In his book The Future of An Illusion, Freud (1928) struggled to create a theory that would distinguish morality from religion so that people would still be able to know right from wrong even if they did not believe in a God. According to Freud, humans belongedto civilization to control nature and to regulate human relations. However, Freud claimedthat humans have often paid a great price for civilization; this price, he believed, wasneurosis. Consequently, humans began to look for some kind of compensation to confrontthe neurosis. Freud's theory maintained that religion often evolved as this compensation.Freud suggested that religion and ethics, to this point, have acted to maintain civilization.However, Freud also proposed that humans were helpless before the forces of nature andthus "needed" something to protect them. Thus, he concluded that religion has sprung outof helplessness and therefore was unhealthy to the individual. Based on this theory ofreligion, Freud proposed the need to consider a way to sustain morality apart fromreligion. As is generally known, the central Freudian criticism of belief in God is that such a belief isuntrustworthy because of its psychological origin. That is, God is a projection of our ownintense, unconscious desires; He is a wish fulfillment derived from childish needs forprotection and security. Since these wishes are largely unconscious, any denial of such aninterpretation is to be given little credence. It should be noted that in developing this kindof critique, Freud has raised the ad hominem argument to one of wide influence. It is inThe Future of an Illusion (1927, 1961) that Freud makes his position clearest:Religious ideas have arisen from the same needs as have all the other achievements ofcivilization: from the necessity of defending oneself against the crushing superior force ofnature. (p. 21)Therefore, religious beliefs are:...illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest and most urg...
