Key Facts About These Challenges
- These challenges are a posteriori arguments seeking to challenge religious belief.
- Argues from psychology (relating to human psyche) and sociology (relating to society).
- Critics of these challenges include most religious people.
- Advocates include Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Jean Charcot.
Freud's Findings
- Religion is an aid to overcome inner psychological conflict.
- Religion helps us to overcome the conflict between our desires and society.
- Religion is an illusion to overcome our fear of nature.
Religion helps us to overcome the conflict between what we want and what society says we're allowed to do - Religion gives us a reason to submit to society; it gives us the promise of a better life after as a reward for our good behaviour in this society. We find a father figure in religion and God, someone that rewards and punishes us like a child.
Religion is an illusion to help us accept that aspects of nature cannot be controlled - We are helpless to nature. Religion personifies God by making him the force that controls nature. By praying to God, we are aiming to gain some control over the elements. Again, religion and God become like a father figure by providing us protection from nature in the same way a father protects his child.
Challenges to Freud's beliefs
- Darwin put forward the theory of evolution, stating that we evolved from animals, but there is no evidence in nature of a father figure.
- Freud only tested his beliefs on a small amount of people.
