Though a Jew, Freud was an atheist for most of his life. He went through a brief period of “wavering” on the issue of God in his university days—during which time he wrote to a friend, “The bad part of it, especially for me, lies in the fact that science of all things seems to demand the existence of a God”1—yet he emerged from his studies without religious conviction. Freud’s peers, and many authors of the time, were immersed in scientific materialism, and he remained a strident atheist. Another factor may have been the appalling anti-Semitism that swept through his native and culturally Roman Catholic Austria. In the light of his experiences of the weakness of Christianity at repelling such vitriol, one writer comments, “One can understand Freud’s motivation to discredit and destroy what he called the ‘religious Weltanschauung (worldview)’ and why he referred to religion as ‘the enemy.’ ”2
In arguing against the existence of God, Freud believed that an individual’s perspective on what God is like sprung from his or her experience of their own father. When people grow up and find themselves alone in the world they cannot go on looking to human parents for security but must find some other more ultimate source of security and end up positing a God to fill this role.
He argued that it is this human need to rise above the vulnerability and frailty of adult existence that leads to us positing the existence of some higher power or God: “When the growing individual finds that he is destined to remain a child for ever, that he can never do without protection against strange superior powers, he lends those powers the features belonging to the figure of his father.”3
From this perspective, God is merely a creation of the human mind, a projection emanating from human need and desire rather than a distinct reality or being that exists independently of the human mind. Freud’s notion of God acting as an idealized father figure for humans, providing a cushion from the harshness of the real world and a comforting friend in the midst of life’s troubles, reduces God to a human construct. Indeed, for Freud, God is made in humanity’s own image and is the “ultimate wish-fulfillment”; God does not actually exist but is merely the creation of humanity’s imagination and desire for a loving father figure.4
Source: www.rzim.org