A Look at Alvin Plantinga's Attempt to Answer Freud's Doubt on the Origin of Belief in God

Based on his psychoanalytic principles, Freud provided an analysis of the origin and function of religion that influenced a wide range of twentieth-century thinkers. These influences often played a negative role, so most religious people either rejected Freud's analysis or viewed it with skepticism. Plantinga is one of the thinkers who adopt a relatively special view to Freud's analysis. In this article, we first briefly describe Freud's analysis of the origin and function of religion. We then present Plantinga's view on Freud's analysis, and finally show what role Plantinga's attention to Freud plays in the formation of Plantinga's religious epistemology. That is, one of Plantinga's main motives in discussing the theory of the fundamentality of belief in God, sensus divinitatis, and the theory of warranted belief is to avoid facing the doubt raised by Freud. However, a study of Plantinga's religious epistemology shows that his solution is not adequate, and that Freud's doubt cannot be answered through the way Plantinga has adopted.