Existential Reasons for Belief in God: A Defense of Desires and Emotions for Faith by Clifford Williams

Author:Clifford Williams [Williams, Clifford]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-02-10T03:24:00+00:00

1. We want to be healed of our neuroses.

2. Believing in God helps heal our neuroses.

3. Therefore, we are justified in believing in God.

Believing in God helps heal our neuroses because it gives us meaning, beauty, completeness, satisfaction and splendor.

Introducing the concept of healing into the question of whether religious belief is justified gives a deeper dimension to the issue. It is deeper because our neuroses are connected to our basic desires and emotions, such as desires for meaning and love and our fears of rejection and death. The argument says that we are justified in having a belief that heals us of our distress concerning these basic desires and emotions. It is not the simple wish-fulfillment argument Freud criti cized, but is more like the complex desire argument that William James espoused. It satisfies the five aforementioned criteria for testing whether needs are legitimate. The neuroses Jung says belief in God heals involve desires and emotions that endure, are significant, are connected to one another and are felt strongly. On these grounds, then, the Jungian argument gains force, because it involves an appeal to both need and reason.

Now let us do a thought-experiment. Let us imagine that Freud concedes to Jung that believing in God heals us of our neuroses. (We will need to stretch our imagination a good deal to do this thought-experiment!) It does so in the way Jung suggests, by giving us meaning, beauty, completeness, satisfaction and splendor. Believing in God is not a result simply of a desire for cosmic security or of an obsessional neurosis, as Freud originally thought. The question is this: Will Freud now admit that believing in God is legitimate because it heals us of our neuroses? This will be a troublesome question for Freud. On the one hand, he has declared that we cannot believe something just because it satisfies us. On the other hand, believing in God because it heals us of our neuroses is much more complex and involves deeper parts of our personality than simply wanting to believe. Such complex believing seems more justified than believing because of simple wanting or because of an Oedipus desire. So it should appeal to Freud, as it does to Jung, because he wants patients to be healed, and whatever works to do this presumably is worthy of being believed.

This dilemma is the dilemma of this book: satisfaction of need by itself does not warrant belief in God, yet somehow satisfaction of need seems legitimately to draw us to belief in God. How, then, can we use satisfaction of need to believe in God if satisfaction of need is not in general an acceptable foundation of true beliefs? The answer, I believe, is to accept both the drawing power of need (when it is certified by the need criteria) and its evidential force. In Jung's terms, we acknowledge that belief in God can heal our neuroses and accept this as both existential and evidential justification for the belief. Evidential justification is

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