Written by Armand M. Nicholi,* The Question of Go*d reads like a dialogue taking place between the atheist founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, and the renown Christian apologetic and former atheist, C.S. Lewis. Throughout the book, we learn about the perspective that both men had on God, evil, morality, love, and death.
Below are the highlights.
God
Lewis added that among those who believe, another division exists: one group, the Hindus, believe “God is beyond good and evil”; the other group, the Jews, Mohammedans, and Christians believe “God is definitely ‘good’ or ‘righteous,’ a God who takes sides, who loves love and hates hatred.” The biblical worldview states “that God made the world . . . space and time, heat and cold, and all the colours and tastes, and all the animals and vegetables . . .” but also “that a great many things have gone wrong with the world that God made and that God insists, and insists very loudly, on our putting them right again.”
But God was not the only supernatural being. There was also “a Dark Power in the universe . . . the Power behind death and disease, and sin . . . [who] was created by God, and [who] was good when he was created, and went wrong.” Lewis asserted that this Dark Power is “the Prince of this world” and we now live in “enemy-occupied territory.”
Why would a good, omnipotent Creator make a world that could go and has gone so wrong? “God created things which had free will—and free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or joy worth having.” The abuse of this freedom, however, has made the human race a horror to God and to itself. The result is human history, with its slavery, war, prostitution, and poverty, “the long, terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.”
Lewis describes how God has intervened repeatedly in our lives. “First, He left us conscience, the sense of right and wrong: and all through history there have been people trying . . . to obey it. None of them ever quite succeeded.” Second, God gave the human race stories “scattered throughout the heathen religions about a god who dies and comes to life again and, by his death, has somehow given new life to men.” Third, God selected a particular people—the Jews—to instruct them in the kind of God he was, “that there was only one of Him and that He cared about right conduct.” The Hebrew Scriptures record this period of instruction.
Then something shocking happened. “Among these Jews there suddenly turns up a man who goes about talking as if He was God.” Lewis wrote that if this man turned up among Hindus or other Pantheists, where people often say they are one with God or a part of God, we could understand his claim. But this man was a Jew, to whom God “meant the Being outside the world Who had made it.” Lewis argued that in this context this man’s claim to be God “was the most shocking thing that has ever been uttered by human lips.”
Wishful Thinking
Freud therefore concludes that belief in God is merely a projection of powerful wishes and inner needs. He writes: “. . . religious ideas, which are given out as teachings . . . are illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind. The secret of their strength lies in the strength of these wishes.”
Freud writes in his 1910 paper on Leonardo da Vinci, “has shown us that a personal God is, psychologically, nothing other than an exalted father . . . and it brings us evidence every day of how young people lose their religious beliefs as soon as their father’s authority breaks down.”
C. S. Lewis countered Freud’s wish-fulfillment argument with the assertion that the biblical worldview involves a great deal of despair and pain and is certainly not anything one would wish for.
He argued that understanding this view begins with the realization one is in deep trouble, that one has transgressed the moral law and needs forgiveness and reconciliation. He wrote that this worldview begins to make sense only “after you have realized that there is a real Moral Law, and a Power behind the law, and that you have broken that law and put yourself wrong with that Power.” Only after we realize that our position is “nearly desperate” will we begin to understand the Scriptures.
Although this biblical faith is “a thing of unspeakable comfort,” Lewis wrote, “it does not begin in comfort; it begins in dismay.” And “it is no use at all trying to go on to that comfort without first going through that dismay.”
Until one experiences the dismay of realizing how far short one falls of meeting the Creator’s standards and how much one needs alteration, one can never experience the comfort of belief. Lewis wrote that in faith “as in war and everything else, comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it. If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: If you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth—only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair.”
In addition, Lewis astutely notes that Freud’s argument stems from his clinical observations that a young child’s feelings toward the father are always characterized by a “particular ambivalence”—i.e., strong positive and strong negative feelings. But if Freud’s observations hold true, these ambivalent wishes can work both ways. Would not the negative part of the ambivalence indicate the wish that God not exist would be as strong as the wish for his existence?
Lewis found this to be true in his own life. He notes in his autobiography that as an atheist his strongest wish was that God not exist. Lewis wanted no one to interfere with his life. “No word in my vocabulary expressed deeper hatred than the word Interference, ” he wrote in Surprised by Joy. And he found himself acutely aware that the Old and New Testaments “placed at the center what seemed to me a transcendental Interferer.” Atheism appealed to Lewis because it satisfied his deep-seated wish to be left alone.
Freud’s atheism and the atheism Lewis embraced for the first half of his life may be explained in part on the basis of early negative feelings toward their fathers. A considerable amount of evidence supports this notion.
The Moral Law
The universal moral law, according to Lewis, finds expression not only in the Old and the New Testaments but also in our conscience. This law, Lewis thinks, is one of the many signposts pointing to the Creator. Lewis says we have two sources of evidence for the existence of this Creator: “One is the universe He has made . . . the other is that Moral Law which He has put into our minds.” The moral law is better evidence because “it is inside information . . . you find out more about God from the Moral Law than from the universe in general just as you find out more about a man by listening to his conversation than by looking at a house he has built.
Freud thought that we learn morality from parents and teachers.
Lewis agrees that we learn the moral law, in part, from our parents and teachers, and that this helps develop our conscience. But this does not mean that the moral law is simply “a human invention.” Lewis explains that our parents and teachers did not make up this law any more than they made up the multiplication tables which they also teach us. He points out that some of what our parents and teachers teach us “are mere conventions which might have been different—we learn to keep to the left of the road, but it might just have been the rule to keep to the right—and others of them, like mathematics, are real truths.”
But Freud saw that it was possible for knowledgeable and intelligent people to commit evil acts, such as the Nazis did. Thus, moral knowledge was not a sufficient bulwark against evil.
Freud thought that a child, at about age five, internalizes the morality of their parents. And this becomes their conscience, rather than a divinely given moral law.
C.S Lewis thought that there was a social danger in psychologizing away morality.
When the apostles preached, they could assume even in their Pagan hearers a real consciousness of deserving the Divine anger,” Lewis writes inThe Problem of Pain.Our culture, Lewis believes, has lost that sensitivity. One reason for this loss “is the effect of Psychoanalysis on the public mind.” “The doctrines of repressions and inhibitions” imply that “the sense of Shame is a dangerous and mischievous thing.” Lewis writes, “We are told to ‘get things out in the open’ . . . on the ground that these ‘things’ are very natural and we need not be ashamed.”
So we tend to accept uncivil behavior—“cowardice, lying, envy, unchastity”—more readily than many earlier cultures. Within this context, Lewis says that the biblical concept of the universal need for atonement and redemption makes little sense.
In a famous passage in *Totem and Taboo, * Freud explained that he had had a “vision”: “The father of the primal horde, since he was an unlimited despot, had seized all the women for himself; his sons, being dangerous to him as rivals, had been killed or driven away. One day, however, the sons came together . . . to kill and devour their father, who had been their enemy but also their ideal.
Freud imagined that this killing of the father is the deed “from which sprang man’s sense of guilt (or ‘original sin’) and which was the beginning . . . of religion and of ethical restrictions.” Quoting from Faust who paraphrased the Gospel of John, Freud wrote: “‘in the beginning was the Deed Freud developed his theory further by conjecturing that the clan members substituted a totem—usually an animal, for the primal father—and eventually “the primal father, at once feared and hated, revered and envied, became the prototype of God himself.
However, even on its own terms, Freud realized a problem. If the killing of the primal father was the beginning of all ethical restrictions, and if his definition of conscience as an internalization of these restrictions holds true, then the sons who killed their father would not yet feel guilty. They had not yet developed a conscience.
Freud responds with a semantic shift. He said that the sons who killed their father felt “remorse,” not guilt. It relates only to a deed that has been done, and, of course, it presupposes that a conscience—the readiness to feel guilty—was already in existence before the deed took place.
If we continue to have difficulty with Freud’s reasoning here, we join many of Freud’s biographers, and Freud himself. Freud expressed doubts about his conclusions soon after finishing Totem and Taboo. “I have reverted very much from my original high estimate of the work, and am on the whole critical of it,” he wrote to several of his colleagues. Freud feared a negative reaction to the book; he was right.
Perhaps, Freud’s life speaks more loudly than his words. Perhaps his recognition of an “impulsion” within himself to be “thoroughly decent” may be a clear indication that, to quote St. Paul, “the law is written on their hearts.” Or, as some scientists have argued recently, this “impulsion” to “be decent” may be an adaptive mechanism that entered the gene pool without divine assistance. Both Lewis and Freud tried to obey the moral law, but only Freud rated his performance by comparing himself with others, concluding that he was “better