Sigmund Freud.

Now, 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 physical terms because they had long known that inside the privacy of their minds, they had dreams and feelings, and even outside in physical reality, they sometimes saw or did things, that by logic alone made no sense. 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 instinctive human drives, so we can often accept intermittent thoughts of fornication, theft, violence, and even murder as natural. But people also have much weirder dreams and even see weird things when they’re wide awake that are, by the laws of physics and common sense, not possible.

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 widely accepted explanation was that God (or Satan) had caused the event or had made him do the deed. Much of normal human experience, apparently, lies beyond science and even common sense.

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 symbolic 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, which is the opposite of what usually happens. Even wide awake, we can sometimes see what in physical reality is not there.

Most of our memories may not be recallable at will, but they are all in there. Unless a person has had some brain-destroying injury or disease, his brain holds all he has ever experienced, all the sense data that have ever been fed into it via sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste. How they will affect his moment-by-moment flow of consciousness can’t be exactly predicted in advance, but the patterns in those “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. The sciences of the mind have shown us convincingly that we can literally see what we want to see.

While at first, Freud and his followers were widely considered to be sex-obsessed crackpots, they soon began to gain credibility and command respect, mainly because they were getting results. Their model could explain all of human behaviour, they could make good 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, allowing researchers to place tiny electrodes on their brains, are able, when a milliamp current is turned on, to recall all kinds of memories in detail, memories of which they ordinarily have no conscious awareness.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, the vast majority of little girls are not consumed with a desire to grow a penis. But the larger impact of his discoveries remains. Those parts of human experience that for so long had seemed to defy logic and common sense turned out to have a rational explanation. The dreams and visions were, and are, figments of overactive human imaginations; they never actually took place at all. No more miracles.

If we consider just these three scientific theories—Galileo’s, Darwin’s, and Freud’s—what can we say have been their consequences? Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, for most people, removed the biblical God from their picture of the cosmos. They didn’t need him in their model of the universe. Darwin removed God as the creator of life. He even reduced humans to just one more kind of animal. And Freud made humans look like sick animals, easily deluded by their own aggressive, lustful, self-absorbed thoughts. (Donald Palmer’s book articulates this idea well.⁷)

Despite all this, science has not proved that the existence of God is impossible or that a universal moral code is impossible. But over the past four centuries, science has severely shaken the traditional idea of God and thus, inevitably, the traditional ideas of morality (the two are deeply intertwined, as we shall see). However, let me stress again that what does not follow from these scientific models is that there is no God or that every form of theism and every form of moral code are mere wishful thinking. We just need a new understanding of what God is and what the fact of his existence should mean for us in how we live our daily lives, an understanding that incorporates some subtler ideas of God and science into a single, consistent, coherent picture of what we believe is real.

But for now, we can say that science has almost levelled the old, pre-Enlightenment ways of thinking of these things. And let us make no mistake about what the loss of their belief in God has done to the vast majority of ordinary people. Removing God from Western society’s generally accepted picture of how this world works had the inevitable consequence of removing our society’s confidence in its moral code, our ideas of what right and wrong are, and how we should try to act—toward the world in general, but especially toward one another. If the moral rules we’re supposed to follow aren’t God’s rules, whose rules are they? Human authorities’ rules? Which human authorities? Who are they to be telling me what to do?

The point may seem a rather trivial one to most people in the West. Why should we care whether the old ideas of God and right and wrong are crumbling? Explaining in more detail why humans throughout the world, sometimes at deep, subconscious levels, are struggling to cope with this loss, even though they may not be aware of the philosophical names for the thoughts and feelings they are having, will be the business of the next chapter.

Notes

1. Barbara Hanawalt, Growing Up in Medieval London (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 55.

2. “Life Expectancy,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Accessed March 29, 2015. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy.

3. René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, Articles 211 and 212, ed. Jonathan Bennett. http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/pdfs/descartes1649.pdf.

4. Ibid., Meditations on First Philosophy, Meditations 3 and 4., trans. John Veitch, 1901. http://www.classicallibrary.org/descartes/meditations.

5. Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, ed. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1966), p. 353.

6. Cathryn Delude, “Researchers Show That Memories Reside in Specific Brain Cells,” MIT News, March 22, 2012. http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2012/conjuring-memories-artificially-0322.

7. Donald Palmer, Does the Center Hold? An Introduction to Western Philosophy (California: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1st edition, 1991), p. 56.