ABSTRACT
Freud assumed that religion was an illusion, something that psychology could explain. Although later psychologists have not said this in these words, they too have assumed that religion is an illusion which they should be able to explain. In some ways this is a new kind of conflict between science and religion. The traditional solution to the science v. religion problem was to say that science deals with the material world and religion with the subjective world; but psychology claims to deal with the inner world too. In a parallel field there have been limited attempts to explain the effects of music on emotion, and it can be partly understood in terms of the physics of music, but this tells us little about our experience of the beauty and meaning of music. What seems to be wrong with all this is a failure to take seriously the experiences of those concerned, to recognise the power of metaphors and symbolic behaviour, which are felt to express some kind of truth, as in what we called ‘symbolic realism’. In contrast, psychologists have not tried to ‘explain’ mathematics, which is recognised as having an independent existence. Nor have they tried to explain physics, chemistry and the rest. At any rate psychology now recognises the existence of consciousness-immediate evidence for a non-material sphere. And the physical sciences have become far more abstract and mysterious than before-it is not far from cosmology to theology.
