Psychology and God
Religion and implicit and explicit language
Many of the great psychologists have come to the conclusion that religions are true. Not in a literal sense, since this could hardly be proved or disproved by a psychologist, but true in a heuristic sense: in many people, religious belief is a psychologically integrating phenomenon.
This should make a lot of sense, the symbols of religion are only “made up” in the sense that they are cultural symbols that emerge in every society in the history of behavioural modernity, and so they reflect the psychology, conscious and unconscious, from which they come. If we take Richard Dawkins’ claim that religions are simply “memes,” it seems also logical to connect their success or failure with their ability to function as — with another term of Dawkins’ — a kind of extended phenotype, something that provides societal cohesion, individual ordering of experience, and integration between the two.
Through the lens of psychology there are two ways of looking at this, the first might be represented by Carl Jung, the second by William James. Carl Jung’s approach was to see the symbols of religion as akin to the contents of dreams, to observe that since they emerge unconsciously they are symbolic representations of the unconscious constituents of the mind, and thus we can use them as a kind of heuristic for personal transformation, or as Jung called it individuation.
For William James the creeds and theories of religion are “absurd,” and what is important is what he believes to be primary, the experience that underlies it. His great work, Varieties of Religious Experience, sees the particulars of religion as only a manifestation of more universal phenomenological contents. Like Jung though he also sees religion as playing a significant role in the development of a person from a sick or divided psyche to a kind of wholeness unique to religion that James calls “saintliness.”
You could in some ways use the fact that in many individuals religion “works” as evidence both for and against belief. One might argue that because the religious symbols reflect underlying psychology thus it reflects a larger truth. Jung himself observed that the “God image” was simply there, whatever we might conclude from it, when he was asked in an interview late in life if he believed in God, it was not a religious answer he gave, but an answer as a psychologist: “I don’t need to believe, I know.”
You could argue that the relativism that it implies, especially given James’ claim that the experience itself contains a universality that precedes any doctrine and that can be experienced in secular individuals in at least some form, means that we are simply attributing a truth about the cosmos to something that obviously simply reflects common phenomenal facts and emotions. If they can be interpreted differently by different religions, they do not reflect some absolute religious truth.
William James proposes that we have two problems here when it comes to drawing truth from our experiential and emotional worlds. The first, is that we cannot conceive of a universe outside of our personal and individual value judgements, the second is that we cannot exist in any reality that is not composed of the world of those value judgements. Religious experience and the trajectory of religious conversion or transformation is essentially, for James, a narrative of the coherence of an individual’s ideas and values into an integrated whole, not an integration into some universal doctrinal fact at which all value judgements coalesce. But clearly, James concludes, there is a coalescence to the religious experience, since its stages can be empirically understood and categorised through its phenomenology. But here, as James points out, the religious person and the psychologist divide:
“Psychology and religion are thus in perfect harmony up to this point, since both admit that there are forces seemingly outside of the conscious individual that bring redemption to his life. Nevertheless psychology, defining these forces as ‘subconscious’…implies that they do not transcend the individual’s personality; and herein she diverges from Christian theology, which insists that they are direct supernatural operations of the Deity.”
Psychology then, particularly in its early forms, stands at a kind of half way point between those for whom the particulars of religious belief are true, and those for whom the reductionist sciences “beneath” psychology ie biology and physics more accurately describe the causes of the mental world and make religious belief epiphenomenal, its truth only true if it can be made objectively propositional. As far as modern science goes metaphors or heuristics are irrelevant.
There is perhaps something analogous here to the working of a placebo. To the taker of a placebo, belief has a demonstrable function. To a psychologist, belief produces physical effect. To a biologist, especially those inclined to reductionism a) either the person is “tricked” by some mechanism yet to be discovered or b) placebo must be exaggerated and it doesn’t really exist. Thus because of this, and other reasons, placebo remains understudied, as Iain McGilchrist put it:
There is no money in it for drug companies — perhaps the reverse; it is an embarrassment to the reductionist materialist mainstream in biological research; and there is little chance of a mechanism being found anytime soon.
You would think that the placebo analogy breaks down as a metaphor for the working of religion because the very definition of a placebo is that we know it is a trick. If you told me you had a headache, and I gave you a tic tac and told you it was an extremely powerful painkiller and your headache went away, I can call it a placebo because I know that it isn’t a painkiller.
You might hold on a minute. Do I? What if that placebo works for a certain group of people, perhaps more suggestible and less inclined to disbelieve my claim, can I really say that it isn’t a painkiller? After all, if I give someone a paracetamol and they still have a headache, I can’t insist that actually they don’t have a headache anymore because I understand the mechanism by which it reduces pain. You can only prove any medicine for something like pain works based on the phenomenological outcome. The idea that placebo is a trick is surely the wrong way of thinking about it, especially from a scientific perspective. Except of course I still have to tell a kind of half-truth, I can’t say “this is a tic tac but believing it’s a painkiller might make your pain go away.”
The problem of religion though is less about what we know is not true than about what we cannot know is true. Whether a person rose from the dead two thousand years ago seems like a fact essentially unattainable by history unless the evidence provided for it would be miraculous if it were false. We can quibble about metaphysics, but since it lies beyond what we can make into absolute propositions, it depends on a subjective element we call faith. Some religious people may believe things literally we may argue are demonstrably untrue, but they certainly believe with felt assurance things that at the very least we cannot know are true. And here, for many, lies the modern problem with the “placebo” of religion. Even if we could get past lazy popular prejudices that “religion poisons everything,” many of its fruits involve a kind of surrender that, like a placebo, require a bypassing of the clumsy obstacle of the conscious rational mind.
The poet T.S. Eliot once observed that the first basic reading of a poem is like meat thrown to a guard dog by a burglar. In other words, the work of metaphor and symbol goes on somewhat unconsciously, and the basic poetic agreement to read a poem as if it’s saying something of significance simply allows the mind to do the work. The same might be said of the basic acceptance of religious truth, that all the experiences described by James require this most basic form of surrender.
Psychology then leaves us somewhat at an impasse. It seems we must either plough in the direction of science, reject the door left ajar by the psychologists and believe that no deity causes what scientific causation can evaluate. The other option is to accept religious ideas on their own terms, throw the meat for the guard dog, take the Kierkegaardian leap of faith and “go in.”
Some may find it possible to do both, and there are certainly examples of reputable scientists who are also piously religious. It does not follow necessarily that to believe religious truth is to reject scientific truth, but it seems an unavoidable fact that they tangle at their edges.
Seeking to untangle this mess today are popular figures such as Jordan Peterson, and others that come in his train such as Jonathan Pageau who believe that this problem need not exist, and that we can actually lead a rational assault up the stairway of Bethel. This leads to a kind of confusion of category, perhaps represented by the painful exchange between Dawkins and Peterson in which Peterson refused to answer whether he actually believes things like the virgin birth to be true. What this demonstrates, is that in spite of Petersons insinuation, he is only claiming to be beyond the Jamesian position of agnosticism. As I said at the start, and as Jung and James, unlike Peterson, both had the honesty and transparency to say, psychology simply can’t go there.
Yet it is completely understandable why someone like Peterson both continues to find psychology such an appealing route into the divine and why his fans were and to some extent still are attracted by it. Reading works by great figures such as Jung or James is a strangely tantalising and frustrating experience, they leave doors ajar with light shining behind them even as they seem also to close them. They seem to leave a work unfinished, like explorers who only got so far, shrugged and ceased their work. Peterson and co at least insinuate to be taking the riverboat further into the jungles of the mind.
Yet it was the great psychologists who knew they could go no further. The more we try to move towards experience, the more our direction demands that we use language that is symbolic, and there we find a paradox that to talk about symbolic language is to already retreat from it. To engage in psychology is to engage by definition in agnosticism.
It is a defining problem of the modern world that the rational mind has become such a spectre that even symbolism can only retain value if we can somehow explain what it is, leaving religion in the public world in a strange kind of liminal place. The aforementioned Jonathan Pageau probably represents this, his YouTube channel “The Symbolic World” attempts to explain the meaning of symbols and stories in the bible, with videos titled things like “The real meaning of Lucifer,” “Symbolism Explained: Tucker Carlson Attacked by a Demon,” and so on. The result is to say the least, confused. In one video boldy titled “Explaining the Fall to Atheists” Pageau goes on about how what the fall actually means is just that there is a gap between what is good and bad, there are hierarchies of identity and “if we see the world in telos that is I have certain purposes that are important to me as a person in that hierarchy then all my perceptions all my identities are participating in the sense of distance from purpose and you can see how that is akin to the fall.”
No, you can’t. This babble represents a mad idea that Peterson and co popularise, that you can do what Jung and James wouldn’t and simply tell everyone what religious symbols are symbols of. Yet to do that, it should be blazonly obvious, would be to empty the symbols of use and to deny them any metaphorical or symbolic content in the first place. If we have said what they mean, they have become husks of language. The very purpose of symbolic language is that you cannot explicitly say what they mean.
Indeed all that Pageau achieves is something like the concoction of a second religion, a reduction of Christian language into his own idiosyncrasies that tend rather depressingly, like Peterson, to complaints about politics, culture wars and the decline of Western civilisation which itself becomes synonymous with Christianity. He may appeal to people who happen to like unfalsifiable linguistic meanderings about symbols, but he simply isn’t quite doing what he claims, and titles such as the “real” meaning of so and so indicate a vital misunderstanding about language.
The issue here lies in a distinction between the implicit and the explicit. Since experience is our central orientation point, and since religious experience is about movement through and towards certain experiences and their transforming effects as they are reified in the world, the religious world is implicit, it exists in a form that cannot be reduced to anything else, it just is. Science, rationality and other forms of epistemology cannot fully arrive at this by their own terms because they attempt to make reality explicit. They attempt to say what things are, in a way that means things can all be said and done. This is why something like psychology remains the ceiling of fields of rational analysis when it comes to religion, and why it must remain agnostic.
The reason that stories and poetic languages and images matter is they take us nearer to implicit understandings of our experience. When Christians talk about faith or conversion, they are referring to an inexplicable sense that suddenly the stories make sense because all in one go you realise that they are telling you something about you. This is not rational. We cannot measure this truth in analysis, only by the fruits that Paul gives us: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness and self-control.
The reason that Pageau is wrong (or perhaps just slightly confusing, wrong might be too strong a word) in his approach, is that although he uses the word symbolic, he seems to misunderstand fundamentally what symbols are. For him, symbols are a kind of code that can be rationally decoded into other kinds of Peterson-sounding language about hierarchies or “the structure of being” or other such things. His work essentially then becomes as a kind of translator, telling people what symbols really mean. Instead of the protestant belief that the bible is accessible for everyone, that as Tyndale said the boy on the plough can approach them as simply as the Bishop, Pageau’s approach requires a PhD in word salad to elaborate what is actually going on so that the helpless unversed in symbolism can understand it.
Yet metaphors and symbols work precisely because they are not a static code with some hidden meaning. If I say “time is a river” there is no single factual thing that it means that can be said otherwise. The content is implicit, because its result is in forms of insight that it generates by the metaphor, in forms of intuitive understandings or observations of things that cannot be otherwise said. I don’t have to know anything about what metaphors are to experience its effect, I only have to have a common knowledge of the words involved. Religion is the highest form of such language, in which the understandings are actually manifest as changes within a person.
To emphasise the distinction of these kinds of language we might think of it in a more banal context: Let’s say a traffic reporter on television describes the movement of traffic, and says ‘the traffic is flowing like a river after rain’. On the same day someone reports on the traffic in strictly literal language, so will say ‘the roads are very busy, the traffic is moving steadily, there are no accidents’. The latter might be more specific and importantly more undeniable falsifiable. The former requires the imaginative participation of the listener. The listener, perhaps unconsciously, has to imagine a river after a rain, connect it to traffic flow and follow the bundle of things that emerge from the connection of the two. This means the latter involves elements of subjectivity and interpretation. It is not, however, strictly or only subjective, there are things it obviously can’t mean. It’s on a specific traffic report, so you can’t say the reporter was using it as a metaphor for the days political events, and it’s unlikely to mean ‘there is no traffic on the road’. Just like the metaphor ‘time is a river’ can’t mean ‘time sits still and doesn’t do anything’, the metaphor implies concepts of flow, movement and changeability. It is not reducible to objective statements but vitally, not arbitrarily subjective. The metaphorical kind of language is deeply important when it comes to abstract concepts and experiences that cannot be broken down beyond what they are, not the least consciousness itself.
Of course we have to know when these different kinds of language are useful, liberally using abstract metaphors on a traffic report would be pretty useless when what we require is language of direct representation. There is a big difference between asking what time is and asking what the time is. The work of Pageau though is to imply that when it comes to symbolic and metaphorical language the implicit can be explained via the explicit, without observing that to do so is to deflate it of precisely what makes it valuable. The vanguards of psychology knew this, they knew that they could only arrange what they found and leave it at that. In doing so, they accepted a basic flaw in the nature of any rational language, which is that there is only so far it can take us. What William James’ work so clearly elaborated was the importance of religion being reified in moral and personal transformation, the only meaningful witness to a truth that we know but cannot say.
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