The Necessity of God
Why Webster Was Wrong, Part One
Interpreting, reviewing the third part of Richard Webster’s Why Freud Was Wrong, “Psychoanalysis, Science and the Future.”
(Art by Michelle Horsley)
Webster’s Hubris
Webster’s manifesto in the third part is where the whole book has been leading until now. Having applied his erudition and intellectuality to deconstruct Freud’s system and personality and show all its flaws and foibles, Webster now attempts to offer an alternative approach. It was here, with this final section, that a growing dislike for the author—or more accurately a general distaste for his perspective—began to take over my experience. (It took the Afterword to fully compound it.)
Getting through this third section was a real slog, one I was sorely tempted to skip but chose not to in the interests of completeness. Having now read it, I would say the book would be much stronger without it. Webster doesn’t show the same degree of rigor or insight when it comes to presenting his own ideas as when he is refuting Freud’s. His diagnosis is sound; his proposed cure less so.
Webster was born in 1950 and his book was published in 1995, so he was only in his early forties when he wrote it (perhaps younger if it took some time to complete and publish). In the first two parts, in terms of Webster’s writing ability, insight, how thoroughly he get to grips with Freud’s work, and how sober and balanced he manages to stay throughout, I would have guessed the author was in his sixties. His youth begins to show in the last section, however.
Admittedly, Webster’s hubris—his unconscious arrogance—is explicit throughout the book. His constant rejection of religion, theism, creationism, his assumption that any thinking person will have reached the same conclusion (that religious thinking is wrong and that we’ve moved forever beyond it), betrays a collective kind of arrogance that Webster demonstrates in miniature.
It’s a massive flaw in his thesis; rather than tackling the really big existential questions, he passes over them with a cynical shrug, like a gunslinger marching indifferently through Indian burial grounds.
Webster’s arrogance actually takes it a step further than cynical indifference, because the premise and purpose of his book is to get rid of religion completely. (He is fairly explicit about this.) The problem he constantly refers to with Freud, and everything that grew up around him, is the crypto-theist, crypto-creationist, crypto-religious aspect. Until we get rid of that under layer of religious thinking, Webster argues, we’re never going to understand ourselves or come to a working theory of human existence.
This is an error of Promethean proportions, and it is classic hubris. One upside of Webster’s hubris, however, is that it gives me an opportunity to question—here at the place where faith and hubris meet—my own certainty, convictions, and dogmatism around the God-subject.
Originary Myths, Ancient and Modern
Compared to some people I know, I don’t think of myself as particularly religious-minded; nor do I strongly identify with any religious denomination. Yet the conviction that God (and Christ) is a necessary hypothesis runs deep in me.
I also think this is a self-evident fact, one that Webster demonstrates, in his own way, by showing how the attempt to understand existence—not only without God, but without the idea of God—is always going to be self-defeating.
Webster’s attempt demonstrates this in ways more subtle than obvious, ways that are worth looking at more closely. Beyond this, he also demonstrates that the very desire to have a theory of human existence is a kind of hubris—which is precisely why—or how—God is a necessary element for understanding human existence (i.e., the acknowledgment that we are a total mystery to ourselves, one that only God can answer).
What Webster overlooks is that, if you’re going to come up with models of an original cause, then it’s really just God again by another name. Calling it the Big Bang or Darwinian evolution doesn’t explain anything, no matter how much you believe in it—it’s just another abstract creationist myth about something that happened long before humans existed, and so can never be confirmed.
Webster’s reliance on Darwinism is similarly misguided and naïve: a case of falling back on a modern consensus and pretending that faith isn’t an indispensable element to making this consensus “true.”
If there are positive gains to Webster’s hubris—as there often are—it is because he is having meaningful insights in his erroneous pursuit. It’s hard to say, at certain points, whether, by rejecting the idea of God as a fiction, he is moving towards a genuinely deeper perspective rather than a shallower one. As this substack is continuously circling back around to, a mental, spoken, or written formula of God—compared to a living experience—is always going to be a kind of fiction.
Webster never makes this proviso, though, and we have to extrapolate it from his arguments if we want to make the most of them. This may be giving him too much benefit of doubt, seeing as how Webster doesn’t show enough transcendental insight to deduce that his atheism is really a deeper kind of (crypto-)spirituality, as apparent atheism sometimes is.
On the other hand, Webster does focus on the body in a profound way, and he does occasionally appear to be getting close to something real, in the midst of all of his hubristic model-building.