Responses to the Moral Argument

1. Responses to the Moral Argument

3. The Challenge of Freud to Moral Arguments • Developed the field of psychology : • Linked hysteria and its symptoms as the product of emotional trauma – particular behaviours and actions linked to neurosis • That people have layers of mental stata – some of which are not immeadiately recognisable – that people have unconscious as well as conscious mental processes.

4. Links to Other Scholars • Freud was influenced by Feuerbach – religion as an infantile illusion, rooted in childhood experiences of relationships with parents. • Hume and Rousseau had previously suggested that religion was a distortion of human reason. • The anthropologist William Robertson Smith considered that religion had developed around the idea of a totem – clans developed around trust and belief in a particular object or animal which was the totem – this totem should not be killed or injured; then once this year the totem was symbolically killed and eaten.

6. The challenge of Freud to Moral Arguments • Freud presents a different explanation of our moral sense – it exists because we learned as we grew up that there were right ways and wrong ways to behave. We were rewarded when we were ‘good’ and punished when we were ‘bad’ until a sense of right and wrong became second nature to us. • God is not the only possible explanation for the human sense of morality. • Religious belief is psychological – belief, experiences and impulses come from within the mind and not from any external, supernatural being.

7. Freud and Morality • Freud saw the conscience in terms of a guilt complex. • Conscience is a thought process that leads human beings to undertake actions out of a sense of guilt and embarrassment for previous actions or feelings. • The repression of the Oedipus and Electra complex leads to a development of guilt. • The child represses its sexual instincts and identifies with the parent of the same sex. • The physical needs of the child for love and affection directly influence the psychological make up of the child.

8. Shame and Guilt • Religious people may understand the rules they follow as coming from God as a heavenly Father. • Non-believers see the conscience as being the product of a male dominated society. • To break rules is thus an act of rebellion against the father, which condemns the son to guilt and punishment. • Freud would want us to live by reason, in fact this ‘superego' conscience restricts humans' aggressive powerful desires (thanatoswithin the id) which would otherwise destroy us.  So guilt "expresses itself in the need for punishment“

9. Shame and Guilt • However, it is also possible for us to repress the sense of shame and guilt.  Our superego can lead us to internalise shame, and to experience conflicts between the id desires and the shame emanating from the superego responses. The more we suppress our true feelings, the more that which drives us comes from what Freud described as the subconscious, which like an iceberg lies hidden in the recesses of our minds. • This repression of shame can cause pathological behaviour such as obsessive washing rituals and sometimes, depending on our upbringing, the guilt is irrational , to do with our sexuality, for example, over which we may have no control. • Religious rites as similar to neurotic obsessions – (for example praying the rosary could be seen as similar to obsessive washing of hands etc)

10. Kung‘s Critiques of Freud • Freud’s interpretation of early religion (influenced by Robertson Smith) as fictional – there is little evidence to suggest that the kind of totemism described by Freud was ever actually practised by any society. • Freud sets out to find a theory which supports his view rather than forming a view on the basis of the evidence. He begins with the assumption that there is no objective God. • Freud’s atheism is as much a hypothesis with no more conclusive evidence for it than there is for theism. • Whilst human’s desire for God and for eternal life does not prove that these things exist, but it also does not prove that they do not exist either. • Likewise whilst belief in God may be influenced by a child’s relationship with his or her father – this does not mean that this is always the case or that therefore God does not exist. • Freud’s assertion that the super-ego comes from society is just an assertion – there is no certain evidence that this is the case and that this morality cannot have come from God.