Sigmund Freud and C.G. Jung hunting in Africa 1909.

                                         Freud and Jung playing billiards, 1908


Carl Gustav Jung worked closely with Sigmund Freud between 1907 and 1912. The careers of both Jung and Freud produced many of the paramount theories and analysis techniques still used in the field of psychology today. While many of the two men’s theories coincided very well, the few they actually disagreed upon had poignancy greater than the consistencies combined. Jung agreed with Freud's model of the unconscious, as Jung called the personal unconscious, but he also proposed the existence of a second, far deeper form of the unconscious, which underlies the personal one. This was the collective unconscious, where the archetypes themselves resided: archetypes which house our connectedness with God. Freud, on the other hand, dismissed Jung’s interest in religion and myths as being ‘unscientific.’

Yet, as Jung began to break through the shadow cast by Freud after they parted ways, he shows the motivation behind his research is coming from a very different place than Freud’s. Here are some quotes I believe illustrate these deviations well:


“Were it not a fact of experience that supreme values reside in the soul, psychology would not interest me in the least, for the soul would then be nothing but a miserable vapor.”
- Carl Jung


“Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.”
- Sigmund Freud


So Jung is interested in answering the mysteries of the “supreme value” of the soul, which he later goes on to describe as God’s spirit within us. In many articles Jung defends this as his motivation behind all his research and discovery and why he is interested in the subconscious in the first place. Jung says there is no Psychology without God.

Still, Freud stands contrary, slating God as a happy accident. He says that, in our minds we have constructed God out of an innate need to have a strong father figure guide us. Freud defends this view as evolutionarily driven and sexually maintained. Freud says there is no God without Psychology.

Shifting gears a bit, I want to use what we just learned about Jung and Freud’s motivations to formulate their arguments on a specific and unique neurobiological phenomenon: Temporal Lobe Epilepsy. But first: a little background.

There are no good statistics on the amount of people with Temporal Lobe Epilepsy (TLE) or who can have it. Temporal lobe seizures usually begin in the deeper portions of the brain's temporal lobe. This area is part of the limbic system, which controls emotions and memory. During a seizure, some individuals with TLE experience some pretty wild things. Sometimes the seizures are so mild that the person barely notices. In other cases, the person may be consumed with fright, intellectual fascination, or even pleasure.

While the features of seizures beginning in the temporal lobe can be extremely varied, certain patterns are common. There may be a mixture of different feelings, emotions, thoughts, and experiences, which may be familiar or completely foreign. In some cases, a series of old memories resurfaces. In others, the person may feel as if everything—including home and family—appears strange. Hallucinations of voices, music, people, smells, or tastes may occur. These features are called “auras” or “warnings.” They may last for just a few seconds, or may continue as long as a minute or two. But in extreme cases, patients claim to experience deep and fulfilling religious feelings. The weirdest part, some of these people who experience this aren’t even religious themselves. Various spiritually related phenomena triggered by the seizures originating in the temporal lobe are actually common, within the relatively small group of people who have TLE.

If you wish to delve further into TLE or verify the mystery for yourself, check out these relevant scholarly articles:

RELIGIOUS AND MYSTICAL EXPERIENCES AS ARTIFACTS OF TEMPORAL LOBE FUNCTION: A GENERAL HYPOTHESIS


Sudden Religious Conversions in Temporal Lobe Epilepsy

The Neural Substrates of Religious Experience

So, how does Freud explain this phenomenon? And Jung? Well sadly, TLE hadn’t been recognized as a distinct condition until the 1940’s, so there is little if anything to connect the two men to TLE directly. But if we take the motivations we already talked about along with other liberties of well known biographies of the men, we may be able to speak for Freud and Jung on the mysteries of TLE.

Let us begin with Freud. Sigmund Freud’s theories were steeped heavily in recessed sexual motivations. He thought that any behavior, subconscious or conscious, could be traced back to some sort of erotic desire. Freud believed religion to be a neurosis; something to be cured. But he also said religious feelings can be connected to our innate need to be connected with a father figure. In Freud’s time, TLE would have been classified as “Hysteria”, which is a classification once given to schizophrenia, dementia, and the effects of LSD. Needless to say, neurology at Freud’s time was blossoming at best. There was little actually known about the subconscious, and even less about its many manifestations. Yet that didn’t stop Freud from formulating grand theories of the inner workings of the brain, and developing many theories that are fundamental to modern psychology.

Freud’s Moses and Monotheism has him writing:

"Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. [...] If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man's evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity." 

It becomes pretty clear that Freud believes mentally healthy individuals, simply by definition, cannot be religious. That we as “civilized individuals” must get past the illness of religious desire to fully mature. So how then, would Freud view the religious experience of TLE seizures? My guess is he would argue that any manifestations related to the stimulation of the brain’s temporal lobes are to be seen as delusions of a hysterical condition. Freud would say that a religious manifestation of this kind would be related to a guilt complex; the patient looking to a father for forgiveness in their subconscious.

Jung was a bit younger than Freud, but let us assume they are working within the same professional atmosphere, as far as what is known about neurology. Jung says:

“Since the stars have fallen from heaven and our highest symbols have paled, a secret life holds sway in the unconscious. That is why we have a psychology today, and why we speak of the unconscious. All this would be quite superfluous in an age or culture that possessed symbols."


So Jung is saying that spiritual connectedness, at one point in history, could be gained easily from an external source, like the stars. But now that we know what stars actually are, we are no longer able to receive external connectedness and must look inward; to the subconscious. He equates the modern psychologist with the priests and shamans of old, considering all three to be students of the mysteries of existence.

Then, how about Jung and TLE? First of all, I would doubt Jung would have the arrogance to dismiss TLE as anything less than an affliction. So, in this, I imagine he and Freud agree. But, I would venture to say that Jung would consider a seizure that provided a religious experience to be a rare glimpse into a lost connectedness with God. Since Jung considered the collective unconscious to literally contain knowledge known by our ancestors, he would see this manifestation as wildly relevant to not only psychology but the collective search for truth. In other words, Jung would not be as concerned with the affliction as he is with the manifestation.

Many patients with TLE consider their visions during seizures to be gifts from God. Reading their testimonies, I tend to agree. When an event causes someone to look deeper into himself to find meaning outside himself, that is maturation. By that logic, Freud viewing these events as immature delusions seems infantile.

Jung is often critiqued by religious thinkers for his poor theology and perennial philosophy. They are often correct, but they can also miss the main point. Jung was clear that his analytical psychology was not a new religion, neither was he a guru. "Psychology is concerned with the act of seeing and not with the construction of new religious truths," he wrote. Make no mistake however; Jung was deeply invested in THE search for truth.

What can we learn from this debate? Well first, that interpretation is the great intellectual scale. Without it, we couldn’t challenge each other to discover as much as we have about the world around us. Second, the feeling of spiritual connectedness can be interpreted as delusion or reality. Nevertheless, what I gather most from this discussion; is that God is reaching out. God is calling out to his people, maybe in ways that seem foreign or unnecessary to us, but where we look- He can be found, and who are we to tell Him how.

“When I reflect on so many profoundly marvelous things that persons have grasped, sought, and done I recognize even more clearly that human intelligence is a work of God, and one of the most excellent.”

                                                                   - Galileo Galilei


As we think about faith as an intellectual act, it is important to know the history behind this debate. For thousands of years, religion and its various traditions dominated the way we, as human beings, define the world around us. Religion was unquestioned as truth, despite its various eccentricities. And we, as followers, reserved scrutiny for those who would not follow our creed as closely as we. The discussion was confined to the best ways of understanding and putting into practice a religious truth that had already been revealed. Nevertheless, over the last five hundred years or so, as a result of religious persecution and various oppression by the church, the debate about the ONE TRUTH became a household one. With the advent of modernity, the questions on which philosophers and religious thinkers had been reflecting for centuries underwent a dramatic and unprecedented change.

Beginning in the 16th century, the Protestant Reformation and the Scientific Revolution began to erode the position of authority held by religion. A new willingness to confront religious authority and a new respect for reason and its accomplishments began to counter established ways of thinking based on revealed religious truth. As a result, modern philosophy began to separate from theology, and new philosophers began constructing a universal, human rationality independent of faith. For the first time in human history, it had become possible to not simply ponder faith and its forms of expression, but to challenge it as a fundamental truth—and to even question the very existence of God.

Needless to say, opening the existence of God to debate has far reaching implication for our lives today. Should "creation theory" be placed on an equal footing with the teaching of evolution in the public schools? Should religious doctrine have a voice in determining the legality of contraception, abortion, or medical solutions to the inability to have children? With this blog, I won’t presume to tackle these complex issues. Yet with these more specific implications come even more philosophical questions to ponder: Is religion irrational and illusory or is it actually essential for human life? Is religious faith merely blind submission, or can it, in fact, be part of an intellectually vital and realistic view of the world?

In examining the challenges to religious thought and the defenses mounted in favor of it through the Protestant Reformation, Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment, and subsequent periods up to the present day and a discussion of secularism, we shall find that this debate permeates our lives and has become more poignant than ever. Through thinkers like Thomas Aquinas, whose integration of theology and Aristotelian philosophy made him the most important Christian thinker of the Middle Ages, to more modern intellectuals like Sigmund Freud, who argued that God was an expression of infantile wishes and considered religion the "universal obsessional neurosis of mankind": we, on either side of this debate have taken heed with our predecessors.

But the truth remains, many of history’s greatest minds have been of the faithful. Albert Einstein defended God vehemently “…against the [scientific] idea of a continuous game of dice.” That the universe as we know it is not a product of chance but intelligently designed by God who is unfathomable. He once wrote:

“The scientist’s religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.”

Essentially Einstein is saying that, not only is scientific discovery a way to marvel at God’s power, but is inevitably futile. For we still know so little of the mysteries God has given us to solve. That to search for those solutions is to search for God. And when said solution is found, we mustn’t be impressed by the greatness of man to have discovered it, but be electrified by the perplexity of God to have provided us the necessary knowledge to do so.

This idea of no knowledge being known if not through God is one that I have found to be paramount in my spiritual and intellectual journey. I believe that when one opens his eyes to the power of God, he will be amazed by the sheer complexity of His omnipotence. I understand that this precedent carries with it the implication that we may never truly know God, and so the skeptic may say, “Why even try?” But I would argue that the failing is not in our ability to know God, but in our inability to define Him in terms of mere human language. He is unknowable because He is indescribable.



Therefore faith, by this understanding, becomes inherently intellectual and the search for truth becomes intrinsically spiritual. One cannot truly exist without the other.

The Search for Truth

My road to faith, as all worthwhile roads are, has been under construction for years.  The route was laid by my upbringing. As a boy I was very involved in the church; knowing of Him but never truly knowing God. It wasn’t until many years later and much worldly (and self) exploration, that I found the truth and the way.  I’ll be the first to admit that, before this, I was a skeptic; even a defender of science as truth. Through what I know now to be a limited understanding of the world, I felt that the more one knows about the mysteries of our universe, the more he is inclined to refute the existing of God.  And conversely, that all of the faithful are sheltered by some grand ignorance. That faith was even a sort of injustice of the masses. But just as my road to faith was laid by the ignorance of youth, it was paved by the enlightenment of knowledge. Therefore, I am writing this blog to not only encourage intellectual scrutiny of faith, but to tell you that, if the search for truth is performed properly, that truth will manifest itself in the form of faith itself—which I believe in fact, to be the one and only truth-- all other truths holding their merit through it.

I will present arguments of sorts: various articles to look at both sides of a particular debate of faith. I will dissect the opinions of highly educated individuals, both classic and modern, to offer a defense for the faithful.  Although my exploration will be rather academic, my conclusions will be in the support of faith. Opinion will reign, and as such should be open to discussion.  Please discuss the thought provoking questions I present and the subsequent version of truth I offer. If you are a believer reading this, I challenge you to welcome scrutiny of our faith in Jesus Christ our Lord.  After all, faith can have little strength if never challenged.  If you are a skeptic reading this, thank you for earnestly searching for truth. For I have stood where you stand, and know that if you are here, you have already made the important decision of objectivity: to hear informed opinions and make a choice for yourself.  After all, that is the true task of the intellectual.

Take this journey with me, as a believer or skeptic, and we will grow as individuals of faith and intellect.