You Rejected a God Who Doesn't Exist

I Didn’t Believe in God. I Believed in Determinism.

By the time I was a teenager, I had a tidy worldview. The universe was a closed system of cause and effect. Free will was a comforting illusion. God was a projection — the wish of frightened people who couldn’t tolerate the silence. I wasn’t angry about this, exactly. I was indifferent, which in some ways is worse. Indifference doesn’t argue. It simply turns away.

There was anger underneath the indifference, as there usually is. Something had failed me, or someone had — I won’t reconstruct all of it here — and the cleanest response was to seal the door entirely. Determinism was philosophically convenient: if nothing is chosen, nothing can be blamed. Including God’s absence. Including my own.

I held this position with the particular confidence of a young man who mistakes the absence of counter-argument for the presence of truth. I was twenty-one years old before anything touched it. And what touched it was not an argument.

I had come back from Europe broke, alone, and in a darkness I didn’t have clinical language for yet. Suicidal is the honest word. I had run out of the ordinary resources — money, company, the forward momentum that keeps most people from stopping to look at themselves. In that emptiness, with nothing left to manage or protect, I reached out to God. Not with faith. With nothing.

I woke up speaking in tongues. Hearing what I can only describe as interpretation — praises of Jesus, welling up from somewhere I had not accessed before and did not know existed.

I am a clinical psychologist. I know what that sentence sounds like. I also know that I have spent the decades since examining it from every angle available to me, and the most honest thing I can say is this: the framework I had built to keep God out did not fall to a better argument. It fell to an encounter. Which, as it turns out, is almost always how it goes.

That is what this article is about.

There is a peculiar asymmetry at work in most conversations about religious belief. The believer is asked — rightly — to examine the psychological roots of his faith. Fear of death. Need for comfort. Authoritarian submission. These are fair questions, and the mature believer should be able to sit with them.

But the reverse question is almost never asked with equal seriousness: What psychological needs does unbelief serve?

It is worth asking. Not to score a debate point, but because the evidence is substantial, the thinkers who have pursued it are serious, and the stakes — for the souls involved — are high.

The Turn That Freud Never Made

Sigmund Freud made religion the great object of psychoanalytic suspicion. In The Future of an Illusion and Civilization and Its Discontents, he argued that belief in God was a projection — a child’s wish for an all-powerful father writ large across the cosmos. Religion was wish fulfillment. A neurosis of civilization. The believer was, in Freud’s telling, a man too frightened to face reality without a heavenly father to hold his hand.

This analysis has been enormously influential. It has the ring of sophistication. It sounds like the kind of thing an intelligent, liberated person would say.

But Freud never turned the analysis on himself. Paul Vitz did.

In Faith of the Fatherless: The Psychology of Atheism, the NYU psychologist and former atheist made a simple and devastating observation: among the most influential atheist thinkers in Western history — Freud, Nietzsche, Hume, Sartre, Voltaire, H.G. Wells — a strikingly consistent pattern emerges. A dead father. An absent father. Or, critically in Freud’s case, a father who was experienced as weak, humiliated, and shameful.

Freud’s father, Jakob, was a wool merchant who had suffered public humiliation — struck by a gentile who knocked his new fur cap into the mud and ordered him off the pavement. When the young Sigmund asked how his father had responded, Jakob replied quietly that he had simply picked up the cap. The son was mortified. He compared his father unfavorably to Hannibal’s father, who had made his son swear vengeance against Rome. The memory stayed with Freud his entire life.

This is not incidental. Vitz’s argument is not that atheism is caused by bad fathers — the relationship is more complex than strict causation. The argument is that defective fathering is a significant predisposing factor; that the rejection of God is not always a cool philosophical conclusion arrived at by a disinterested intellect, but is sometimes — often — the product of a wounded, disappointed, or enraged inner child who has transferred his feelings about his earthly father onto the heavenly one.

Freud built a theory of religion on projection. What he did not acknowledge is that his own rejection of a personal God may have been the most remarkable projection of all.

Rizzuto and the Inner Image

The clinical framework for this argument was developed most rigorously by Ana-Maria Rizzuto in The Birth of the Living God — a landmark psychoanalytic study that Freud himself, had he been honest, might have written very differently.

Rizzuto, a Catholic psychoanalyst working in the object-relations tradition, demonstrated through careful clinical research what Winnicott’s theory implied: that every person — believer, agnostic, and atheist alike — carries an internal God representation. This representation is not a theological concept. It is a living psychological object, built up across childhood from internalized relational experiences with primary caregivers, shaped by the emotional texture of early attachment. It is less what we think about God and more what we feel when we encounter the idea of God — or the reality of God — in prayer, in crisis, in silence.

What Rizzuto found, crucially, is that the atheist’s rejection of God is not typically a rejection of the God described in the Nicene Creed or the Summa Theologica. It is a rejection of the God representation that was formed in childhood — an internal object that may be cold, terrifying, demanding, absent, or shaming. The atheist often has very good psychological reasons for rejecting that God. The tragedy is that they believe they have thereby disposed of God entirely, when in fact they have only dismissed a distorted image, often formed in the crucible of pain.

The philosophical dismissal is real, and the philosophical arguments deserve engagement on their own terms. But underneath the philosophy is often an emotional truth that no syllogism quite reaches: I could not survive a God like the one I experienced in my early life. And so I have decided there is no God at all.

This is not stupidity. It is often a reasonable response to real suffering. But it is not, in the clinical sense, neutral. It is a defense.

The Defense Mechanism Nobody Names

Classical psychology describes the defensive operations of the ego with considerable precision. Repression. Intellectualization. Sublimation. Displacement. Projection. Reaction formation. These are the mechanisms by which the psyche protects itself from pain it cannot yet bear to consciously experience.

Atheism — as a psychological posture, not as a conclusion — functions in many of the same ways. It is, however, a defense mechanism that our culture has granted an exemption from analysis. It gets to dress as conclusion rather than defense, as liberation rather than avoidance, as intellectual courage rather than emotional withdrawal.

But look at the structure. The defensive posture of atheism places the self at the center of the epistemological universe. I am the final judge of what exists. Nothing has authority over me that I have not granted. This feels like freedom. It is also, quite precisely, the architecture of control.

It forecloses an entire category of relationship — the vertical, transcendent relationship — that has historically been the primary source of confrontation with one’s own limitations, failures, and need for mercy. To eliminate God is to eliminate the most demanding relational encounter the soul can face.

It then rationalizes the closure as reason. Here is where intellectualization does its most efficient work. The defense is armored in the language of science, logic, and the Enlightenment. To question it feels like attacking reason itself. But reason is not the same as the person reasoning, and the question of what motivates the reasoning is always fair.

The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, in its chapter “We Agnostics,” is blunter than most academic texts about this dynamic. It observes that the alcoholic’s resistance to God is rarely purely philosophical — it is connected to self-sufficiency, to a deep reluctance to admit dependence on anything outside the self. The Big Book calls this what it is: prejudice. Not conclusion. Posture. And posture has causes.

Thomas Jones: When God Becomes the Therapist

The psychoanalyst Thomas Jones, writing on transference and transcendence, extended this analysis into the therapeutic frame. He observed that patients bring to their image of God the same transference dynamics they bring to the analyst — the same longings, the same fears, the same rage, the same test-and-withdrawal patterns of their earliest relational wounds.

What Jones makes explicit is that the experience of the transcendent is always mediated through the relational history of the self. We do not encounter God — or the idea of God — in a psychological vacuum. We encounter God through the lens of every significant relationship that has preceded the encounter, and for most people, the earliest and most powerful of those relationships is with the father.

This is precisely why the pattern Vitz identifies is not a logical fallacy but a clinical finding. The boy who watched his father humiliated and looked away in shame does not simply develop atheism as a philosophical position. He develops a profound inner resistance to the idea of a loving, powerful, personal God — because the closest analog to such a God in his experience was a man who could not protect him, could not protect himself, and left his son to absorb the wound alone.

The grown man may be brilliant. He may write with precision and force. He may demolish theistic arguments with genuine skill. And underneath all of it, there may be a boy who decided, at some formative moment, that no father could be trusted — and that the wisest thing was to need none.

The Distinction That Changes Everything

None of this is an argument that God exists. The clinical observation that atheism can function as a defense mechanism does not settle the metaphysical question. That question must be pursued on its own terms, with rigor and honesty.

But it does change the texture of the conversation considerably.

It means that the challenge to the believer — examine whether your faith is wish fulfillment — must be met with an equally honest challenge to the unbeliever: examine whether your rejection is wound-fulfillment. Whether the God you have dismissed is the God who is, or the father who wasn’t.

Rizzuto’s great insight was that the God image is never static. It develops across the life of the person, and the crises of development demand that it develop — that the representation be revised, matured, integrated with new experience. A God image that is too brittle, too closely identified with an early wounding, will be rejected as the person grows. This is not always pathological. Sometimes the rejection is necessary to make room for the real.

But there is a difference between a God image that has died and been transformed, and one that has been buried under intellectual debris and called a philosophical conclusion.

The first is a kind of dark night of the soul — painful, honest, potentially redemptive.

The second is what the Big Book would recognize immediately: a man who has decided he doesn’t need any help, and built a very sophisticated case for why.

The Invitation Underneath the Defense

Defenses are not enemies. They are the ego’s attempt to survive what it could not otherwise bear. The alcoholic’s grandiosity is not stupidity; it is the last shield between him and a despair he believes will kill him. The atheist’s self-sufficiency is not usually malice; it is often the very reasonable response of a person who learned early that depending on a father brought pain, not comfort.

The clinical — and the pastoral — task is not to demolish the defense with argument. It is to create enough safety, enough warmth, enough genuine presence, that the person beneath the defense can begin to wonder whether it is still necessary.

This is why the most persuasive arguments for God’s existence have almost never been arguments. They have been encounters. An unexpected sense of being loved. The experience of mercy without strings. A moment in which the expected punishment did not arrive, and something gentler did instead.

I know this because it is what happened to me. Broke and alone and at the end of what I could manage, I reached out to a God I didn’t believe in. What came back was not a philosophical vindication. It was presence. It was language I had never spoken, rising from somewhere beneath the architecture of my very sophisticated unbelief.

The God that Freud rejected was his father’s inability to protect him made transcendent. The God I had rejected was something similar — an absence, a disappointment, a closed door. The God who actually is — the one attested in the person of Christ, the one who shows up precisely in the places of greatest shame and powerlessness — is something else entirely.

Whether the defense ever softens enough to allow that encounter is, finally, not a matter of argument.

It is a matter of grace. Which is, perhaps, its own kind of diagnosis — and its own kind of cure.

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Dr. Sean Tobin is a licensed clinical psychologist and Catholic author. The Inner Exodus publishes at the intersection of faith, psychology, and the questions modern life cannot answer by itself. If this found you at the right moment, share it with someone who needs to hear it. And to sow into this writing ministry, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription.