You cannot maintain that God is the source of all good without asserting that he is the reason you are good not you. He is the only real source of good and all you are doing is letting his love and good flow in and out of you.
Is this a way of being proud of your goodness and telling yourself that you are not proud? Do you see yourself in God and pretend you don't? Is that what you really want when you say you want God? Is it really about you not him? When we talk about God as possible wish-fulfilment, projection or psychological transference that is what we are asking.
God can be a disguised picture you have painted in your brain of your ideal self - and by ideal self we don't necessarily mean a really good self.
If you are making a God to use as a prop to validate yourself, a psychological transference, you cannot do it without, at the back of your mind, transferring the bad in you onto him as well. To see your human goodness in God, means you are indirectly seeing the badness there too. The coin has two sides. You know the bad side is there but you look at the good. The fact that you invest God with your evil, and that you conceal that, will only lead to corruption. In time, your God will become more capricious and wrathful.
We look inside ourselves and spot something. We may see it as a threat. We may see it as horrible. So we sense it within us but instead of letting ourselves handle it we prefer not to deal with it. So we use diversion. We sense it in others instead even if it is not in them at all. It is like how the person who wants to steal or fears they might have to do it starts to get too suspicious of their innocent friends. We do not like the fact that our reality detectors are skewed for we know that reality is not about us and errors have many risky consequences. We fear how we know so little and how truth will always bite back. If you want to be a sort of God, you deal with how you cannot be by saying you pray and have faith in God.
God can be a sign of indirect self-worship when you are only interested in gaining something from faith and your ideas about God. Your devotion to God masks the real object of devotion, yourself.
If you think God is merely something we worship to hide the fact that we worship ourselves then why God? Why does it take that shape?
What do the experts say?
C S Lewis said that we all desire God and that this makes it possible that a God is telling us he is there for us.
While he did not say this means that God is wish-fulfilment, it could be equally possible that that is exactly what is going on. I would say that this is the most likely possibility. Many would say that many have a desire for a proper God but this is polluted by wish-fulfillment as well. In that case, the argument from desire, would be highly unsafe and would have to be dismissed.
Lewis needed to be told that possibilities do not count. We desire to do harm and does that mean we should worship a Devil? No.
And it is not true that all, even the devout, are all drawn to the notion of a single incorporeal Christian or Lewis God who helps all. Most people in the world have other ways of dealing with their wishes. They may be content believing that the idol around the corner is their god. Most people are engaging in wish-fulfilment but the style of the wish-fulfilment differs from person to person. God is only one style. The need for wish-fulfilment could give rise to anything at all not just any specific God.
Would some go as far as to say faith is wish-fulfilment and because it is so common, it indicates that there probably is a God?
Logic denies that wanting something to be true makes it true.
If your God is a product of wish-fulfillment, that is not a God. It is a crutch. Also, you could easily use the desire argument for God to hide what you are doing.
Lewis contended that God makes us need him to exist. But if there is a need for that, it could come from society's conditioning or something other than any God. Each person must be careful to have real needs, not ones they were persuaded into thinking they have. Conditioning needs into a person is risking putting an addiction, a need that should not be there, into them.
It is argued by some that even if God is a psychological projection, he can still be real. The two are not mutually exclusive. True. But it does not mean anybody cares about the real God if there is one. If too many don't then God must have created that state of affairs and wants us to use versions of him, not him. He does not want to know us.
It is thought that God can use a projection to make himself known and create a relationship with the person. For example, you can want to believe in mathematics and want mathematics to be true. Thus it is a projection. But its being a projection does not make it untrue. We want mathematics to be true for we see we need it and cannot reason without it. God is not mathematics. It is not the same thing. If God is honest and good he will not be sending lies and errors to forge a relationship. The argument does not know what relationship means.
Now to Freud. He believed faith in God was both a projection of the desires and needs a person has and an infantile neurosis. Either way, the person is immature and damaged. They may compensate by doing good works but that does not address the damage. I would point out that you may deal with the neurosis by forming a God who is in your image and you tell yourself you are in his. There you imagine you have no disorder. No two cases of infantile neurosis will be exactly the same. Some kinds might cause a projection directly, as a symptom.
We will merely mention that Freud also saw religion as a cultural neurotic symptom.
Then there is Fromm who argued that psychological projection was caused by a need to fit in with authority. It is about fear of the authority. Fromm saw projection not as paranoia but as masochism. God is authority. If Fromm is right, then because God is the ultimate and supreme authority, psychologically projecting a God must be maximal masochism. Maybe you have a sadistic streak which is why you want others to be masochistic too!
The best known projection scholar of them all was Feuerbach. He argued that many have a psychological need for belief in God and the afterlife and because of this dependency they accept belief in these things and in religion to deal with it. He believed that belief in God is a psychological projection, in other words, you need a friend and you make up one to fulfil this need. Hans Kung agrees with this (page 50, Eternal Life?). He says that if this is behind belief in God, it does not mean there is no God. True. But it means we worship an idol not the real God if there is one. Feuerbach's argument has been used by anti-religionists to demonstrate that religious faith is a neurosis or a delusion and dangerous.
Feuerbach said we worship God, who does not exist, because we want to express our dependence and helplessness. Against that Christians say, it could be insisted that unbelief in God could arise from our wish to be independent of God. Unbelief could be wish fulfilment too. True. But if unbelief is making a huge effort to be right then it is not wish-fulfilment. Believers assume God exists on paltry evidence or just because their parents told them he exists. That is wish-fulfilment.
Feuerbach held there was no God for God is just a mental construct that we use to get certain psychological benefits. He said this because he noticed that there are emotional reasons for believing in God.
Against this it is said that if we are to be sceptical about anything people believe just because part of them believes it because they want to then we will believe nothing people say. But this is a misunderstanding. Feuerbach was not saying God is just a psychological projection because people want to believe. If they let themselves be guided by the evidence then he is not. He was saying that if the reasons for worshipping God are too emotional then God is a psychological projection. It is possible to have evidence for God and still worship him not because he exists but because you please yourself in doing so.
Suppose there is no evidence for psychological projection or against it. People have to tell us if they follow God for their feelings or because they have evidence of a relationship with him. But they are not going to admit it if it is psychological projection. Psychological projection would mean their worship of God is self-deception. The only sure way would be to observe how they claim to love and worship God and how they behave in a way that is inconsistent with that love. Most believers make little effort to promote God. They do not put him first. For example, they may believe in fatalism and still act as if their fate is in their hands not God's.
Hans Kung said that atheism can be a psychological projection too. That is only true of people who for some reason don't want God to exist, perhaps they see God as a father-figure and they hated their own fathers. I would say he is right. But surely belief in God being a projection is more likely than atheism to be driven by wishful thinking? It is easier. You are not going to use say mathematics or atheistic philosophy as a projection of yourself the way you can use a person. How you think of a person real or not says a lot about you. An atheist projector and a religious one cannot both engage in psychological transference to the same extent.
To say I am always right will make people avoid me. They will laugh at me behind my back. To move this sad arrogance to a God who is always right is a neat trick. It means I think he is doing the “never wrong” for me. Discuss.
Well is it humble for you to talk and act as if you know somebody is incapable of erring? You are trying to be arrogant in such a way that you can still get along with people. You would do this to protect yourself. This is actually one of the most obvious instances of projection.
FINALLY
Psychological projection must never be underestimated. And because it is protecting something with a lie, it may be impossible to detect in most if not virtually all cases. You depend on the person to search themselves and tell you. But can you trust them as the problem is their lying? No. There is no humility where people need you to ignore things and help support their lie. Religion says pride is replacing yourself with God. In that it is right for once! We have found that there is a lot of pride in one who says they have the power to detect God and see what he is like. They do the assessing so they stand over God as superior. The reason they do that is because God is really a mirror of themselves.
Belief in God, as Feuerbach, Freud, and others suggest, may often stem from psychological needs—needs for authority, love, meaning, or identity. While this doesn’t prove that God doesn’t exist, it raises urgent questions about what, or who, believers are truly worshiping. If God is unknowable and beyond human projection, then faith must begin not with assumption, but with a deep, uncomfortable look within. Are we worshipping God—or ourselves in divine disguise?