ATTACKS ON RELIGION.

Press, Volume LXVI, Issue 19889, 28 March 1930, Page 21

ATTACKS ON RELIGION.

DANGER FROM PSYCHOLOGISTS. (rnoai OU* OWS COEWSSPOHDtHT.) ' ; LONDON, February 13. In the .second .of the series of. Barnpton Lectures; given at Oxford, the Bev, L. W. Grenstead, of University College, dealt with .the attempt? made recently by psychologists, to explain religion away. He pointed out that this attack did not come from .psychology of the .older, and more philosophical type, but had its origin in the pragmatism of Williani James.

The Behaviourists had. transformed this, so' far as religion was concerned, into a crude system of experimental ethics, with disastrous effects not, only on religion, but on common morality. ; The most dangerous attack ever made on religious belief came'from the psychoioanalygts. Here it was claimed that the whole idea of God was a mere projecting ofhumari ideals and ambitions; Religious symbolsand beliefs were" re? garded as' arising naturally as a compensation by which man comforted and secured hitnself in a world which, in reality offered him no permanence and no immortality. The lecturer dealt at length with the account of religion given by Freud and Jung, and showed its incomplete character/ ■

; Jung, for example, assumed that we had no historical knowledge of the life of. Christ and that the; Gospels w«re mere mythology. The lecturer showed that Jung's own explanation, of , the facts, of religion was even more mythOr logical. 'Unless there was, a -real historical basis for Christianity a,U history became unintelligible. '• But the belief in the- reality of his? Tory made fully possible a belief in the reality of a God behind and in his. Tory- ■"