Our God — Page 201
Refutation of Arguments Supporting Atheism 201 as he grows up and out of his father’s shadow, he feels a vacuum in his mind in which the ‘father-son’ image is firmly established. This vacuum leads him to an imaginary being to replace his father figure and that imaginary being ultimately develops into a god. This theory is largely presented by a renowned European phi- losopher and scientist, Sigmund Freud, who was born to a Jewish family in Austria in 1856 and later migrated to England and died in 1954. He wrote many books and is considered an authority on human psychology. From this viewpoint, he raised many objec- tions about the concept of God and the philosophy of dreams. On the topic under discussion, he writes: In this way the mother, who satisfies the child’s hunger, becomes its first object of love and certainly also its first pro- tection against all the undefined dangers which threaten it in the external world; its first protection against anxiety, we may say. In this function [of protection] the mother is soon replaced by the stronger father, who retains that position for the rest of childhood. But the child’s attitude toward its father is coloured by a particular ambivalence. The father himself constitutes a danger for the child, per- haps because of his [father’s] earlier relation to its mother. Thus it fears him no less than it longs for him and admires him. [. . . ] When the growing individual finds that he is des- tined to remain a child forever, that he can never do with- out protection against strange superior powers, he lends those powers the features belonging to the figure of father. He creates himself the gods whom he dreads, whom he seeks to propitiate, and whom he nevertheless entrusts