How To Be An Agnostic
‘If this view is right, it is to be supposed that a turning-away from
religion is bound to occur with the fatal inevitability of a process
of growth and that we fi nd ourselves at this very juncture in the
middle of that phrase of development’, he wrote. It is not clear
over what time-scale Freud saw this fatal inevitability emerging
but 80 years on there is little sign of the turning-away.
It is commonplace to note that Freud’s desire to do away with
religion has an Oedipal structure itself: Judaism was the religion
of his fathers. Jonathan Lear, in his philosophical introduction
Freud, makes a more novel observation. He compares Freud’s
conception of religion with that of Kierkegaard, who thought
Christianity, in practice, a monstrous illusion too. However, for
Kierkegaard, the ramifi cations could not have been more dif-
ferent. Kierkegaard interpreted the illusion of religion as a sign
that the Christians of his time were not being authentically reli-
gious at all. The way they practised their religion was ‘a mis-
leading fantasy of religious commitment’, as Lear puts it. For
Kierkegaard, the future of the illusion was not a turning-away
from religion but a struggle with faith proper.
What this suggests about Freud is that he saw religion through
the lens of a larger conception of scientifi c progress, part of
which included shaking off the vestiges of what he took to be
infantile beliefs. Reason and experience – what he interestingly
called ‘our God Logos’ – will show that religion is not compat-
ible with the evidence. It is a thought, dare one say, an illusion,
that has common currency to this day (though, in another
twist, the atheists, who follow the same logos-god as Freud, now
commonly decry Freudianism for its lack of scientifi c veracity –
another Oedipal moment perhaps, if Freud is thought of as one
of the fathers).
Today, Christianity seems to operate with an illusion – the
illusion of its incompatibility with science. It feels or is forced
to compete for the same ground – the ground marked out by
the scientifi c criteria of fact, proof and relevancy. Kierkegaard’s
call would be to recover a conception of religion that is truer
to itself. For him, that call was to radical faith, interpreted as