Freud’s psychological challenge to religious experience

Question 1

Freud as a scientific psychological challenge to religious experience

Answer 1

-relugion=’‘obsessional neurosis’ that derived from 2 main psychological forces: fear of death +desire to be child forever(y we call god ‘father’=eternal innocence in face of painful reality of world)

Question 2

mirage

Answer 2

-A person lost in a desert can be so desperate for water that they hallucinate it.
-humans can be so desperately afraid of death + the difficulties of life that they can delude themselves that there is a God who will take care of them and an afterlife.

Question 3

Religious response

Answer 3

-Freud’s analysis fails to explain mystical religious experience as it has a sense of unity w soemthing infinite+unbounded
-go beyond wish-fulfilling hallucinations of a neurotic
-his theory works well against visions eg mirage case
-whereas, mystical experinces r ecstatic, immersive+unlike normal sensory experince
-but they r harder to dismiss as hallucinations caused by delusory wishfull thinking

Question 4

counterpoint freud

Answer 4

-he admitted it was hard to challenge this
-response: intense mystical experinces r actually reliving of childhood experinces before ego or self had formed
-so explains dissolving of sense of self+resultant untiy w everything in ME
-relive experince of selflessness is a feature of mind+later became arbitrarily associate w religion but in essence has nothinh to do w it

Question 5

Counter-evaluation: Freud’s account of religion is unscientific, overgeneralised and overly-reductive.

Answer 5

-theres lots of non-neurotic religious people
-problem w psychological arguments is they could be true for many but hard to argue its true for all

Question 6

freud criticisms

Answer 6

-hes too unempirical in his methods for his theories to count as real science
-small samples so dont represent society
-no method of experiment
-popper: freuds theories were falsifable