This is very much what you might call ‘an objection on psychological grounds’. But it should be noticed straight away that psychology itself is, to its fault, often based on supposed closed systems, whereby a psychologist purports to have a built-in formula for explaining away any evidence that appears to falsify his or her claims. That is, they have an expedient method of ascribing to the great depths of the sub-conscious those things for which they cannot provide sufficient evidence.
One cannot really accuse Christianity of being a ‘wish-fulfilment without considering atheism as an even stronger wish-fulfillment. Freud said that religion was a form of ‘wish-fulfilment’, and many others have assented to his contention. The problem with this contention is that it does not really answer the questions that should ordinarily precede it.
I do not doubt that some people subscribe to a particular religion because they hope it is true. But it says nothing about whether the religion to which they are subscribing is, as a matter of fact, true or not; it is merely a statement about why they have subscribed. It is certainly true that we learn things from experience, but all of the perceptions, inferences and feelings deduced from experience are infringed upon if the philosophy that we take into the experience is either faulty or influenced too much by mere feeling - for mere feeling will never tell us anything objective about external things.
In the second place, it is perfectly obvious that if religious belief can be accused of being a ‘wish-fulfilment’, then so too can atheism. Men and women who have no interest in religion or who do not want to give up things in their irreligious lifestyle have every reason to wish that religion is all nonsense. One of the reasons why macro-evolutionary theory is so appealing is that it gives a man much of the emotional comfort of being free from any God that might be watching over him. Many evolutionists try to expunge God from the picture, claiming that He is not necessary for our existence - and it is certainly easy to see why they would wish it to be true.
Those who do not analyse our ultimate existence quite so much, have a capricious thought process when called upon to think abut God. When they wake up happy on a sunny day, and everything is good in their lives, it is lovely to think of the whole cosmos as a preordained configuration of atoms, a benevolent supernatural force which carries us through life eventually leading all the ‘good people’ into some form of pleasant afterlife. If, on the other hand, you wish to commit a bad action or if you wake up feeling not so good, that you are, in fact, not such a good person - it is the great to see the whole cosmos as a blind purposeless entity with no recall, nothing like the vexatious God that we were taught about in Sunday School.
This is an even bigger form of ‘wish-fulfilment’ than the first kind, for it allows you to smuggle in some further inconsistent logic - it allows you to exhume your god when it is convenient, and suppress him when he is undesired or bothersome. You get the excitement of an afterlife, but none of the cost of working towards it in this life.
Karl Marx shared a similar belief with Freud. According to Marx, religion was created by the ruling classes in order to keep the populace satisfied with their unjust work situations. He claimed that they could avoid dissent by promising the oppressed workers a ‘pie in the sky’ Heavenly reward. He called religion an ‘opiate of the masses’, a method used to desensitise the pain of the workers, so they could endure greater travails and be more productive.
This is another example of flawed logic. Firstly this contention is not supported by any evidence whatsoever, and secondly, just because people might have had good reason to infuse religious belief - it does not make the religion itself any less true because of this. It is perfectly obvious that many people in the past have had good reason to embrace religion and many have had good reason to reject it. We have to become aware of the error in Marx and Freud’s thinking before we start to produce correctives.
We have seen that they have made inferences about supposed states, without much consideration of the antithetical argument; that is, they have presumed straight away that religion is false and posited theories which are already predisposed to that contention. Until spurious logic is eradicated, reason can have little effect in these types of human affair. If you presuppose something without realising that the presupposition is equally applicable to the opposite argument then you are invalidating your own reason.
Reason itself does not always make it known when it is being invalidated, for the forces which invalidate reason, themselves depend on reasoning. We have to use reason to confirm that reason is faulty, so we have to trust reason even when we are trying to locate spurious reasoning. But we cannot, by simply pointing out flaws in atheist thinking, conclude that because they are wrong that Christians are automatically right. A wrong contention does not automatically make the opposite contention correct; we need evidence or verification to know for sure.
This leads me to the question; does my knowing that they have not experienced God mean that I can know for sure that I have experienced Him? Do you see the problem? When we start to ask questions like Freud and Marx did, we end up with difficulties; that is, we are really asking the wrong questions. Everything I know is an inference or deduction from sensations which enter my cognisance (except the exact present moment) - so therefore what I know cannot be dependent on any external factors (other than God), certainly not by an absence of something completely independent from my cognisance.
Everything we know of ultimate realities beyond our instant experiences depends on inferences from these experiences. Only if our inference provides us with a genuine understanding of reality can we know for sure if God communicates with us through our own cognition. If our inferences emanate from the random chaos produced by (in the long run) a purposeless and unguided cosmos then we cannot ever insightfully separate one thought from another. In other words, if our thinking never has been and never will be a real insight, we can give up thinking about ultimate realities, for the truth or verity of our knowledge cannot be justified beyond anything other than a small meaningless arrangement of atoms within a much larger meaningless arrangement of atoms. But our thoughts can be admitted as a genuine and authentic insight if they are part of a much bigger intelligence - something which transcends the whole totality of nature.
But even if we conclude that this Super Intelligence must exist, and that He was responsible for all the reason in the universe, it does not follow that folk will naturally understand their need for Him. Christians believe that He made Himself known through His Son, and that He gave us free will to choose to accept or reject Him; therefore it naturally follows that with free will, there must some sort of democratic process, whereby sound logic and unsound logic can be deployed interchangeably if the recipient so wishes. The recipient must be able to make bad decision as well as good ones, therefore not all men and women will use the correct logic necessary to search for Him or even acknowledge Him.
It is true that reason can be used to detect sound reason from unsound reason - therefore a man can, at any time, use his reason to attempt a better understanding of whether he is using his reasoning properly or not. In order to do this, he must realise that sound reason arises from truisms, corollaries and conclusions (all of which can be located by utilising one or both of the other two) and therefore all hypotheses should be measured by two of these three things. In other words, you can correctly infer C from both A and B collectively, ditto B from A and C collectively and so on - but no axiomatic certainties can be reached from, say, A from B, or C from B and so on.
Now, where the theory is accordant to the facts, all is well and good. But if this is not testable or provable - either because the relevant facts are unknown, or because the conclusion is dependent upon probability estimates regarding feelings and emotions - one should work through the theories, breaking down each constituent part, and analyse it next to truths known by other inferences from either personal sensation, personal awareness or personal experience - until a primary axiomatic truth can be established.
It is also useful to put aside all personal motives (something which Freud and Marx certainly failed to do regarding their theories). The efficacy of any belief will invariably be questionable if other motives cause one result to be desired over the other. It sometimes requires quite a bit of thought in order to locate some of the less obvious partisans that might be existent within our rationale.
Our knowledge of certain things (including Christianity) is dependent upon on how certain we are about the inference itself. And I think Christianity, like no other religion, or indeed any other belief system, provides us with the greatest certainty regarding inference, for there are so many different ways that people become Christians and so may different ways that people experience God. It is very likely that inferences are sound if that which is experienced is able to override a feeling of disinclination, for we do not very often change our minds without some form of lengthy thought process resulting from external influences.
This ‘wish-fulfilment’ or ‘opiate’ definition of religion is guilty of a logical misjudgment. You must show something is incorrect before you start explaining why it is incorrect; and this is where Marx and Freud have palpably failed. In order to distinguish between sound and unsound logic you must not preclude yourself from the equation. For instance, Marx claimed that all analytical reasoning is conditioned by matter, and that economic influences largely impinged man’s thoughts. How then is Marx himself precluded from such inferences - that is, how do we know that his own hypotheses were not tainted by economic dispositions?
In Freud’s case, if all religious belief came out of the non-rational unconscious, then this might be equally true of Freud’s own atheistic assessment. It is not so difficult to see that both Marx and Freud’s theories about religion were tarnished by a partisan; that is, their reasoning process was tainted by their own desires. They have hoped and presumed that God does not exist and then taken steps to posit their own contentions without any solid foundations. They have built houses on the sand. When it comes to the validity of reason, wishes and desires should remain extricable from all assessment of the facts.
Freud, Marx, and many others like them, observed how susceptible people are to emotional propaganda. This susceptibility has precipitated a modern worldview that people need to be distracted from sentimentality to the extent that reason should predominate every facet of modern interaction. They determined that the best thing for societies is to strengthen the minds of young people against sentimentality, feelings and emotion - that a society governed by pure reason would produce, not hard hearted people, but utilitarian ideals.
My own experiences tell me just the opposite. For every one young person who needs to be awoken from abundant sentimentality, there are, I would say, seven or eight who need to awoken from cold impressionability, deindividuation, pressure to conform to the demands of in-crowds, and lack of nascent self-understanding. The responsibility of the contemporary educator is not to remove things which are already part of a young person’s makeup - it is to help add things that will bring about a reconstitution of his or her reason and emotions. The best defence against deceptive reason and emotions is to help instill better reason which will be faithful to the emotions, and emotions which will be in harmony with his or her reasoning. By starving our youth of their emotional structure or their reasoning capabilities, we harden their hearts and we make them susceptible to all kinds of negative influences.
Once they are on the right track, we can help them with their thought process - that is, we can lead them to a better way of thinking by teaching them not what to think (apart from what is right and wrong) but how to think - for in my opinion, too many people have been taught what to think without being taught how to think. Those who can think properly are those who have learned to develop their beliefs to correspond to the truth, those who cannot, attempt to create their own reality; that is, they try to make the truth correspond with their own beliefs, feelings and perceptions. They will attempt to bend the truth and they will attempt to stretch the laws of logic in their favour. They attempt to do the impossible; they attempt to create a different truth to converge with their own ideas
Freud and Marx tried to occasion their own reality and failed. They cast many doubts over the theories of others, but failed to cast sufficient doubts over their own theories. A small amount of analysis shows that all claims of Christianity being a mere ‘wish-fulfillment’ are, in fact, based upon a tautological argument, from which no sound truths can be established without underpinning external factors.
In order to help people to Christ, we should try hard to get people’s minds off the idea of different truths and different realities, for we live in a world where cultural relativism is very much a part of the shifting cultural zeitgeist. It is one of the biggest impediments in modern day thinking, for it causes pseudo-satisfaction, indifference, false contentment, disingenuousness, apathy and an attempted compromising of what is ultimately real. If we believe that no person can find satisfaction on earth until he or she knows God - it is our responsibility to help people out of the comfort zone towards the truth.
