The challenge of secularism

Overview

Recall questions on secularism and secularisation, Freud on religion as illusion and God as a father-figure, Dawkins' case against belief and on the harm of religion, Christian replies to both, secular humanist views on public life, education and government, and Christianity's place in society's values.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   What is the difference between secularism and secularisation?

   Model answer

   Secularism is a position: the view that religion is a private matter and that the state, its laws and its public institutions should be neutral between beliefs rather than favouring any religion. Secularisation is a process that sociologists describe: the decline in religious practice, affiliation and authority over public life in a society. The two can come apart, since a country may secularise without adopting secularism, or maintain an established Church while its population largely stops attending it.

2. 2

   How did Freud explain the origin of religious belief?

   Model answer

   He argued that religious ideas arise from human helplessness. Nature is overwhelming, fate is cruel and death is certain, and the child's experience of being protected by a powerful father supplies the model for a solution: the universe is reimagined as being under the care of a father who can be appealed to. Religion also serves civilisation by making its restrictions on instinct bearable, since a divine lawgiver gives moral demands an authority that mere social convention lacks.

3. 3

   What does Freud mean by calling religion an illusion, and why is that not simply calling it false?

   Model answer

   In his technical usage an illusion is a belief held because it fulfils a wish, regardless of whether it happens to be true; a girl who believes a prince will marry her holds an illusion even though princes occasionally do marry. So Freud's claim is about the cause of religious belief, not directly about its truth: belief in God is generated by desire rather than by evidence. He does add that religious claims are unprovable and, in his view, almost certainly false.

4. 4

   Why does Freud describe religion as infantile and repressive?

   Model answer

   Infantile because he sees it as a continuation into adult life of the child's dependence on a protecting father, which prevents people from facing reality on their own terms. Repressive because religious morality demands the suppression of instinctual drives, particularly sexual ones, and generates guilt and neurotic symptoms in the process. He compared religious ritual to the compulsive behaviour of obsessional patients, and argued that humanity would be healthier if it grew out of religion and accepted an education in reality, with science as the honest alternative.

5. 5

   How does Freud's psychoanalytic account of God as a father-figure work?

   Model answer

   He held that the small child experiences the father as all-powerful, both protector and rival, and that these feelings are never fully resolved. The adult, faced with a universe indifferent to their survival, projects the childhood father outwards on a cosmic scale, producing a God who is loved, feared and obeyed. Freud also offered a speculative prehistory in which religion originates in guilt following the killing of a primal father - an account which anthropologists have long rejected, and which is the weakest part of his case.

6. 6

   What is Dawkins' central argument against belief in God?

   Model answer

   He treats the existence of God as a hypothesis about what exists, so it must be assessed like any other. His main objection is that a designer capable of producing the universe would have to be at least as complex as what it explains, so invoking God does not reduce the improbability but multiplies it; explanations should run from simple to complex, as Darwinian evolution does, rather than beginning with the most complex thing of all. He concludes that God almost certainly does not exist.

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