Psychology and God
Religion and implicit and explicit language Matthew Follow 12 min read · Mar 14, 2025 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...