Isn't God just a crutch people invented?
Wanting something to be true tells you nothing about whether it is. People want a cure for cancer; the wanting neither creates one nor rules one out. And the argument works just as well in reverse — wanting there to be no one you answer to is also a wish. It explains why someone believes, never whether they are right.
Freud’s version is the one that stuck: religious ideas are illusions, the fulfilment of the oldest and strongest wishes of mankind. We are frightened children who want a father, so we invent one large enough to cover the sky.
It is a good story and it explains something real. Plenty of people do believe for comfort. The question is whether that has any bearing on whether the belief is true.
The mistake at the centre
It does not, and the reason is a piece of basic logic worth learning by name: the genetic fallacy. That is arguing about where a belief came from instead of whether it is correct.
Say it plainly and it becomes obvious. Nothing exists merely because we wish it. And nothing fails to exist merely because we wish it.
A child who is frightened of the dark and wishes his father were downstairs is not thereby wrong about his father being downstairs. He might be right. The wish and the fact are two separate questions, and you settle the second by looking, not by analysing the first.
It cuts both ways, and harder than people expect
If wishing explains belief, wishing explains unbelief too.
There are excellent reasons to want no God. No one watching. No final accounting for what you did. Your life is yours to run, and no one will ever ask you about it. If comfort discredits a position, that position has a comfort problem of its own.
Notice this is not a good argument against atheism, and it should not be offered as one. It is a demonstration that the tool is broken. A method that disqualifies every position it is pointed at is not telling you anything about the world.
Nobody would invent this one
There is a further problem with treating Christianity specifically as wish-fulfilment: it is not what anyone would have wished for.
A God you would invent would approve of you. He would not require you to forgive people who have not apologised, to give away money, to tell the truth when it costs you, or to love people you find intolerable.
He certainly would not tell you that you are far worse than you think, that you cannot fix it, and that your rescue had to be done for you. That is not flattering. It is the opposite of flattering.
And the central image is not a benevolent father in the clouds. It is a man scourged and nailed to a post outside a city wall. Whatever else the first Christians were doing, they were not designing something soothing.
The other way of reading the desire
Freud saw a longing and concluded there was nothing on the other end. That is one possible reading of a longing. It is not the only one.
We have hunger, and there is food. We have thirst, and there is water. We are lonely, and there are other people. Every deep and universal appetite we know of corresponds to something real.
That is not a proof. Appetites can misfire. But if there is one appetite in the human race that is nearly universal and points beyond everything the world contains, “there must be nothing there” is not the only conclusion available.
Objections answered
But religion clearly does comfort people. Doesn't that count for something?
It counts as an explanation of behaviour, and a partial one. Christianity has also sent people to be eaten by animals rather than say four words that would have saved them. Any account of religion as comfort has to explain the martyrs, and Freud’s does not try.
Isn't it suspicious that everyone's God looks like their culture?
Somewhat, and it is a fair observation about religion in general. It does not work as well on a first-century Jewish carpenter executed as a criminal, which fits neither Jewish expectations of a Messiah nor Roman ideas of a god. The story was an embarrassment in both directions.
Doesn't neuroscience show belief is just brain activity?
Everything you think is brain activity, including that sentence. Showing which regions light up when someone prays tells you the mechanism, not whether the belief is true — exactly as with mathematics, which also happens in neurons and is not false because of it.
Shared ground, and where traditions differ
All Christians hold
All the traditions hold that human beings are made for God and are restless without him — so the longing Freud identified is one Christianity had already described, and read the opposite way.
Related questions
Inspired by Alister McGrath, bethinking.org — "God as Wish Fulfilment?". The argument is theirs; the words here are ours.
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