Now to take up again the threads of our enquiry: what is the
psychological significance of religious ideas and how can we classify
them? The question is at first not at all easy to answer. Having
rejected various formulas, I shall take my stand by this one: religion
consists of certain dogmas, assertions about facts and conditions of
external (or internal) reality, which tell one something that one has
not oneself discovered and which claim that one should give them
credence. As they give information about what are to us the most
interesting and important things in life, they are particularly highly
valued. He who knows nothing of them is ignorant indeed, and he who has
assimilated them may consider himself enriched.
There are of course many such dogmas about the most diverse things of
this world. Every school hour is full of them. Let us choose geography.
We hear there: Konstanz is on the Bodensee. A student song adds: If you
don’t believe it go and see. I happen to have been there, and can
confirm the fact that this beautiful town lies on the shore of a broad
stretch of water, which all those dwelling around call the Bodensee. I
am now completely convinced of the accuracy of this geographical
statement. And in this connection I am reminded of another and very
remarkable experience. I was already a man of mature years when I stood
for the first time on the hill of the Athenian Acropolis, between the
temple ruins, looking out on to the blue sea. A feeling of astonishment
mingled with my pleasure, which prompted me to say: then it really is
true, what we used to be taught at school! How shallow and weak at that
age must have been my belief in the real truth of what I heard if I can
be so astonished to-day! But I will not emphasize the significance of
this experience too much; yet another explanation of my astonishment is
possible, which did not strike me at the time, and which is of a wholly
subjective nature and connected with the peculiar character of the
place.
All such dogmas as these, then, exact belief in their contents, but not
without substantiating their title to this. They claim to be the
condensed result of a long process of thought, which is founded on
observation and also, certainly, on reasoning; they show how, if one so
intends, one can go through this process oneself, instead of accepting
the result of it; and the source of the knowledge imparted by the dogma
is always added, where it is not, as with geographical statements,
self-evident. For instance: the earth is shaped like a globe; the proofs
adduced for this are Foucault’s pendulum experiment, the phenomena of
the horizon and the possibility of circumnavigating the earth. Since it
is impracticable, as all concerned realize, to send every school child
on a voyage round the world, one is content that the school teaching
shall be taken on trust, but one knows that the way to personal
conviction is still open.
Let us try to apply the same tests to the dogmas of religion. If we ask
on what their claim to be believed is based, we receive three answers,
which accord remarkably ill with one another. They deserve to be
believed: firstly, because our primal ancestors already believed them;
secondly, because we possess proofs, which have been handed down to us
from this very period of antiquity; and thirdly, because it is forbidden
to raise the question of their authenticity at all. Formerly this
presumptuous act was visited with the very severest penalties, and even
to-day society is unwilling to see anyone renew it.
This third point cannot but rouse our strongest suspicions. Such a
prohibition can surely have only one motive: that society knows very
well the uncertain basis of the claim it makes for its religious
doctrines. If it were otherwise, the relevant material would certainly
be placed most readily at the disposal of anyone who wished to gain
conviction for himself. And so we proceed to test the other two
arguments with a feeling of mistrust not easily allayed. We ought to
believe because our forefathers believed. But these ancestors of ours
were far more ignorant than we; they believed in things we could not
possibly accept to-day; so the possibility occurs that religious
doctrines may also be in this category. The proofs they have bequeathed
to us are deposited in writings that themselves bear every trace of
being untrustworthy. They are full of contradictions, revisions, and
interpolations; where they speak of actual authentic proofs they are
themselves of doubtful authenticity. It does not help much if divine
revelation is asserted to be the origin of their text or only of their
content, for this assertion is itself already a part of those doctrines
whose authenticity is to be examined, and no statement can bear its own
proof.
Thus we arrive at the singular conclusion that just what might be of the
greatest significance for us in our cultural system, the information
which should solve for us the riddles of the universe and reconcile us
to the troubles of life, that just this has the weakest possible claim
to authenticity. We should not be able to bring ourselves to accept
anything of as little concern to us as the fact that whales bear young
instead of laying eggs, if it were not capable of better proof than
this.
This state of things is in itself a very remarkable psychological
problem. Let no one think that the foregoing remarks on the
impossibility of proving religious doctrines contain anything new. It
has been felt at all times, assuredly even by the ancestors who
bequeathed this legacy. Probably many of them nursed the same doubts as
we, but the pressure imposed on them was too strong for them to have
dared to utter them. And since then countless people have been tortured
by the same doubts, which they would fain have suppressed because they
held themselves in duty bound to believe, and since then many brilliant
intellects have been wrecked upon this conflict and many characters have
come to grief through the compromises by which they sought a way out.
If all the arguments that are put forward for the authenticity of
religious doctrines originate in the past, it is natural to look round
and see whether the present, better able to judge in these matters,
cannot also furnish such evidence. The whole of the religious system
would become infinitely more credible if one could succeed in this way
in removing the element of doubt from a single part of it. It is at this
point that the activity of the spiritualists comes in; they are
convinced of the immortality of the individual soul, and they would
demonstrate to us that this one article of religious teaching is free
from doubt. Unfortunately they have not succeeded in disproving the fact
that the appearances and utterances of their spirits are merely the
productions of their own mental activity. They have called up the
spirits of the greatest of men, of the most eminent thinkers, but all
their utterances and all the information they have received from them
have been so foolish and so desperately insignificant that one could
find nothing else to believe in but the capacity of the spirits for
adapting themselves to the circle of people that had evoked them.
One must now mention two attempts to evade the problem, which both
convey the impression of frantic effort. One of them, high-handed in its
nature, is old; the other is subtle and modern. The first is the _Credo
quia absurdum_ of the early Father. It would imply that religious
doctrines are outside reason’s jurisdiction; they stand above reason.
Their truth must be inwardly felt: one does not need to comprehend them.
But this _Credo_ is only of interest as a voluntary confession; as a
decree it has no binding force. Am I to be obliged to believe every
absurdity? And if not, why just this one? There is no appeal beyond
reason. And if the truth of religious doctrines is dependent on an inner
experience which bears witness to that truth, what is one to make of the
many people who do not have that rare experience? One may expect all men
to use the gift of reason that they possess, but one cannot set up an
obligation that shall apply to all on a basis that only exists for quite
a few. Of what significance is it for other people that you have won
from a state of ecstasy, which has deeply moved you, an imperturbable
conviction of the real truth of the doctrines of religion?
The second attempt is that of the philosophy of ‘As If’. It explains
that in our mental activity we assume all manner of things, the
groundlessness, indeed the absurdity, of which we fully realize. They
are called ‘fictions’, but from a variety of practical motives we are
led to behave ‘as if’ we believed in these fictions. This, it is argued,
is the case with religious doctrines on account of their unequalled
importance for the maintenance of human society.[2] This argument is not
far removed from the _Credo quia absurdum_. But I think that the claim
of the philosophy of ‘As If’ is such as only a philosopher could make.
The man whose thinking is not influenced by the wiles of philosophy will
never be able to accept it; with the confession of absurdity, of
illogicality, there is no more to be said as far as he is concerned. He
cannot be expected to forgo the guarantees he demands for all his usual
activities just in the matter of his most important interests. I am
reminded of one of my children who was distinguished at an early age by
a peculiarly marked sense of reality. When the children were told a
fairy tale, to which they listened with rapt attention, he would come
forward and ask: Is that a true story? Having been told that it was not,
he would turn away with an air of disdain. It is to be expected that men
will soon behave in like manner towards the religious fairy tales,
despite the advocacy of the philosophy of ‘As If’.
Footnote 2:
I hope I am not doing an injustice if I make the author of the
philosophy of ‘As If’ represent a point of view that is familiar to
other thinkers also. Cp. H. Vaihinger, _Die Philosophie des Als ob_,
Siebente und achte Auflage, 1922, S. 68: ‘We include as fictions not
merely indifferent theoretical operations but ideational constructions
emanating from the noblest minds, to which the noblest part of mankind
cling and of which they will not allow themselves to be deprived. Nor
is it our object so to deprive them—for as _practical fictions_ we
leave them all intact; they perish only as _theoretical truths_’ (C.
K. Ogden’s translation).
But at present they still behave quite differently, and in past ages, in
spite of their incontrovertible lack of authenticity, religious ideas
have exercised the very strongest influence on mankind. This is a fresh
psychological problem. We must ask where the inherent strength of these
doctrines lies and to what circumstance they owe their efficacy,
independent, as it is, of the acknowledgement of the reason.