Adolf Gru$ nbaum on religious delusions

Gru$ nbaum claims it is possible that all belief in God is a delusion, meaning a false belief which is engendered by irrational psychological motives. I dispute this on the grounds that in many cases belief in God is engendered by purely cultural factors, and this is incompatible with its being engendered by psychological ones. Gru$ nbaum also claims that saying a culturally engendered belief cannot be a delusion makes social consensus the sole arbiter of reality. I dispute this on the grounds that we can say that socially engendered beliefs fail to be delusions because they fail to meet the psychological criterion, rather than because they are true. This paper is written in response to a recent article by Adolf Gru$ nbaum, in which he considers Freud’s psychoanalytic explanations of religion." Gru$ nbaum is critical of these explanations but, in my view, not critical enough. My arguments will have a broader application than Gru$ nbaum’s article, however – they will apply to psychological explanations of religion in general.