Smile, You Are On Reality Camera : Or, God The Projection, We The Projectors

Here is a cheery Roman Catholic nun on a sunny day who was smiling once upon a time into a camera and now you, the reader of my blog, can see her 'projection' on your computer screen. I wonder what she would have said if she were to be told that the God she believes in is Itself her own Projection. She would probably have heard of the redoubtable Herr Sigmund Freud who had, according to popular opinion, demolished the idols of reactionary superstitition by showing how it is we human beings who project our deepest wishes, hopes, fear and desires onto the world, and thereby create gods out of our own images. This argument stated with brilliant brevity in many of Freud's books has now percolated down to the masses for whom, as I am never tired of repeating, it is not Religion but an easy-going and unself-critical Atheism that has become the new Opium.

How coherent, however, is this wide-spread notion that God is a Projection (GP) of the human mind/heart? In what follows, I shall not attempt to do either of the following. Firstly, (a) I shall not give you any proof for the existence of God, primarily because the very notion of 'proof' varies from one context to another. I would sooner prove that a unicorn exists than pay God the compliment of reminding God that God does, after all, exist. Secondly, (b) neither I shall demonstrate that God does not exist, not because there is any lack of disproofs but because it is much easier to think that one has done this than to be sure what exactly has been disproved, the reality of God or the reality of what one has presumed God to be like. Just as philosophers often set up 'straw-men' whom nobody accepts, they can also take a juvenile delight in constructing 'straw-gods' who never existed anyway.

Nothing as majestic as either of the above shall be attempted in this post. Here I shall simply point out why atheists should not use the metaphor of Projection in their arguments, and the reason for this can be stated very precisely : the metaphor of Projection self-destructs atheism. That is, an atheist who uses the GP has already undermined her own case even before putting it across.

Our day to day conversation is peppered with all kinds of metaphors : we say that a friend has passed away, that we are killing time, that someone has hit bull's eye, and that the government is biding its time. It is extremely important that we do not forget the metaphorical nature of these expressions, and it is precisely when we do forget this that we jump to unwarranted conclusions by becoming enslaved to the bewitching power of language. One of the most famous examples in this context is the phrase 'selfish gene'. Looking back over the Gene Wars (which, by the way, are still going on, and will go on for a long time to come until all the Genes have mutated themselves in utter despair), one can see that this highly metaphorical phrase has generated more heat than light. Genes themselves are dead pieces of DNA, it is we human beings who think, rightly or wrongly, that genes are selfish. To say that genes are selfish is only as meaningful or as meaningless as saying that your hormones are unpredictable, that your chromosomes are patriarchal, that your heart is patriotic, that your medulla is reductionist, that your duodenum is politically correct, that your brain is feminist, that your blood is Maoist, that your liver is alcoholic, that your pineal gland is eccentric, or that your nerves are edgy : cool magnet-poetry for your fridge, but very slippery language especially for those scientists who think that the mathematically exact language of science should be kept free from the 'sentimentality' of poetry.

A similar problem arises with the metaphor : God is a Projection (GP). To see what this is, let us first examine the metaphor in its 'home context' which is that of a camera which projects a movie onto a (real) screen. From this phenomenon, we extrapolate and say that just as a camera projects a film onto the (real) screen, so too we human beings project our desires and fears onto something and we refer to this 'something' as 'God'. Once again, excellent poetry, but let us note how we have been swept away by the power of (the English) language across the barrier created by this simple word called 'something'. In the former case, there is 'something' real onto which the film is projected, namely the wall, the backcloth or the screen. Therefore, an atheist who uses the GP as an analogy is unwittingly saying, whether or not she realises this fact : there is 'something' out there onto which we humans project our desires and fears, and this 'something' is real, just as the 'something' of the screen is real. But this is precisely what an atheist cannot assert, for the atheist claim is that there is no such external reality to which our beliefs and desires conform, correspond or relate to. In short : the analogic use of the GP is severely flawed.

Indeed, a theist can use the GP and turn it against the atheist. This is how a theist can reply : 'Just as in a movie projector, the camera projects the film onto a real screen (the 'something'), so too we human beings project our deepest hopes and fears onto an external reality that we call God (the 'something' in this case). Now given the fact that we human beings are living in a fallen world, it so happens that very often we project the wrong beliefs, hopes, wishes, and desires; consequently our images of God are also defective. What the GP as used by the atheist does prove is that our human beliefs about God are often false, and this is an important lesson that we must learn from the atheist. However, the atheist version of the GP does not in the least prove that there is no external reality called 'God'; it only shows that our human views of what we think this reality is need to be revised again and again.'

Indeed, living as we do in a supposedly post-modern era, we can in fact see that atheists who use the GP are hopelessly behind their times, for a post-modernist uses the GP to subvert not only Religion but Atheism itself. This is, in effect, what a post-modernist could say to an atheist : 'Very well, my friend, you have used your GP to show that there is no reality called 'God'. Thank you for having brought a ray of light into this darkness that is the world that we live in. But, then, how do you know that there is a reality called 'The World', the World that you think is revealed to you through your science and your mathematics? Well, my friend, you must be consistent enough and apply the clean-cutting Occam's Razor all the way down. Not only is there no real God, there is also no real World : if God is a Projection, so is the World. If God goes out of the window, everything else does.'

My reply to such post-modernist claims will move along very similar lines to my above criticism of the atheist use (or, actually, abuse) of the GP. There is a certain sense in which both God and The World are our human projections, and there is no need to deny the elementary fact that it is, after all, we human beings who have produced these notions. However, and this is the extremely crucial point, the mere fact that these are our human Projections is not sufficient reason to jump to the conclusion that there is no external reality underlying or underpinning these Projections of ours. Whether or not this is the case cannot be settled by the whimsical fiat of the post-modernist, it must be carefully investigated from one case to another. Some of these Projections, say those of the 'unicorn', the 'ether', and the 'phlogiston' may turn out to be merely that --- Projections, nothing more and nothing less. Others, such as The World, Islam, science, human rights, Buddhism, freedom, suffering, Marxism, hope, technology, and progress are once again our human Projections, very much so indeed, but whether or not these are mere Projections is a question that cannot be settled at one stroke by applying some arcane post-modernist mantra. (I shall leave the reader to ponder on the Irony of Ironies : that post-modernism itself is a Projection. I hope your head does not turn around too much thinking about this one.)

Let us try to be a bit more precise. The basic issue is not whether X, Y, or Z is a Projection, for all human notions, conceptions and beliefs are Projections, but whether or not X,Y, or Z is a Projection that is associated with a reality that is capable of sustaining it in an inter-subjective domain. Let us therefore drop the metaphor of Projection as being either as meaningful or as meaningless as the other currently fashionable one that 'genes are selfish' : they produce too much heat, but too little light (though I have never understood the point of this metaphor itself, heat and light being both forms of 'energy').