WJ

"The psychological study of religion is a meaningful area of psychology in America. It is relevant to our understanding of people because it addresses an important facet of life in America, with more than 90% of Americans professing belief in God, and the vast majority of citing specific religious preferences (Hoge, 1996). It offers a rich source of material for the study of attitudes, coping, altruism and many other phenomena of general interest to psychologists. It also challenges the psychologist's ingenuity to conduct research on constructs that cannot easily be studied experimentally. At a more abstract level, the link between psychology and religion helps psychology maintain its historical connection with philosophy. As psychologists seek to employ the techniques of the natural sciences, the psychology of religion reminds us that our roots are in philosophy, and that the assumptions we make regarding our subject matter have important implications for our science."

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(Personally, I think we are fortunate to have the beloved WJ's The Varieties of Religious Experience complete publication on linehttp://www.psywww.com/psyrelig/james/toc.htm


There are many many directions one could take the discussion; Freudian psychoanalysis, Jungian analytical schools, objective relations, transpersonal schools, phenomenological schools of thought, and so on. I would like to begin with a brief critique of the ontological argument. But before we do, let us look at what James said in his Chapter on philosophy viz. religion:

"When I call theological formulas secondary products, I mean that in a world in which no religious feeling had ever existed, I doubt whether any philosophic theology could ever have been framed. I doubt if dispassionate intellectual contemplation of the universe, apart from inner unhappiness and need of deliverance on the one hand and mystical emotion on the other, would ever have resulted in religious philosophies such as we now possess. Men would have begun with animistic explanations of natural fact, and criticised these away into scientific ones, as they actually have done."

"But even if religious philosophy had to have its first hint supplied by feeling, may it not have dealt in a superior way with the matter which feeling suggested? Feeling is private and dumb, and unable to give an account of itself. It allows that its results are mysteries and enigmas, declines to justify them rationally, and on occasion is willing that they should even pass for paradoxical and absurd. Philosophy takes just the opposite attitude. Her aspiration is to reclaim from mystery and paradox whatever territory she touches. To find an escape from obscure and wayward personal persuasion to truth objectively valid for all thinking men has ever been the intellect's most cherished ideal. To redeem religion from unwholesome privacy, and to give public status and universal right of way to its deliverances, has been reason's task. "

"I believe that philosophy will always have opportunity to labor at this task. * We are thinking beings, and we cannot exclude the intellect from participating in any of our functions. Even in soliloquizing with ourselves, we construe our feelings intellectually. Both our personal ideals and our religious and mystical experiences must be interpreted congruously with the kind of scenery which our thinking mind inhabits. The philosophic climate of our time inevitably forces its own clothing on us. Moreover, we must exchange our feelings with one another, and in doing so we have to speak, and to use general and abstract verbal formulas. Conceptions and constructions are thus a necessary part of our religion; and as moderator amid the clash of hypotheses, and mediator among the criticisms of one man's constructions by another, philosophy will always have much to do. It would be strange if I disputed this, when these very lectures which I am giving are (as you will see more clearly from now onwards) a laborious attempt to extract from the privacies of religious experience some general facts which can be defined in formulas upon which everybody may agree. "

"The intellectualism in religion which I wish to discredit pretends to be something altogether different from this. It assumes to construct religious objects out of the resources of logical reason alone, or of logical reason drawing rigorous inference from non-subjective facts. It calls its conclusions dogmatic theology, or philosophy of the absolute, as the case may be; it does not call them science of religions. It reaches them in an a priori way, and warrants their veracity."

"In all sad sincerity I think we must conclude that the attempt to demonstrate by purely intellectual processes the truth of the deliverances of direct religious experience is absolutely hopeless. It would be unfair to philosophy, however, to leave her under this negative sentence. Let me close, then, by briefly enumerating what she can do for religion. If she will abandon metaphysics and deduction for criticism and induction, and frankly transform herself from theology into science of religions, she can make herself enormously useful. "

"Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation. There is in the living act of perception always something that glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes too late. No one knows this as well as the philosopher. "

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With that , we can proceed to critique of the ontological argument which many view (including myself) as simply the 'cart before the horse' demonstration of [a] God's existence. Meaning, it is based on the apriori, analytical propositions, and therfore one has to already 'believe' for it to have meaning.

At this point, is it worth discussing (beating a dead horse), or shall we move on with other issues.... ?

Walrus