Sigmund Freud (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

 

 

All of this may seem bad enough, but it gets worse. The third significant way in which Science eroded Religion came when Science began to understand the workings of the human brain. Humans had long felt that many things in this world could not be explained in scientific terms because they had long known that inside the privacy of their minds, which both Science and daily experience had shown resided in their brains, they had dreams and feelings that, by Science alone, made no sense. Even in physical reality, away from all dreams, they sometimes saw or did strange things that seemed to have no logical explanation.

Cruel or lustful thoughts and acts were bad enough, but at least they seemed somewhat predictable, given humans’ “sinful” nature. From long experience, we’ve come to know our human drives, so we can accept intermittent thoughts of fornication, theft, violence, and murder as natural. The traditional wisdom had explanations for them all. We are morally “fallen” creatures, the Bible says.

But people also have weirder dreams and even see weird things when they’re awake that, by the laws of both Science and common sense, are not possible.

 

                                

                 

 

                                  The Nightmare (Fuseli) (credit: Wikipedia)  

Why do people have dreams and waking visions of angels or demons hovering in the air, or of talking cats on mountaintops, bathed in orange light and standing on their hind feet? Night after night, many of us dream not just cruel or lustful dreams, but also many more that are simply absurd. Other people, wide awake, see angels, demons, and miracles. For centuries, if a person saw or did something that afterward he himself could not make sense of, the accepted explanation was that God (or Satan) had caused the event or made him do the deed. Much of normal human experience, apparently, lies beyond Science and even beyond common sense. In those times, “The Devil made me do it!” was an acceptable explanation for otherwise unexplainable behavior.

When Freud came along, his big contribution to human knowledge was simply the proposition that all these perceptions come from inside the brain of the person having the dream or vision. Thus, visions and miracles can be easily explained. They come from stored-up memories that combine and recombine to form narratives that are driven by deep, unconscious needs – needs that the visionary isn’t aware of because they are buried so deeply, he can’t consciously access them, no matter how he tries. Under stress, his brain transmits images into his optic nerves – the opposite of what normally happens. So even wide awake, we sometimes see what in physical reality is not there.

Most of our memories are not recallable at will, but they are all in there. Unless a person has had some brain-destroying injury or disease, her brain holds all she has ever experienced, all the sense data that have ever been fed into her brain via her vision, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. How they will affect her moment-by-moment flow of consciousness can’t be predicted in advance, but the patterns in “paranormal” experiences coincide too often and too closely with the subject’s personal issues for us to believe that those experiences are somehow independent of the mental states that preceded them. 

People have visions of angels when they have been reading about miraculous cures for the very illnesses under which they have lately been suffering. They dream of tidal waves after watching a TV show about a recent big one in Japan. They see ghosts of their dead fathers after days of feeling guilty about how they neglected him while he was alive – the dream coming just before what would have been his 80th birthday. The sciences of the mind have shown us – with evidence – that we can literally see what we want to see.

While at first, Freud and his followers were considered to be sex-obsessed crackpots, they soon began to gain credibility and command respect, mainly because they were getting results. Their models could explain all of human behavior, they could make high probability predictions about how individuals with certain backgrounds would act in specific future situations, and they began to cure people of neuroses and psychoses that, in earlier times, would have been pronounced hopeless.

Then, as research on the human brain advanced, other researchers showed that the model portraying all of a person’s experiences as being stored in his brain – even though he can’t recall the experiences at will – is literally true. Patients willing to stay conscious during neurosurgery and allow researchers to place tiny electrodes on their brains are able, when milliamp currents are turned on, to recall all kinds of memories which they are ordinarily not aware of.⁶

Freud went much further with his psycho-sexual explanations of nearly all of the motives that drive human behaviour. Much of what he had to say has today been discredited; for example, we no longer believe little girls are consumed with a desire to have a penis. But the larger impact of his discoveries remains. Those parts of human experience that for so long had seemed to defy both logic and common sense can now be explained rationally. The dreams and visions are products of overactive human imaginations; they never actually took place.

No more dreams sent from God. No more waking visions. No more miracles.