The Will to Disbelieve - Feuerbach, Freud, and Friends - Atheism as Wish Fulfillment
Few things are as important to understand about man as the two foundational truths that he is created in the image of God, and he is fallen.[1] The first ensures that the existence of God is something man cannot not know; the second that some men will nevertheless deny that they know it.
The image of God in man is the basis
for what Calvin refers to as a sensus
divinitatis. “There is,” he says, “within the human mind, and indeed by
natural instinct, an awareness of
divinity.”[2]
He observes further,
To prevent anyone from taking refuge in the pretense of ignorance, God himself has implanted in all men a certain understanding of his divine majesty… Since, therefore, men one and all perceive that there is a God and that he is their Maker, they are condemned by their own testimony because they have failed to honor him and to consecrate their lives to his will.[3]
Furthermore, this “awareness of
divinity” is inescapable.
The
conviction…that there is some God, is naturally inborn in all, and is fixed
deep within, as it were in the very marrow… [I]t is not a doctrine that must
first be learned in school, but one of which each of us is master from his mother’s
womb and which nature itself permits no one to forget.[4]
If this is true (and it is, Calvin is simply summarizing the teaching of Scripture), how are we to account for the
fact that many people—some of them very intelligent and well-educated—deny his
existence? This is one of the effects of the fall. In his fallen state, man all
too eagerly looks for reasons to
disbelieve. As Calvin says, “Many strive with every nerve to this end.”[5]
LUDWIG
FEUERBACH
One man who did this was the 19th century German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872). He wrote two influential books critical of religion in general and Christianity in particular.[6] Feuerbach attributed the “source of religion” to “the feeling of dependence in man.”[7] Man’s weakness and vulnerability in a dark and dangerous world leave him wishing for the existence of a benevolent, superior power—a deity who can come to his aid. The wish spawns the belief; but in the end “religion is [only] a dream of the human mind.”[8] He says, “To believe, means to imagine that something exists which does not exist… God himself is nothing but the essence of man’s imagination.”[9]
The
essence of faith is the idea that that which man wishes
actually is: he wishes to be immortal, therefore he is immortal; he wishes for
the existence of a being who can do everything which is impossible to Nature
and reason, therefore such a being exists.[10]
He
says the idea of “God… satisfies our wishes, our emotional wants; he is himself
the realized wish of the heart, the wish exalted to the certainty of its
fulfillment, of its reality.[11]
Because man can never “get beyond
his true nature,” man’s imagined deity looks a great deal like himself. “He in
truth only images and projects himself,” except larger, stronger, and wiser.[12]
He explains further, “Man—this is the mystery of religion—projects his being
into objectivity [i.e., as an
objectively existing deity].”[13]
SIGMUND
FREUD
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) picked up these ideas and popularized them for a 20th century audience. To the extent that people today are familiar with the ideas of projection and wish fulfilment, they have likely heard of them in connection with psychoanalytic theory which Freud first developed.
Feuerbach was a formative influence
on Freud, who described him as “the man whom I revere and admire most among all
philosophers.”[14] He
famously argued that belief in God originates in a childlike longing for an
all-provident, protective father. Man does not believe in God because such a
being exists, but because he wishes
for such a being to exist. “Religious ideas,” he says, “are illusions,
fulfilments of the oldest, strongest and most insistent wishes of mankind.”[15]
The strength of these religious ideas derives from the strength of the wishes that
spawn them—wishes that arise largely through fear of danger.
We
know already that the terrifying effect of infantile helplessness aroused the
need for protection—protection through love—which the father relieved, and that
the discovery that this helplessness would continue through the whole of life
made it necessary to cling to the existence of a father—but this time a more
powerful one.[16]
This more powerful father is God.
When we were helpless children, we looked to our earthly fathers to protect us
and provide for us. When we grew up, we came to realize that there were other,
even greater dangers than ever we knew as children. As a result, we feel a
profound sense of vulnerability and helplessness. We find ourselves wishing for
the existence of a “benevolent rule of divine providence [to] allay our anxiety
in face of life’s dangers, the establishment of a moral world [to] ensure the
fulfilment of the demands of justice…and the prolongation of earthly existence
by a future life.”[17]
Belief that a being exists who guarantees these things arises from the wish that such a being exists. Hence, he
calls the belief a “wish-fulfilment.”[18]
A significant problem with this
view, however, is that whatever may be true of other deities, the God of the
Bible isn’t the sort one would expect people to invent. He is powerful, yes,
and loving. He’s capable of meeting our needs and defending us from danger, and
love leads him to do so. But he’s also a rather demanding deity. He insists we
obey him. He prohibits us from indiscriminately gratifying our desires. He
requires us to deny ourselves by curbing our biological urges, even in some
cases the urge to preserve our lives.[19]
He commands us to make sacrifices for the good of others. What’s more, he
threatens those who violate his commandments with fearful punishments. He’s not
the kind of deity one might wish to exist. If he was wholly imaginary, why not
imagine him to be a bit more lenient; a god who is untroubled by how we choose
to live?
ATHEISM
AS WISH PROJECTION
It is difficult to resist the
notion that the truth is just the opposite of what Feuerbach, Freud, and
friends suggest. Might it not be the case that atheism is itself a kind of wish
fulfilment? Perhaps it is not believers but unbelievers who are guilty of
projecting their wishes onto reality, not to mention projecting their habit of projection onto believers. And why would they wish for such a thing, a godless universe? To feel justified
in doing whatever they want to do without fear of a divine, “No!”
FRIEDRICH
NIETZSCHE
The
moral (or immoral) purpose in every philosophy has constituted the true vital
germ out of which the entire plant has always grown. Indeed, to understand how
the abstrusest metaphysical assertions of a philosopher have been arrived at,
it is always well (and wise) to first ask oneself, “What morality do they (or
does he) aim at?”[21]
ALDOUS
HUXLEY
Frequently, the morality in question
is sexual morality. In his book Ends and Means, Aldous Huxley
(1894-1963) explained the appeal of atheism (which he referred to as a
philosophy of meaninglessness) in just these terms. He is worth quoting at
length:
I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption…
No philosophy is
completely disinterested. The pure love of truth is always mingled to some
extent with the need, consciously or unconsciously felt by even the noblest and
the most intelligent philosophers, to
justify a given form of personal or social behavior… The philosopher who
finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in
pure metaphysics. He is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason
why he personally should not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should
not seize political power and govern in the way that they find most
advantageous to themselves.[22]
He goes on to explain that above all “the philosophy of
meaninglessness” was used to “justify a political and erotic revolt,” with
particular emphasis on the later.
For myself as, no doubt,
for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was
essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was
simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and
liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality
because it interfered with our sexual freedom; we objected to the political and
economic system because it was unjust. The supporters of these systems claimed
that in some way they embodied the meaning (a Christian meaning, they insisted)
of the world. There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people
and at the same time justifying ourselves in our political and erotic revolt:
we could deny that the world had any meaning whatsoever. Similar tactics had
been adopted during the eighteenth century and for the same reasons. From the
popular novelists of the period…we learn that the chief reason for being
‘philosophical’ was that one might be free from prejudices—above all prejudices
of a sexual nature… The desire to justify a certain sexual looseness played a
part in the popularization of meaninglessness…[23]
What is this but atheism as wish fulfilment, licentiousness
seeking philosophical justification?
A more recent philosopher, Thomas Nagel, in a chapter
entitled “Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion,” described his
aversion to the thought of a cosmic authority figure. He said,
Here, I think, we get to the heart
of the issue. Nagel fears the existence of a “cosmic authority” figure. And he
suspects that many others share this fear. I suspect he’s right. We want what
we want when, where, and how we want it, and we don’t want anyone to tell us, “No,”
least of all someone whose authority is beyond appeal.
C.
S. LEWIS
In Surprised by Joy, C. S. Lewis confessed that this was no small obstacle that stood in his way to believing in God.
What
mattered most of all was my deep-seated hatred of authority, my monstrous
individualism, my lawlessness. No word in my vocabulary expressed deeper hatred
than the word Interference. But
Christianity placed at the center what then seemed to me a transcendental
Interferer. If its picture were true then no sort of “treaty with reality”
could ever be possible. There was no region even in the innermost depth of
one’s soul (nay, there lest of all) which one could surround with a barbed wire
fence and guard with a notice No Admittance. And that was what I wanted; some
area, however small, of which I could say to all other beings, “This is my
business and mine only.”
He goes on to say, “I may have been
guilty of wishful thinking. Almost certainly I was. The materialist conception
would not have seemed so immensely probable to me if it had not favored at
least one of my wishes.”[25]
WILLING
(or not) TO DO HIS WILL
Jesus provides insight into this
phenomenon with a saying recorded in the seventh chapter of John’s Gospel. “My
teaching,” he says, “is not my own, but his who sent me. If anyone is willing to do his will, he will know whether the
teaching is from God or whether I am speaking on my own authority.”[26]
Here our Lord indicates that willingness or unwillingness to obey God plays a
vital role in faith and unbelief.
Atheists like to charge Christianity
with being intellectually untenable, absurd on the grounds of reason and logic;
only those who have deeply felt psychological needs believe in him, despite the
irrationality of it. But unbelief is less a matter of the intellect than of the
will and it has its own psychological motives. Resistance to divine authority
is a primal instinct of our fallen nature, despite the “awareness of divinity”
within us and “those insignia [without] whereby he shows his glory to us,
whenever and wherever we cast our gaze.”[27]
Paul speaks of people who know God but who nevertheless “suppress the truth”
about him. They fabricate deities more to their liking (Rom. 1:18-25). Some
prefer to acknowledge no deity whatsoever (Ps. 10:4). Both are foolish
enterprises (Isa. 44:9-20; Ps. 14:1).
What a puzzle and contradiction man is, created in the image of God, and for God, but fallen and rebellious and wishing he did not exist.
[1] See
for example, Gen. 1:26-27; 5:1; 9:6; and Gen. 3; Eccles. 7:29; Romans 5:12
[2]
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian
Religion 1.3.1
[3]
Ibid
[4]
Ibid 1.3.3; see also 1.4.4, “Yet that seed remains which can in no wise be
uprooted: that there is some sort of divinity…a sense of divinity is by nature
engraven on human hearts.”
[5]
Ibid
[6] The Essence of Christianity (1841) and The Essence of Religion (1846)
[7] The Essence of Religion (Amherst, NY:
Prometheus Books, 2004), p. 1
[8] The Essence of Christianity, Kindle
Location 114
[9] The Essence of Religion, p. 69 (emphasis
in the original)
[10] The Essence of Christianity, Kindle
Location 2615
[11]
Ibid, Kindle Location 2480
[12] The Essence of Christianity, Kindle
Location 476
[13] The
Essence of Christianity, Kindle Location 806
[14]
Cyril, Levitt, Sigmund Freud's intensive reading of Ludwig Feuerbach
(2012) Psyche 66, pp. 433-455
[15]
Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion
(1927), Kindle Locations 522-524
[16]
Ibid, Kindle Locations 524-526
[17]
Ibid, Kindle Locations 526-528
[18]
Ibid, Kindle Location 529
[19] For
example, “Whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life
for my sake will find it (Matt. 16:25)
[20] Not
to mention projecting their habit of projection onto believers!
[21] Friedrich
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
(Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1997), p. 4
[22] Aldous
Huxley, Ends and Means: An Inquiry into
the Nature of Ideals (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2012), pp.
312, 315
[23] Ends and Means, p. 316, 317
[24]
Thomas Nagel, The Last Word (Oxford
University Press, 1997), pp. 130-131
[25] C.
S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of
My Early Life (New York, NY:
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2012), p. 172
[26]
John 7:16b-17 (my translation)
[27]
Calvin, Institutes of the Christian
Religion, 1.5.1
[28]
Thomas Nagel, The Last Word, p. 131
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