ARGUMENTS AGAINST GOD AND RELIGION — Part II The Psychological Argument

in a totally perfect form? As an intellectual exercise, it is no more difficult to accept this, than to accept the notion that genes, although only microscopic elements in the human embryo, control the growth and development of an adult human being. Might not the human and natural desire for a world immeasurably vaster than our own be an echo—spiritual and otherworldly—of a world already existing in this universe in a form invisible to human eyes? Psychologists are right in holding that sometimes ideas are repressed in our minds during childhood, which erupt at a later stage in an extraordinary form. But to infer that it is this very characteristic in humans which has given birth to religion is to jump to wrong conclusions. It is a misinterpretation, if not an actual distortion of a perfectly ordinary fact. It is as if observing a potter designing an image of clay, we deduce that it must be he who has created human beings. Image making and the creation of the human body differ from each other in so qualitative a fashion that to draw any parallels with God’s creativity would be utterly preposterous. It is only minds which see fit to make such analogies which look upon religion as a result of the inchoate ramblings of mentally deranged individuals. Religious thoughts expressed in prophetic diction are virtue and purity par excellence. It is a general weakness of modern thought that it jumps to extraordinary conclusions on the basis of facts which carry no weight from the logical point of view. An emotionally disturbed individual may babble abnormally under the influence of thoughts repressed in the unconscious, but how does this prove that the knowledge of the universe revealed to the prophets is also a ‘babbling’ of the same nature—a ‘miracle’ of the unconscious? It is possible to accept incoherence in sleeping and in waking as the result of mental disturbance, but to assert the same about divine revelation is to descend to illogical and unscientific argument. It merely shows that those who reason in this way are hard put to find any other criterion by which to judge the extraordinary words of the prophets. 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. The thoughts and wishes, suppressed in the unconscious, are mostly such evil designs as could not be realized for fear of punishment and or social ostracism. Now, if the subconscious part of the mind of a