Sigmund Freud never had a chance. In a short and now almost entirely forgotten book published in 1952 entitled The Psychology of Unbelief, the Dutch psychiatrist HC Rümke demonstrated that, given Freud's upbringing – his poor relationship with his father, his intense dislike of his Roman Catholic nanny and so forth – the great psychoanalyst could not but reject religion as he matured, replacing belief in God the Father with a rational and scientifically robust set of beliefs about the puerility of believing in God the Father.
We would do well to remember this little vignette when we tackle contemporary attempts to explain (away) religion. Such attempts stand in a long and illustrious line. Freud famously showed how religion was merely the result of deep-rooted neuroses and before him Karl Marx demonstrated how it was the consequence of socio-economic injustice. In the 20th century, BF Skinner contended that it was essentially a kind of cosmic behaviourism, primitive societies justifying and enforcing their ideas of good and bad through concepts of ultimate reward and sanction. Today it is popular to argue that religion is an evolutionary phenomenon, the result of (some combination of) our developing minds, recognising agency, fearing death, and needing social cohesion.
This is not an altogether happy history – posterity has been none too kind to Marx's, Freud's and Skinner's theories – but there has, at least, been some sign of progress. The direction of travel has clearly been towards seeing religiosity as something intrinsic to human nature rather than something forced upon it by adverse social, political, familial, or personal circumstances. Such deep roots in human nature, coupled with the fact that demographic data repeatedly show that the religious outbreed the irreligious more or less anywhere you go in the world do rather seem to suggest that religion is unlikely to disappear in the near future.
Such a view – that the ubiquitous phenomenon of human religiosity is not only in the blood but also delivers a distinct evolutionary advantage – is gloriously consonant with (most) religious views. Not only does God tilt creation towards life, and life towards sentience, and sentience towards intelligence, and intelligence towards morality and wonder, but he tilts that package of intelligence, morality and wonder that we call human nature towards himself. Creation delivers us to God's doorstep and bids us only knock at his door.
But it is also, of course, compatible with atheism, albeit atheism of the nothing-buttery variety. Our belief in God may be a product of evolution, but so is the human coccyx and male nipples. Once the survival value of such adaptations has been exhausted (they have no truth value, by definition), they merely hang about the human person, totally redundant and a little bit embarrassing.
The interesting thing about this debate is that the atheists are clearly on the back foot. No longer able to find refuge in the idea that belief in God is an unnatural or neurotic accretion on human nature (save the rather clumsy virus metaphor that is still doing the rounds in some quarters), the atheist finds himself saying: "Yes, OK, religion may well be an inherent part of human nature, but that doesn't mean it is good or true."
Perhaps not, but few serious religious believers would claim that any scientific discipline is competent to adjudicate on the goodness or truth of religious claims.
Most would countersign the words of the influential social psychologist, Michael Argyle, who spent much of his time at Oxford studying religion and admitted that "psychological research can tell us nothing about the truth, validity or usefulness of religious phenomena: these are questions which must be settled in other ways." What the current status of scientific research into religion does seem to indicate is that not only is there a God instinct, but that it is religiosity that is the human norm and atheism the exception. Perhaps we might profit from following HC Rümke's lead and spend a little more time exploring the psychology of the historically anomalous phenomenon that is unbelief.
