Idolatrous projection and what to do about it

In 1841, Ludwig Feuerbach published his arguably most famous work, The Essence of Christianity. His main thesis was that religion is essentially a projection, that in religion humans project their deepest desires and values unto an imagined divinity. In a famous passage on he says,

The object of the senses is in itself indifferent — independent of the disposition or of the judgment; but the object of religion is a selected object; the most excellent, the first, the supreme being; it essentially pre-supposes a critical judgment, a discrimination between the divine and the non-divine, between that which is worthy of adoration and that which is not worthy. And here may be applied, without any limitation, the proposition: the object of any subject is nothing else than the subject’s own nature taken objectively. Such as are a man’s thoughts and dispositions, such is his God; so much worth as a man has, so much and no more has his God. Consciousness of God is self-consciousness, knowledge of God is self-knowledge. By his God thou knowest the man, and by the man his God; the two are identical. Whatever is God to a man, that is his heart and soul; and conversely, God is the manifested inward nature, the expressed self of a man, — religion the solemn unveiling of a man’s hidden treasures, the revelation of his intimate thoughts, the open confession of his love-secrets.¹

I was reminded of Feuerbach and his idea of religion as projection today when I read about a very interesting study² partly based on neuroimaging, that shows that "people's own beliefs on important social and ethical issues were consistently correlated ... strongly with estimates of God's beliefs". That is, people are prone to think that whatever they believe, that's what God believes.

Science and Religion Today reports,

A team of researchers led by Nicholas Epley, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago, studied a group of American religious believers and found that when people reason about God’s beliefs on important and controversial issues like abortion or the death penalty, they do so based on the beliefs they hold themselves—leading to a close match between their individual opinions and those they attribute to God.

It turns out people also use the same parts of the brain when they contemplate their own beliefs and when they predict what God thinks. Yet they use different regions of the brain when they contemplate the opinions of other people. “Intuiting God’s beliefs on important issues may not produce an independent guide,” the scientists write, “but may instead serve as an echo chamber that reverberates one’s own beliefs.”

And there’s another fascinating finding from this team: When the researchers asked participants to give a speech on the death penalty in which they took the position opposite to their own, they found that if people’s own attitudes on an issue shift, so do their predictions of what God believes.

As the team concludes:

People may use religious agents as a moral compass, forming impressions and making decisions based on what they presume God as the ultimate moral authority would believe or want. The central feature of a compass, however, is that it points north no matter what direction a person is facing. This research suggests that, unlike an actual compass, inferences about God’s beliefs may instead point people further in whatever direction they are already facing.

So "correlational, experimental, and neuroimaging evidence" agrees with Feuerbach's insight: That God is made in man's image. We enshrine our own whims as the exalted will of God. Even as we change our minds we think we're getting closer to the mind of God. We believe in the God we want to believe in and religion is a projection.

What are us religious folk to do with this? Theology's proper response to Feuerbach (and those who levelled a similar critique - he was by no means the only one who did) was and is a critical appropriation. Here's Barth,

One had better look out if one picks up the only weapon that will take care of Feuerbach. No one may strike him with it unless he has himself been hit by it. This weapon is no mere argument which one exploits in apologetics, it should rather be a ground on which one can stand, and with fear and trembling allow to speak for itself. Whether or not we stand on this ground will be tested by our answer to this question: are we capable of admitting to Feuerbach that he is entirely right in his interpretation of religion insofar as it relates not only to religion as an experience of evil and mortal man, but also to the "high," the "ponderable," and even the "Christian" religion of this man? Are we willing to admit that even in our relation to God, we are and remain liars, and that we can lay claim to His truth, His certainty, His salvation as grace and only as grace? Then we know what we are doing when, in contrast to Feuerbach, we remember evil and death. If “Yes” is the answer, then one speaks as "a solitary individual" and has done with Feuerbach’s impertinent theology of identity. So long as this nail is not firmly in, so long as the talk about "God in man" is not cut out at the roots, we have no cause to criticise Feuerbach, but are with him "the true children of his century."³

What Barth is saying basically is that Feuerbach does not deal a death blow to religion in his critique, but rather provides it with an important opportunity to examine itself to see whether it is true or not. What Feuerbach is critiquing is not true religion, but idolatry. And if anyone is interested in the extermination of idolatry it is the truly religious individual. As Barth said in another instance, "one can not speak of God simply by speaking of man in a loud voice."⁴ Or as the Bible says, "Thou shalt have no other Gods before me." (Ex. 20:3)

When we as religious people are faced with challenges to our faith, whether we're reading Feuerbach or a scientific journal, we should not dismiss the challenges out of hand. We should rather ask whether those challenging have a point. And more often than not, they do. With the demonstrated reality that religion in many cases is mere projection, we must urgently be aware of this propensity and make sure that our religion doesn't degenerate into projection, but rather humbly seeks the truth of God, always aware of the intrinsic dangers of doing just that.