Spirit of Islam, Feb 2015

A theistic thinkers dismiss religion as being unfounded in fact. They maintain that it springs from man’s desire to find meaning in the universe. While the urge to find an explanation is not in itself wrong, they hold that the inadequacy of our predecessors’ knowledge led them to wrong conclusions, namely, the existence of a God or gods, the notions that creation and destruction were a function of the godhead, that man’s fate was of concern to God, that there was a life after death in heaven or hell, as warranted by the morality of man’s life on earth, and that all thinking on these matters must necessarily be regulated by religion. Here we examine the psychological arguments against God or religion. The Psychological Argument After the revelation of natural causes, the need to posit, and to believe in the existence of God, or a supernatural force, vanished in and of itself. If the rainbow is merely a reflection of sunlight in minute droplets of water in the air, it is not, in any way, a sign placed in the sky by God. If the plague is inevitably an outbreak of this disease, it can no longer be looked on as a sign of divine wrath. If animals and plants have slowly evolved over hundreds of millions of years, there is no room for a ‘Creator’ of animals and plants, except in a metaphorical sense–quite different from that in which the word was originally and is now normally used. If hysteria and insanity are external symptoms of disordered minds, there is no place left in them for possession by devils. Citing such events in support of his argument, Julian Huxley observes with great conviction: “If events are due to natural causes, they are not due to supernatural causes.” It does not follow that because agnostics possess only one yardstick by which to measure reality, there exists, de facto, one and only one such yardstick. He holds that their ascription to Supernatural Beings is merely due to man’s ignorance combined with his passion for some sort of explanation. Subsequent research carried out in the field of psychology further strengthened this point of view, as it revealed that religion is the ARGUMENTS AGAINST GOD AND RELIGION — Part II The Psychological Argument