Why The Father Of Psychology Refused To Dismiss God’s Existence
(ANALYSIS) William James is remembered as the father of American psychology. But for many believers, he holds a different place altogether. He stands as one of the rare modern thinkers who refused to mock faith.
He didn’t preach religion, and he certainly didn’t try to dress it up in academic jargon. Instead, he studied it with care, reverence and genuine respect — treating the spiritual life not as superstition, but as something that lives at the center of who we are. In an age when many intellectuals dismissed the inner life as a quirk of biology or a trick of the mind, James dared to say: Something real is happening here.
His great work, “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” remains one of the most honest examinations of the soul ever written by someone outside the clergy. James didn’t approach faith as a theologian. Rather, he approached it as a man who understood that human beings are shaped as much by longing as by logic. He saw religion not as a doctrine first, but as an experience — intense, disrupting, humbling, sometimes terrifying.
Instead of trying to shrink the spiritual life into a tidy theory, he allowed it to keep its natural force. He collected testimonies of people who had broken down, cried out, found a higher purpose, lost themselves, or stumbled into a sense of God they couldn’t explain. For James, these moments weren’t embarrassments to be swept aside. Quite the opposite. They were data. Evidence that our deepest convictions find a voice, whether we want them to or not.
James wrote during a time when science was beginning its march toward materialism. Many thinkers were eager to declare the death of mystery. Yet he refused to join them. He believed that the inner life had a dignity all its own. He didn’t concern himself with whether a particular vision, dream, or conversion aligned perfectly with Christian doctrine. He cared about what it did to a person.
If it transformed them into someone more stable, kinder, or more courageous, then it held weight. If it brought healing, it was worth attention. If it plunged someone into darkness, that too told him something important. For James, our deepest movements, toward light or toward despair, were never trivial.
He gave special attention to the people he called the “sick souls,” those whose inner lives were marked by melancholy or fear, people who felt the world’s brokenness with burning intensity. Instead of dismissing them as unstable, he saw them as people who grasped the seriousness of life. Their suffering, he believed, was a sign that their hearts were tuned to deeper realities.
Out of this, James offered one of his most powerful insights: that conversion — the turning of a life toward God — often goes hand in hand with a reckoning that shifts a life forever. To him, spiritual rebirth wasn’t an abstract idea, but something he had witnessed in the lives of countless people who had reached the end of themselves and realized they weren’t abandoned after all.
What made James extraordinary was his willingness to consider possibilities that others ridiculed. He entertained, without embarrassment, the idea that mystical experiences might connect us to something beyond this world. He pondered psychic visions, life after death, and what he called “the unseen order,” the notion that our minds are brushing up against a reality larger than anything our senses can measure.
He didn’t insist these things were true in a doctrinal sense, but he refused to dismiss them. He understood that human beings have always reached beyond the visible, and that this reaching is part of what makes us human. In a century growing increasingly proud of its skepticism, James left the door to wonder wide open.
He believed faith should never be dissected into pieces but understood as a whole, a force that could lift a person out of anguish or ground them in gratitude. He didn’t reduce belief to chemicals or childhood memories. Instead, he treated the spiritual life with a seriousness that many believers found refreshing.
James himself never embraced a single creed, yet he remained convinced that the world we see is not the entire story. He once compared the human mind to someone peering through a keyhole. We see fragments, shadows, hints. But the room beyond is real, and the narrowness of our vision doesn’t diminish its size.
That humility, that sense of mystery, is why so many religious readers, myself included, still treasure him. He never claimed to know everything. He simply refused to believe that we are nothing more than bodies in motion. He saw the spiritual longing in people and answered it with humanity, a response science rarely offers.
So yes, William James is the father of psychology. But in many ways, he resisted the direction psychology eventually took. And that resistance is why his work still matters, perhaps now more than ever.
John Mac Ghlionn is a researcher and essayist. He covers psychology and social relations. His writing has appeared in places such as UnHerd, The US Sun and The Spectator World.