Why Do We Care if God Exists?
Ludwig Feuerbach says we invent God because we are afraid of ourselves.
I’m not strictly following the usual Method of Engagement because on this topic I prefer to mingle the ideas rather than compartmentalize them.
I started this Substack project in search of the best philosophical arguments for atheism. Most recommendations are people who are living, writing, and debating today. Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach, however, is from the nineteenth century and best known for his work, The Essence of Christianity.
Feuerbach (1804 – 1872) was a German philosopher who was influenced by Baruch Spinoza (1632 – 1677) and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 – 1831), who was a contemporary of Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882) and Karl Marx (1818 – 1883), and who, in turn, shaped the thought of Friedrich Engels (1820 – 1895), Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844 – 1900), and Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939). Because he is situated among these peers and because he was advocate of atheism, I expected Feuerbach’s writing to be more syllogistic. Terms, assumptions, and premises are laid out, conclusions drawn. We all know that arguments can be set out like the finest porcelain, but that does not mean people will sit down and partake.
Feuerbach does not provide arguments. He writes with authority and speaks fluent Christianese in keeping with the title of his book. He begins with the essence and nature of man set apart from brute animals, the only animal who can reflect on universals and do science. Very Aristotelian-Thomistic. He invokes the “I-Thou” relationship of man with himself and others, an idea that would become a buzzword in Christian anthropology in the twentieth century after Martin Buber. He has chapters on the mysteries of the Incarnation, suffering, the Trinity, Mary, the Logos and Divine Image, Creation, Providence, Prayer, miracles, and theological virtues. His book looks like a book about religion, until you read it.
Somewhat like the order of St. Thomas Aquinas’s works, he begins with God’s existence, but the first line is a showstopper. “Religion is the disuniting of man from himself” (33). What? God is everything we are not: infinite when we are finite, eternal when we are temporal, almighty when we are weak. Religion arises, he says, because we are aware of our limited human nature. Our consciousness, which our brains evolved to produce, can self-reflect, and for that reason transcend. This “intelligence” that we have evolved into…is God. He writes, “The pure, perfect divine nature is the self-consciousness of the understanding, the consciousness which the understanding has of its own perfection” (34). In this objective mental realm, man is free. (Very Plato.) The understanding just is God. With it, man has conjured up a father/judge who condemns his own son to death because he, as man, is guilty. A god can “only do this as a rational, not as an emotional being” (34). The Crucifixion is us killing ourselves. The solution is to stop seeing God as something other and to, instead, realize we are that god.
I find his writing arresting because Feuerbach does not let us hide behind esoteric nuances of terms and fifteen-line sentences no one can follow. He hits right at the core of faith itself. The Christian who steps through the scholarly arguments for God’s existence, with all the terms packaged nicely and premises arranged like dominos, gets to the “therefore, God exists,” and Feuerbach punches you in the face. “Yeah, but what if God is just your intellect all along? What if your need to get here is only your fear of facing yourself? What if you could find yourself by realizing God is you?” That will mess you up. I know there are proofs against these statements, but don’t we formulate the proofs of God’s existence knowing what we want the conclusion to be? Therefore, God. Always.
I have written and spoken about faith and science for ten years now, whether about “science as the study of God’s handiwork” per Fr. Stanley Jaki, or about evolution and the fluff that is “theistic evolution,” or against an over-reliance on scientific data regarding Eucharistic miracles, especially when the investigations were done haphazardly, or in the area of bioethics and fetal tissue research. I keep coming back to the primacy of faith. All the reasoning we do is great but not if we engage the world pretending Christianity is faithless. Science is a privilege because we are rational and learn more about Creation by studying it. Evolution is just science, and it is not a threat to faith in revelation. We believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist because God said so, the Word, so we accept the testimony of God Himself. We care about bioethics because the dignity of the human person comes from God.
Why do we care if God exists if it is all an exercise in reason alone? We wouldn’t. Reason alone? That is what scientists do. Science is impersonal. You research, analyze, develop, formulate, test, and conclude. But science does not demand much from your heart, at least not in the way faith does.
Later in his book, Feuerbach deals with miracles and the Resurrection of Christ. He says miracles are “subjective inclinations” in our minds, wishes we make true by claiming the extraordinary (131). The “dogmatic miracle” of the Resurrection of Christ reflects our collective “wish not to die.” Feuerbach sees this belief as an act of self-preservation. We cannot prove beyond certainty that we are immortal, so by believing that Jesus Christ, God’s only begotten Son who became man, rose again from the grave, we guarantee our greatest desire to live forever — and we do so beyond any reasoned certainty the ancient Greeks may have discovered. Feuerbach calls this religious devotion a means of self-flattery.
Now, Stacy Trasancos the Apologist is supposed to stop here and point out how ridiculous and insulting Feuerbach’s words are to humble believers who are well within the dictates of reason to believe in the Resurrection. Indeed, I fight against the urge for this publication to turn into a series of ‘gotchas’ against the atheist arguments. I am Catholic. I desire to defend my beliefs, life structure, and worldview, but there are plenty of apologists who do this already. That is not my goal. Feuerbach’s influence was significant, and I want to think about why.
I think he is right to put his merciless finger on our insecurities about death. Whether you are atheist and think our ability to think rises from material nature, or whether you are a believer in God, whatever your religion, and see the intellect as a spiritual power in union with the body, we all face death, not just our own but the death of those we love. If no God exists, then we need to work out how to live the best mortal life we can. If God exists, as Catholics understand it, then we still need to figure out how to make good choices so that we can live forever with God in Heaven. We care about whether or not God exists because of death.
I remember when my Granddad died, my first “loved one” to pass away. I was not a believer at the time. Chemistry, atoms, and molecules were seriously my entire worldview. But suddenly, standing there in the church watching as the men prepared to close the casket on his corpse, I demanded that someone tell me where Granddad went! I could not accept that he ceased to exist. Yes, it was fear. That memory forced me to admit that nature did not answer my most pressing questions. Later, I lost five babies in miscarriage. A year ago, I watched my teenage daughter lay down her life (job, apartment, education, sanity) to keep the baby boy in her womb alive, only to see him die in her arms. Three weeks ago, my husband’s mother died. This past weekend, so did his father. They were married 65 years and were, in every way, inseparable. We all face these moments. Any theist who tells you he never doubts the afterlife is not being honest.
Obviously, I do not agree with Feuerbach. Is faith just self-flattery? I do not think so. Granting intellectual assent to the truths of faith takes a kind of raw courage that feels like jumping off a cliff because someone convinced you that you could fly. That’s where the cliché “leap of faith” comes from. It is not 100% reasonable.
Feuerbach says that love is the opposite of faith, that where faith disunites us with ourselves, love reunites. Love is found in letting go of God and turning inward (248). I cannot agree that the entire history of Christianity is one big collective illusory wish. I realize that Christians often fail to live a life of faith that anyone would want to emulate, but in spite of human failure, I do believe it is all real and true. I have committed to forming my life according to Catholic tenets. Doing so taught me to love, to love the other person and will his or her good even when I cannot see past today. Love is not 100% reasonable either, and I am okay with admitting that. Here is what I do know: love is not found in isolation. We face the “whys” and “whats” all together whether we want to or not.
Source
Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, originally published in 1841, trans. George Eliot in 1902 (New York: Cosimo, 2008).
As Stacy said, Sigmund Freud himself was part of the atheist movement, and offered his opinion that religion exists not because there is a God, but because Christians want there to be a God.
The claim survives, but I would like to note that psychoanalysts were not at all in agreement about this claim. It is certainly not a widely held view by among practitioners today.
I recall reading literature of the early psychoanalysts who broke away from Freud on the topic. Most of us believed it was a circular argument. A parent might wish that their missing child was alive somewhere. She might even dream the child is alive. No doubt her wishing her child was alive and her dreaming about her child are purely psychological phenomena. But the psychological mechanism of her wishing her child to be alive is completely independent of the actual fact of whether the child is alive. Similarly, I grant you the entire wish fulfillment argument. And it has no bearing whatsoever on whether there is a God.
I genuinely wonder what atheists see in this argument of Freud. At best it leads to agnosticism.
I tend to believe poor Freud was invoked by atheists merely because he was popular at the time, and therefore useful to atheism. I just don't see any value to the argument beyond that.
My humble opinion.
My mistake and I did apologize to DN. If you want to flush out someone's interior motivation for
'engaging atheism' a simple thought experiment will do. If, for example, there is absolutely no hope
of cracking an atheist's shell, and nothing you say will have any impact, and they relate that to you,
it would seem that Einstein's blunt definition about someone who does the same thing over and over
but expecting different results is in play. However, if say, someone has an open enough mind to ADMIT there might be a path forward, into the light, then they are engaging atheism for quite the
opposite reason.