worship practices, rituals, important personages of the faith (e.g., saints, prophets, reformers), metaphysics and doctrine. James ignores all of this. Instead, James focuses upon the phenomenological experience of religion, what he calls "personal religion." James's main contention is that primal religious experience, the felt encounter with the divine, is the origin of religion. What James calls "organizational" religion is an after-effect, ritual and doctrinal accretions that grow upon the primal foundation of religious experience. Some quotes from James on the primacy of experience over theology:

What keeps religion going is something else than abstract definitions and systems of logically concatenated adjectives, and something different from faculties of theology and their professors. All these [abstract] things are after-effects, secondary accretions upon a mass of concrete religious experiences.

These direct experiences of a wider spiritual life...form the primary mass of religious experience on which all hearsay religion rests, and which furnishes that notion of an ever-present God, out of which systematic theology thereupon proceeds to make capital in its own unreal pedantic way.

The mother sea and fountian-head of all religion lies in the mystical experiences of the individual, taking the word mystical in a very wide sense. All theologies, and all ecclesiasticisms are secondary growths superimposed.

To make his point James filled The Varieties with first-person biographical accounts, from both saints and ordinary people. These personal accounts of religious experience, grouped and analyzed by James, is what gives The Varieties a vitality and immediacy rarely encountered in academic treatises.

ii.
In Part 1 of these essays we have begin discussing how functional accounts of religion have the potential to alter debates concerning the validity of religious belief. We have focused upon suspicious and deflationary functional accounts. After reviewing biological, sociological and psychological formulations we concluded that the Freudian (and Marxist) account is the most troublesome, then and now. The Freudian account argues that religion exists to provide existential consolation. Freud, echoing Marx, compares religious belief to a narcotic. To review from The Future of an Illusion:

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. And thus a store of ideas is created, born from man’s need to make his helplessness tolerable...In this way all the terrors, the sufferings and the hardships of life are destined to be obliterated.

This, then, is Freud's functional account: The function of religion is to provide consolation. The function is akin to the effect of a drug, a narcotic, which attenuates anxiety, dulls pain and creates euphoria. Existentially speaking, faith does each of these things.

What are we to make of this functional account? Again, the effect of Freud's formulation is deflationary. If true, it appears to take the wind out of the sails of the religious believer. Freud's account seems to diminish faith at best and to explain it away at worst.

However, when get to William James we see a functional approach but without the deflationary implications. James, unlike Freud, is very careful in his discussions of religion in maintaining logical distinctions between questions of origins, functions and spiritual value. In the very first chapter of The Varieties James spends a great deal of time defending his psychological approach to religion by insisting that this approach has no real bearing upon the value or importance of religious faith. Specifically, James makes a distinction between what he calls "existential questions," questions about the origins and existence of religion, and questions of "spiritual value," the impact of faith upon our lives (mentally, socially and morally):

The question, What are the religious propensities? and the question, What is their philosophic significance? are two entirely different orders of question from the logical point of view; and, as a failure to recognize this fact distinctly may breed confusion...

In recent books on logic, distinction is made between two orders of inquiry concerning anything. First, what is the nature of it? how did it come about? what is its constitution, origin, and history? And second, What is its importance, meaning, or significance, now that it is once here? The answer to the one question is given in an existential judgment or proposition. The answer to the other is a proposition of value, what the Germans call a Werthurtheil, or what we may, if we like, denominate a spiritual judgment. Neither judgment can be deduced immediately from the other.

For James, a functional account of religion that attempts to explain its origin and nature is logically separate from the spiritual or practical value of faith. Further, although this question doesn't interest James, a functional account of faith doesn't logically connect with the metaphysical claims of faith. James goes on to illustrate how any psychological state, even atheism, is grounded in biology. How, as physical creatures, could it be otherwise? A functional biological account could be given for Einstein's theory of relativity but that account doesn't invalidate the usefulness of relativity as an idea to guide us. Here is James on this point:

Modern psychology, finding definite psycho-physical connections to hold good, assumes as a convenient hypothesis that the dependence of mental states upon bodily conditions must be thoroughgoing and complete. If we adopt the assumption, then of course what medical materialism insists on must be true in a general way, if not in every detail: Saint Paul certainly had once an epileptoid, if not an epileptic seizure; George Fox was an hereditary degenerate; Carlyle was undoubtedly auto-intoxicated by some organ or other, no matter which -- and the rest. But now, I ask you, how can such an existential account of facts of mental history decide in one way or another upon their spiritual significance? According to the general postulate of psychology just referred to, there is not a single one of our states of mind, high or low, healthy or morbid, that has not some organic process as its condition. Scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are; and if we only knew the facts intimately enough, we should doubtless see "the liver" determining the dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of the Methodist under conviction anxious about his soul. When it alters in one way the blood that percolates it, we get the methodist, when in another way, we get the atheist form of mind. So of all our raptures and our drynesses, our longings and pantings, our questions and beliefs. They are equally organically founded, be they religious or of non-religious content.

To plead the organic causation of a religious state of mind, then, in refutation of its claim to possess superior spiritual value, is quite illogical and arbitrary...

iii.
What shall we say about James's distinction between questions of origins and questions of value?

First of all, James is absolutely correct that there is no logical connection between functions, value and metaphysical validity. That is, even if religious belief originated as a form of existential consolation this does not logically imply that religious belief isn't psychologically and morally transformative. Nor does the functional account imply that it is not corresponding with metaphysical ontology. That is, my reasons for believing in God, noble or ignoble, have no logical bearing upon God's existence.

I agree with all this. But, to tell the truth, I find this response unsatisfactory. Yes, on logical grounds James has an point. An important point. But this debate isn't solely about logic. Just because there is no logical connection between faith-as-wishful-thinking and God's ontological status doesn't mean that something fishy isn't going on. As Freud pointed out in The Future of an Illusion, the fact that our ontological claims (i.e., God exists) match exactly with what we wish for seems a bit nice and neat. The fit between ontology and wish is a bit too close. Plus, given that we are talking about the Unseen, there is really no way to have a conversation or debate about any of this. Logically, it is true, the believer can have both their ontology and their wish. But that just seems a bit too convenient for the critic of religion.

My point is, although we should keep James's logical distinctions in mind, I can't help but think that the debate is still a little lopsided in Freud's favor. The wish/ontology match just smells bad to honest people. So in these essays I want to push further into this debate. Past the well-worn observation that psychology doesn't logically determine ontology. I want to see if this feeling of lopsidedness in favor of Freud can be balanced out. And, as noted in the prior posts, this re-balancing isn't going to be a logical rebuttal. We've just done that. What is needed is a closer empirical examination of Freud's claim that faith is a form of existential consolation. What is his evidence for that claim? Is it persuasive? What does modern psychological research say about Freud's narcotic theory of religion? These are questions we've yet to take up. And, interestingly, William James will help us start the journey.