Our Mother, Who Art in Heaven

Tamas Pataki hasn't burst into print for the purpose of weighing evidence. Having afforded religion what to his mind is its due—good sometimes comes from it; it can console people; it's been extremely popular through history—the Melbourne philosopher dismisses it as nonsense, "phantasy masquerading as knowledge." He then gets down to business, which is to try to account for how so many people, including highly intelligent ones, could believe in a transcendent, omnipotent, personal and solicitous God. There may be, he supposes, rational grounds for such a belief, but he can't think of any. So how does it take root in the mind, and why does it endure?

Pataki's Against Religion (Scribe; 136 pages) is the latest in a spate of atheistic books. It's a little heavy going in parts, and best read with a dictionary nearby. But while the related offerings of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens may have the edge for flair and accessibility, Pataki gets the prize for focused inquiry. Applying an almost Cartesian skepticism to research into the origins of religious devotion, and drawing on Freudian theory, he presents a plausible case that faith is held in place by a bunch of unconscious needs that arise soon after birth. The author has a bad back and is hard of hearing. He doesn't seem like the type to be spoiling for a fight. But he might well have picked one with his further claim that "we must seriously consider the possibility that many people's religious convictions depend principally . . . on something akin to mental illness."

Pataki notes that the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Islam and Christianity have many similarities. He lists 10, which include the idea of believers as superior or "chosen," an obsession with symbols and markings (skullcaps, turbans, crosses) to demarcate between believers and non-believers, and a Holy Book, prophet or charismatic leader. For Pataki, this overlap suggests something fundamental: religion is less important for what it is than for what it does. For a group he calls the "religiose"—the deeply, though not necessarily fanatically, religious—it soothes them. Where key human relationships have fallen short, it reassures them that they're special and loved. The need to feel these things is extremely powerful, Pataki argues, and trying to satisfy it can lead us to believe in the darnedest things.

The preconditions for belief in God, he suggests, are set in the first months of life, when the infant feels anxious when separated from the mother. His only wishes are to be free of hunger and pain, and to believe in the mother as infinitely provident and, later, that she knows everything. "It is remarkable, is it not," writes Pataki, "that these attributes—omnipotence, omniscience and omnibenevolence—so necessary in the regulation of infantile narcissism and wellbeing, are precisely the key perfections attributed to God?"

Few would argue that children want to believe in the infallibility of their carers. But sooner or later, don't we all realize that everyone is flawed, that there's no such thing as perfection, and that really this is no big deal? "Many people can't give up the idea, and that's why they're driven to religion," Pataki says. "They need to believe that somewhere there is a perfect, loving, all-seeing being who cares deeply for them. The idea may be surrendered consciously, but is usually retained unconsciously in some form by most people." The idolization of pop singers and sports people springs from the same craving, he says, as does the tendency to rally behind political leaders during crises: "When people are afraid they often regress and once again invoke the perfect parental figure as some sort of savior."

Of course, some people never believe in a god, or quickly abandon the idea of one. There are many paths to atheism, says Pataki, who rejected the tenets of his Jewish education in his teens. Some children "are simply intellectually robust enough to reason themselves out of religious indoctrination," he says. Others witness such horrors that religious belief becomes impossible for them, while others still have had secure early relationships and have "internalized their good parental objects in a reasonably healthy way." Belief in God mightn't be rational, but likening it to mental illness is a big call. "From my perspective, some religious belief is so outlandish, so contrary to reality, so immune to reason, so obviously bound up with pathological processes, that it is delusional," says Pataki. True, people can hold nonsensical views out of ignorance or intellectual laziness. But Pataki's interest is in those to whom these characteristics don't apply. Shortly before his death, Anton Chekhov wrote: "I can only regard with bewilderment an educated man who is also religious." While Pataki reckons he knows how the Russian writer felt, he thinks he's found the reasons for the phenomenon that baffled him.