Response to Robert Segal's ‘Jung as Psychologist of Religion and Jung as Philosopher of Religion’

Robert Segal has written a characteristically thought provoking paper questioning the degree to which Jung's system of psychology, particularly his psychology of religion, gives shape to philosophical conclusions regarding religion. Such conclusions would implicate Jung, despite his protestations to the contrary, as a philosopher of religion. More broadly, Segal is attempting to define the relationship between a social scientific explanation for religious experience and belief and what philosophers would refer to as the truth-value of certain propositions about states of affairs in the world, such as ‘God exists’. Segal succinctly frames his position on the concluding page of his paper by stating that ‘The truth of religious experience depends on the origin of religious experience’ (Segal , p. 381; emphasis in original). He then goes on to stipulate that if there are sufficient social scientific—or natural scientific—explanations for the existence of a certain experience, in this case a religious experience, then the putative cause of the experience, in this case God, is superfluous to the explanation. Philosophers would call this an eliminationist argument in which a reductive analysis of a phenomenon eliminates one of the categories associated with the phenomenon in folk psychology. Thus neuro-philosophers such as Paul and Patricia Churchland will argue that folk psychological states, such as religious beliefs, do not exist in the sense that identifiable brain states are sufficient to account for the phenomenon. I will return to the eliminationist argument below, but first it is necessary to highlight several other elements of Segal's argument.

To set the stage for his argument regarding psychology and religion, Segal outlines, for purposes of analogy, several examples from the sociology of science. The objective of this discussion is to ‘see how far the social sciences claim to go’ (p. 365) in questioning or relativizing the claims of the natural sciences. To the