SOUTHERN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
'S THE GENETIC fALLACY A fALLACY?
JON PASHMAN
Long Island University
By the Genetic Fallacy is meant at
least the following: "When someone
gives an account of what led someone
(or a group) to a view and argues that
since this (the account) is true, the
view is false, this is called the Genetic
Fallacy. Such an argument is incor-
rect since what led someone to a view
is irrelevant to determining whether
the view is true." (Carney and Scheer,
Fundamentals of Logic (New York:
Macmillan, 1964), p. 32).
Let us look at a case in which some
question of a Genetic Fallacy might
arise. It will be instructive in showing
that such a fallacy, if it ever occurs,
is contextual, not general.
Suppose we meet a Freudian who
adduces a causal explanation for re-
ligious belief. His argument proceeds
in this way: because a child depends
on his parents for love, sustenance and
care, he develops close attachments to
them. However, this image of parents
who love is tempered with one of par-
ents who discipline and judge harshly,
at times even withdrawing their love.
The analogy between this picture
and the theistic God is readily appar-
ent in His mercy and love, His tendency
to punish for sin, to engender awe in
His people, etc. But why should the
child's picture of the parents in some
sense "cause" theistic belief?
The causal link runs through the
Oedipus complex, in which Freud sees
the male child by age four coming to
desire the mother sexually and to re-
gard the father as a rival. Fear of the
father's hostility drives the complex
• Alston, William P.: "Psychology and Theistic Belief," in Faith and the Philosophers, ed. John
Hick (New York: Macmillan, 1964·), p, 73.
, Ibid., p. 73.
* This view did not begin with Freud. Something very much like it is found in Spinosa,
Ethics (New York: Hafner, 1949), p. 73.
57
SPRING, 1970
into the unconscious where it remains,
a troublesome matrix of repressed
wishes, fears and desires:
As the child matures in his society,
he is presented with the figure of a
divine God on whom the repressed
material is projected. So far this thesis
is relatively weak since it explains only
the tendency to accept a pre-existing
theological system without explaining
the origin of the system.'
For philosophic reasons, let us posit
a more radical thesis, namely that
Judeo-Christian theological belief origi-
nated in the projection of the father-
principle into the universe. *
What does projection do for the in-
dividual? It lessens the tension inher-
ent in the repressed Oedipal conflicts:
namely conflict between tendencies to
rebel against the father and tendencies
to submit to him and between the
drive to satisfy desires which his father
opposes and the prohibitions against
satisfying them. (The more radical
thesis would of course depend on a
similar psychological picture obtaining
for the female.) Projection of a divine
image reduces conflicts in a number of
ways.
Jon Pashman, educated at Colgate, Co-
lumbia and New York University, has been
teaching at Long Island University for five
years. He is currently doing work in Ethics,
Epistemology, and Theory of Action. One
of his longer range projects involves an
examination of the aesthetic bases of moral
judgments. He has completed a monograph
entitled The Genetic Fallacy which will be
published shortly.
SOUTHERN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
(1) Externalization of the problem
affords relief in the substitution of a
clear-cut opposition (between various
desires of one's own, on the one hand,
and a forbidding external person on
the other) for a discomfort nameless
and hidden.
(2) Rebellious tendencies are sub-
merged in favor of submissive ones
since the perfection and beauty of the
divine object make hostility inappro-
priate while God's omnipotence de-
mands submission.
(3) Rebellion and hostility are dis-
placed upon those outside the religion
who are punished for disobeying the
"father," and
(4 ) Oedipal guilt (repressed love
for the mother and fear of loss of father-
ly love) is assuaged by various forms
of penance and forgiveness:
It should be noted that the Freudian
supplements the projection theory with
the concept of regression, the tendency
to revert to less mature forms of re-
sponse in the face of emotional dis-
turbance. Freud's attack on the mystic's
feeling of oneness with the divine in
Civilization and its Discontents takes
this line. Regression has the further
power of explaining increase in in-
tensity of worship during periods of
stress.
Put aside the question of the Freu-
dian theory for a moment. Is the
Genetic Fallacy committed in the fol-
lowing argument: Premise-Belief in
God is a projection of the father-princi-
ple into the universe.
Conclusion-God does not exist.
On the usual model, this is clearly
an invalid argument for it moves from
the psychological origin of a belief to
an assertion about its truth.
The Freudian asserts a causal re-
• Ibid., p. 74.
* In my usage a premise is relevant to a conclusion if it is one consideration (reason) whose
truth would, either alone or with additional premises, support or establish the truth of the
conclusion.
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SPRING, 1970
lation between a set of sociological and
psychological conditions and the tend-
ency to hold a certain theological be-
lief. The genetic fallacy doctrine as-
serts that even if psycho-social condi-
tions are causally sufficient for a belief
they are irrelevant to the truth or
falsity of the belief. Hence the truth
or falsity of the belief "God exists" is
logically independent of its genesis.
Indeed, my relation to my father,
even if sufficient to compel belief in
God, is a "bad reason" for that be-
lief, perhaps no reason at all. But good-
ness and badness cannot be read off a
bare premise and a conclusion in iso-
lation from all other considerations.
For what about the more radical thesis,
that Judea-Christian theism originated
in projections of the father-principle
into the universe?
It may easily be granted that, even
under this more radical thesis, the argu-
ment from "Belief in God is a projec-
tion" to "God does not exist" is in-
valid, and if the Genetic Fallacy means
an invalid argument from genetic ma-
terial to a conclusion, we have here
such a fallacy. However, as I noted
previously, the Genetic Fallacy is a
"Fallacy of Irrelevance." And it is
far from obvious that the premise as
stated is irrelevant to the conclusion.*
Is there not the feeling that even if the
contrary conclusion does not follow,
somehow the Freudian premise under-
cuts God's existence, perhaps in con-
junction with other suitable premises?
I believe there are grounds for this
feeling. They lie in recognizing that
Freud's naturalistic explanation of the
origins of theistic belief may be correct
and complete; and if this naturalistic
explanation is complete, why might not
other phenomena (all other?) be
amenable to naturalistic explanation?
I.e., the relevance of the premise to
the existence question lies in seeing
SOUTHERN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
how the appeal to God (the supernat-
ural) as an explanatory principle is
rendered useless by exhaustive natural-
istic explanations of this kind.
If my analysis is correct, the natural-
istic explanation of theistic belief is
relevant to the claim "God exists"
though not sufficient to disconfirm
that claim. The theistic claim for God
is that he is needed to explain the
world. The naturalist shows God to be
unnecessary to this task. And one of
his major premises is to prove by Ge-
netic argument that theism can be
naturalistically explained. In view of
this, to dismiss the genetic material as
irrelevant is too quick a maneuver.
The question of relevance between
premise and conclusion does not end
here. For the stronger thesis can be
turned into a defensive move which
supports (without establishing) the ex-
istence of God. For example, John
Hick writes:
. . . Perhaps the most interesting
theological comment to be made
upon Freud's theory is that in his
work on the father-image, he may
have uncovered the mechanism by
which God creates an idea of him-
self in the human mind. For if the
relation of a human father to his
children is, as the Judeo-Christian
tradition teaches, analogous to God's
relationship to man, it is not sur-
prising that human beings should
think of God as their heavenly father
and should come to know him
through the infant's experience of
utter dependence and the growing
child's experience of being loved,
cared for, and disciplined within a
family. Clearly, to the mind which
is not committed in advance to a
naturalistic explanation, there may
be a religious as well as a natural-
istic interpretation of the psychologi-
cal facts.'
We are left with the question, "In
• Hick, John: Philosophy of Religion (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc.,
1963), p. 36.
59
SPRING, 1970
which direction does the premise (ex-
pressing the relation between projec-
tion and theistic belief) point?" To-
ward existence or non-existence of God?
Whatever the merits of these con-
flicting positions, one thing is clear.
The Genetic Fallacy must be restricted
to the formula: it is fallacious to argue
from genetic material which is irrele-
vant to a conclusion, to the truth of
that conclusion. Just how the psycho-
logical material is relevant to the con-
clusion, "God exists," is what has
come into dispute.
We left the Freudian on one side,
taking the fact of projection as a rea-
son to doubt God's existence and the
theologian who finds in that fact a
reason to affirm God's existence.
The above dispute looks irresoluble.
One may be inclined to say, "Every-
thing depends on the way one takes
'projection.'" For the Freudian, pro-
jection is a "merely psychic phenome-
non." The import of this remark is
that the formation of the concept "God"
was purely passive and causal. The
concept represents not the outcome of
a cognitive process during which rea-
sons were weighed, but the extrusion
of an inevitable by-product of cul-
turally-given stresses and familiarly-
based strains. So reasons offered after
the fact can only be rationalizations to
protect religion and to serve those for
whom religion is a comfort.
For the theologian, "projection" is
not merely psychological. While not
necessarily the outcome of a cognitive
process, it has the status of a discovery,
an intuitive awareness that God is at
the base of the self.
So far so good, but the theologian's
position weakens when he is challenged
to show uses for the concept "God"
beyond the merely psychological one
stressed by Freud. To see if this weak.
ness is permanent, let us go deeper into
presuppositions on both sides.
SOUTHERN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
I characterized the Freudian and the
theologian similarly. I said they both
agreed on the fact of projection, but
took it differently. What does this
"taking differently" mean? Why is the
projection evidence for God on the
one hand and evidence against him on
the other?
If the dispute continued, the answer
would emerge clearly. The theologian
would speak of the place of man in the
design of the universe as a whole, his
freedom to walk one path rather than
another, the nisus toward good, the
temptation of evil. Within this context
of theoretical presuppositions, projec-
tion will be seen as evidence for God's
existence.
In contrast, the Freudian speaks of
man's instinctual aggressiveness, de-
structiveness, eroticism, his bondage to
these drives, the ego torn apart by the
demands of superego and id. As the
naturalistic picture approaches com-
pleteness for man's mental and emo-
tional life, the room left for something
"spiritual" dwindles. The denial of
man's freedom is one with the denial
of his divine origin. No wonder pro-
jection is one link in a pattern which
could not include God.
What appeared to be merely a dis-
agreement in attitude turns out to be
a full-blown disagreement in theory,
over which theory explains the facts.
What this conflict illustrates is that
the full meaning of "projection," a
theoretical term, is given only within
the context of a theory. Within a
thoroughgoing naturalism, its epis-
temic meaning is one thing; in a theo-
logical framework, it may be quite
another.
At this point it may be objected
that while it is fair to think of Freud's
intellectual production as a theory, it
is stretching usage too far to call theo-
logical frameworks "theories." I do
not at this point want to haggle over
this, so I will briefly state my reasons
for calling theological frameworks, e.g.,
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SPRING, 1970
Catholicism "theories." In general, it
seems to me that such frameworks
have enough in common with the fam-
ily of "theories," including physical,
psychological, and philosophical to be
included in that genus.
In particular, theological "theories"
share with some or all of the family
members the following characteristics:
( 1) they purport to explain; e.g., the
Catholic theory purports to explain
the origin of the world, the nature
of man, man's actions, etc.
(2) they accomplish this task within
a theory of action (or picture of hu-
man nature) in which terms e.g., soul,
grace, sin, etc. are implicitly defined
by their role in the theory as a whole.
(3) they aim at coherence and sys-
tematization of assertions, e.g., the at-
tempt to reconcile evil in the world
with God's goodness.
(4) they predict man's future (that
such prediction is non-scientific is ir-
relevant; they purport to predict and
that is enough).
We can now return to the Freudian
and the theologian, still at each other's
throat. The Freudian has just insisted
that he has the whole of science on his
side, that his is the simplest explana-
tion consistent with the facts. He fur-
ther insists that the positivists were cor-
rect in thinking that there simply is no
sensory evidence, direct or indirect, for
God's existence, that we don't even
know what such evidence would look
like.
The theologian can take refuge in
the thesis of this paper with the fol-
lowing argument. He can grant the
positivist one true premise while urg-
ing that the positivist' conclusion is in-
valid. The positivist is right to say,
"We don't know what sensory evidence
for God's existence would be like," but
wrong to conclude from this that no
evidence for God's existence could be
sensory. Indeed, what turns out to be
sensory evidence for what is ultimately
SOUTHERN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
a theoretical consideration; relative to
a theological framework, 'projection' is
sensory evidence for God's existence.
Relative to the Freudian framework,
it is not.
"But surely," rejoins the Freudian,
"in strict scientific inquiry, the para-
digm of clear thinking, what is evidence
for what is not relative in this way."
The theologian is not, surprisingly,
dismayed by this onslaught. He replies
as follows:
"I will pass over without comment
your persuasive definition of Freudian
psychology as 'strict scientific inquiry'
and ask how you can be so sure that
what is evidence for what is not rela-
tive, even in strictly scientific activi-
ties?" The justification of this remark
follows.
The point of Quine's work, Two
Dogmas of Empiricism, further devel-
oped in Word and Object, is to estab-
lish the thesis that our conceptual
framework is under-determined by sen-
sory stimuli. That is, the traditional
dichotomy assumed to lie at the base of
experience, the dichotomy between
"brute fact" (sensory bombardment)
and a conceptual framework by which
we order the given, is a false one. He
puts it as follows:
. . . Total science is like a field of
force whose boundary conditions are
experience. A conflict with expe-
rience at the periphery occasions
readjustments in the interior of the
field . . . The total field is so un-
derdetermined by its boundary con-
ditions, experience, that there is
much latitude of choice as to what
statements to reevaluate in the light
of any single contrary experience. No
particular experiences are linked
with any particular statements in the
interior of the field except indirect-
ly through considerations affecting
the field as a whole . . . Any state-
ment can be held true come what
• Quine, Williard Van Orman: "Two Dogma of Empiricism," in From a Logical Point of
View by Quine (New York: Harper and Row, 1953), pp. 42-43.
61
SPRING, 1970
may, if we make drastic enough ad-
justments elsewhere in the system
. .. No statement is immune to re-
vision . . . it is misleading to speak
of the empirical content of an in-
dividual statement-especially if it
is a statement at all remote from
the experiential periphery of the
field."
Quine's position has some well-known
implications and some not so obvious.
The first, which is well-known, is the
outright rejection of the trichotomy
"analytic-synthetic-meaningless," the
positivist cudgel wielded so forcefully
against the theologian. Not so obvious
is a "third way" open to theology and
suggested by Quine's analysis, between
a futile competition with science on
the one hand, and a question-begging
mysticism on the other. It lies in a
shift toward pragmatism for the theist
just as, Quine has shown, the scientist
himself has shifted.
A religion must accordingly be seen
as a theoretical framework within
which experience is ordered. Since
prediction is not the aim, competition
with science is unnecessary. And yet, a
religion is a "seeing as," a way of tak-
ing experience, of giving it meaning.
But experience is not a brute given to
which the conceptual frame of religion
is added; experience is given as re-
ligious, e.g., the phenomenon ex-
plained by projection is "seen as" evi-
dence of God's work; the universe as
structured by ethical categories. Posi-
tivism seemed effective against religion
because the theist was challenged to
demonstrate a one-to-one relationship
between his categories and "sense data."
But this was unfair for two reasons. In
the first place, scientific statements,
whose acceptance hinges on the total
body of science, bear no such simple
relation to the sensory given. And the
key religious statements (e.g., involving
God) like the key scientific statements,
SOUTHERN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
are remote from the sensory periphery
of experience.
The skeptic may retort: "This sub-
jects religion to pragmatic criteria, e.g.,
"need fulfillment," and cuts the abso-
lute (certain, indubitable) ground
away, the ground it has always
claimed."
"What of it, if pragmatic grounds
serve science, surely they will serve re-
ligion? And this is far better then
throwing out the latter for meaningless-
ness."
He may again retort, "This makes
any religion true by fiat, if it fulfills
my needs."
"Not really, for the predicate 'true'
no more applies to a religious system
than to a scientific one. And this way
of seeing the matter does show how
a religious system orders the world for
one who accepts it and how some
scientists can be believers. The task
for philosophy is to elucidate the logic
of religious discourse and then to dis-
• This paper was delivered at the Pacific Division meetings of the American Philoscphical
Association held on March 26-28, 1970, in Berkeley, California.
62
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cuss how it may conflict with other
modes of reasoning."
At this point, can we say that the
Freudian and the theologian were in
essential disagreement over the facts?
I think they certainly were; indeed,
they illustrated a conflict of two con-
ceptual systems (a theological and a
psychoanalytic), not merely of two
arguments or premises.
Finally, what has the previous dis-
cussion to say for the question of the
Genetic Fallacy? It suggests that
the classical statement of the Genetic
Fallacy (p. 57) has oversimplified the
relation between the causation of a be-
lief and its truth by: (a) missing the
fact that the relevance of causal mater-
ial to truth is often established by means
of a suitable theory (or conceptual
framework) relating that material to
truth-claims, and (b) treating the fal-
lacy as if it were general (as if to es-
tablish that x is genetic for y ensures
that x is irrelevant to the truth of y)
and not contextual (dependent on the
type of causal link of x to y)."