No, Christianity Is Not Merely Wish-Fulfillment

Freud-Marx complaints do not stand up to rigorous criticism, because they provide no evidence for their claims, which, even if they were true, would not prove what they set out to prove, that is, that Christianity is false.

What Were Marx and Freud’s Complaints About Religion?

Sigmund Freud proposed that religion was merely wish-fulfillment. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a Great Big Brother in the sky who rewarded good and punished evil? Christians, on Freud’s anti-realist religious view, were projecting their wishes onto the concept of God.

Because of this theory’s apparent explanatory power for religious belief, it then follows that religion is debunked as nothing more than benign wishful thinking.

Karl Marx agreed with Freud, except with a Nietzschean twist. According to Marx, religion both was illusory and harmful. It is the opium of the masses (and Marx knew a thing or two about opium).

Religion deadens one’s senses; it is both the cry of injustice, and the purported solution to the injustice of a cold world. Just like opium. And like opium, it is destructive.

The religious will-to-power allows believers power to control and subdue the proletariat. The lower classes are kept in subjugation by religious maxims about obeying one’s master, and they are kept from uprising by placating hopes of the hereafter.

Why Were They Wrong?

One looming problem with Freud-Marx Complaints is that they offer no evidence for their positions. On the surface, it seems unlikely that any religion-as-wish-fulfillment would include much of the elements Christianity incorporates.

Who would wish for an inexplicable Trinity or a Lord who demands self-sacrifice unto death as an admirable good?

If Freud wants to prove that religion is wish-fulfillment, he has to provide some evidence that such is true.

Furthermore, to say that religion is discredited when its origin is uncovered is to commit the genetic fallacy. Just because one knows why a Christian believes in Christianity, one has not therefore discredited the belief.

Finally, to be successful, Freud would have to show that human wish-fulfillment faculties were not aimed at truth.

Why could it not be that human beings were designed with such faculties in place in order to determine the truth about God?

Marx’s view suffers from similar problems. If religion has been abused in the past, that says nothing about its truth as found in scripture.

Likewise, a placating, peace-inspiring hope in the hereafter is only delusory if the belief is false, which begs the question in favor of non-theism.*

To conclude, Freud-Marx complaints do not stand up to rigorous criticism, because they provide no evidence for their claims, which, even if they were true, would not prove what they set out to prove, that is, the falsity of religious belief.

* On a note of historicity, Marx’s interpretation of the French Revolution as being a transition from feudalism toward middle-class ascendancy has been discredited by modern historians. The implications are that his predictions of what comes next, viz. Communism are therefore in doubt. His theory having been nullified, doubt is therefore cast on his other presuppositions, such as atheism, which were bound up with his historico-economic ideas. I did not include this in this post, to avoid a poison-the-well fallacy.

Originally posted here.