Classics In Psychology & Religion

The following links are to various ebooks available online. Some are in the public domain, but others are under copyright. Please read and follow the guidelines noted for the copyrighted materials. Generally, you will be expected to use the copyrighted ones for personal or private use; and are restricted from printing them for distribution without permission of the publisher.

Psychology

Sigmund Freud

The following titles are available on Classics in the History of Psychology: The Interpretation of Dreams, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, The Origin and Development of Psychoanalysis, The History of the Psychoanalytic Movement.

William James

"The Varieties of Religious Experience" by William James is second on the Modern Library Association's list of the top 100 works of nonfiction. It also had a significant influence upon Bill Wilson, one of the co-founders of Alcoholics Anonymous. The following William James titles are available on Classics in the History of Psychology: "The Varieties of Religious Experience, The Will to Believe, Pragmatism, The Meaning of Truth." Several William James titles are found at Google books in pdf format including: The Varieties of Religious Experience, The Principles of Psychology, Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth.

The Myth of Mental Illness, by Thomas Szasz

This is the article published in the American Psychologist before the classic book by the same name. Szasz makes the same argument against the existence mental illness from the first sentence: "My aim in this essay is to raise the question 'Is there such a thing as mental illness?' and to argue that there is not."

Religion

Charles Darwin

The following titles are available on Google books: The Descent of Man and Origin of the Species.

Jonathan Edwards

The following titles are available on Google books: A Narrative of Many Surprising Conversions, Freedom of the Will, Selected Sermons, Memoirs of the Rev. David Brainerd and The Treatise on Religious Affections.

John Frame

The following titles are available at frame-poythress.org: The Amsterdam Philosophy, Evangelical Reunion, Theology at the Movies.

Martin Luther

The following titles are available on Project Gutenberg: Concerning Christian Liberty, Luther's Large and Small Catechisms.

Vern Poythress

The following titles are available at frame-poythress.org: The Works of The Gender-Neutral Bible Controversy: Muting the Masculinity of God's Words, God Centered Biblical Interpretation, Redeeming Science: A God-Centered Approach, The Returning King: A Guide to the Book of Revelation, Science and Hermeneutics, The Shadow of Christ in the Law of Moses, Symphonic Theology, Understanding Dispensationalists.

The Essence of Christianity by Ludwig Feuerbach

Feuerbach argued that very attribute of God corresponded to some feature or need of human nature. Religion, according to Feuerbach, was simply an awareness of the infinity of consciousness. Therefore God was the outward projection of man's inward nature. “Consciousness of God is self-consciousness, knowledge of God is self-knowledge.” (33) God as a perfectly moral Being is merely “the moral nature of man posited as the absolute being.” (73) This seminal work influenced Karl Marx, Sigmnd Freud, Carl Jung, William James and others.

History of Conflict Between Religion and Science

Written by John William Draper in 1874, this is one of the original books to view science and religion as in conflict with each other. Draper said, "The history of science is not a mere record of isolated discoveries; it is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on the one side, and the compression arising from traditional faith and human interests on the other."

History of the Warfare of Science with Theology

Written by Andrew Dickson White in 1896, this was another classic book on the conflict between science and religion. It was a collection of previously published works between 1876 and 1892 on how science was a liberator in the quest for academic freedom.

Institutes of the Christian Religion

John Calvin's Institutes is still the best articulation of Reformed theological principles and a great introduction to biblical Christianity. This is the John Allen translation, not the Henry Beveridge translation.

Monism as Connecting Religion and Science

Originally given as a lecture in October 1892 by Ernst Haeckel, a famous professor of zoology and advocate of Darwinian theory. Haeckel is most famous as the inventor of the Biogenetic Law—"ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny"—the theory that evolutionary developmental stages (phylogeny) were replicated in the stages of human embryonic development (ontogeny). He also published a theory of human descent from apes in 1868, three years before Darwin published his own in The Descent of Man. As early as 1866, Haeckel proposed a new philosophy or natural religion (which he called Monism) based upon the natural sciences, "since God reveals himself in all natural phenomena." He extended his Biogenetic Law to encompass the development of human consciousness, intelligence, will, and morality. Among others, his thinking influenced both Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.