The two theories of religion: is religion the projection of the human species-essence, or the expression of a finite creature's dependence on nature?

Ludwig Feuerbach, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Both are mine, and the second is the better. In The Essence of Christianity I derived religion from the human capacity to make the species an object of thought, and that book was written against Hegel in Hegel's own idiom.12 In the later work I began where a living creature actually begins: in hunger, in the need for air and water and light, in the fact that I did not put myself here and cannot keep myself here. The feeling of dependence is the ground of religion. Nature is the first god.34

Sources

  1. SOURCE OF RELIGION. [The following treatise forms the basis and substance of the author's larger work, published under the same title, as a complement to his previous: "Essence of Christianity" (translated into English by Marion Evans, the translator of Strauss' "Life of Jesus." It will re¬ commend itself to the unbiased reader as by far the most striking and powerful argument for the human origin of religion in…
    The Essence of Religion, God the Image of Man, pp. 1–2
  2. Times change, and men's gods with them. It is equally meaningless to say "There is a God" or "I believe in a God," and "There is no God" or "I do not believe in a God." Whether we speak of theism or of atheism, what matters is the content, ground, and spirit. And now I shall proceed to the subject itself, namely, my book The Essence of Religion, which I have chosen as the basis of these lectures.
    Lectures on the Essence of Religion, pp. 25–26
  3. INTRODUCTION. 1. The Essential Nature of Man. Religion has its basis in the essential difference between man and the brute--the brutes have no religion. It is true that the old uncritical writers on natural history attributed to the elephant, among other laudable qualities, the virtue of religiousness; but the religion of elephants belongs to the realm of fable.
    The Essence of Christianity
  4. Feeling is thy own inward power, but at the same time a power distinct from thee, and independent of thee; it is in thee, above thee; it is itself that which constitutes the objective in thee--thy own being which impresses thee as another being; in short, thy God. How wilt thou, then, distinguish from this objective being within thee another objective being? How wilt thou get beyond thy feeling?
    The Essence of Christianity

Where the argument is made

  • The Essence of Christianity (1841), especially the Introduction and Part I
  • The Essence of Religion (1846)
  • Lectures on the Essence of Religion (delivered Heidelberg 1848-49, published 1851), especially lectures 1-5 and 20-30

How the argument was received

Contested chiefly by neglect. The received account of my philosophy stops at 1841, so the later position is treated as a footnote to the earlier one when it is noticed at all.