Is God Invented by People to Console Themselves?

A phrase from Karl Marx is often cited here: "Religion is the opium to human desire." The basic idea is that God is some kind of spiritual narcotic that dulls our senses to the pain of the world and helps us cope with it. We want there to be a God to console us and so we invent him. In this view, religion offers succour for the suckers and losers, but not for serious and sophisticated people.

This argument has its roots in the works of the left-wing German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, who argued that the idea of God arises understandably, but mistakenly, form human experience. Religion in general is simply the projection of human nature onto an illusory transcendent plane. Human beings mistakenly objectify their own feelings. They interpret their experience as an awareness of God, whereas it is in fact nothing other than an experience of themselves. God is the longing of the human soul personified. This idea was developed by Karl Marx, who argued that it arose from psychological pressures. If a Christian were told this, and were incapable of giving a defence, their beliefs could crumble beneath them under panic.

My response is that Feuerbach's critique of religion is just as effective a criticism of atheism. For example, consider a serial killer who took delight in the pain and trauma of his victims. Would there not be excellent reasons for supposing that he might hope that God does not exist, given what might await him on the Day of Judgement? He argues that people invent their religious ideas to suit their longings and aspirations. In that human beings wish for God, their longing is satisfied by their invention of that God by a process of projection. On the basis of Feuerbach's analysis, it is not simply Christianity but also atheism that can be regarded as a projection of human beings. This resonates with much sociological and historical analysis of the rise of atheism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which emphasize how so many longed for a godless world and chose to create one in which reality was adapted to their longings.

The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, who wont he Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980, has an interesting poit to make here. Having found himself intellectually bullied and politically silenced, first under Nazism and then under Stalinism, Milosz had no doubt as to the ultimate source of despair and tyranny in the twentieth century. In a remarkable essay entitles "The Discreet Charm of Nihilism," he pointed out that it was not religion, but its denial—above all, the denial of accountability in the sight of God—that lay at the root of the oppressive totalitarianisms. Here are some wise words from that article:

Religion, opium for the people! To those suffering pain, humiliation, illness, and serfdom, it promised a reward in afterlife. And now we are witnessing a transformation. A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death, the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders we are not going to be judged. The Marxist creed has now been inverted. The true opium of modernity is the belief that there is no God, so that humans are free to do precisely as they please.

There is a third point of concern about this approach, which is perhaps more serious. There is a fatal logical error in Feuerbach's analysis. It is certainly true that nothing actually exists because I with it to. But does this mean that because I want something to be true, it cannot be? Imagine the man who longs for a drink of water on a long, hot, dusty day. Does water not exist because he wants some? Hardly!

Resource: Beyond Opinion; Challenges from Atheism, p. 31-32.