Freud's Wish Fulfillment: Why Atheism Can't Explain Atheism

Since the rise of the new atheist, many new nicknames have been created including the Brites, the New Atheist, and even, the Four Horsemen (a reference to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in Revelation). These Four Horsemen include Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and Samuel Harris. They are not the only atheist with recent best-selling books arguing against the existence of God, but these are nonetheless the main four.

Though there have been many books released recently responding to the Four Horsemen, some of the best that I've read include "What's So Great About Christianity?," "The Delusion of Disbelief," "the End of Reason," and the soon-to-be-released Dr. Mohler book, "Atheism Remixed."

But these men are not the real Horsemen. If we were honest, the real ground-breaking atheist of the modern period are Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud. Dawkins and crew don't even compare to these men. These four men, without a doubt, shaped Western, secular culture. Charles Darwin obviously laid the foundation for the other three, but all four are critical thinkers.

Two of them, I believe, are still applicable (Darwin and Nietzsche) in today's world. Marx and Freud are being left behind. First, history has proven Marx's theories concerning social revolution and economic reform to be disastrous. Marxism doesn't work. All one has to do is look at those nations that have adopted atheistic Marxism, and we see a failed system run on control. Dissenters, in such a culture, are arrested at best and executed at worst. Marxism creates a lazy society that reduces production to economic ruin. Why work whenever your not going to get paid more and everything is given to you? I knew that Marxism failed whenever the people of Cuba praised Castro for his giving everyone toasters and microwaves.

Freud's demise has been a bit slower and it is the subject of a recent article written by Dinesh D'Souza. Freud laid the foundation for modern psychology (built on the assumption of Darwinian evolution). Without a doubt, Freud had some weird ideas. Before I knew much about all of this stuff and was being introduced to Freudian thought, I knew this guy was a bit of a quack whenever he argued that those who were breast fed too long were going to be neat and clean and those who weren't breast fed long enough were going to be messy. True, Freud had some good insights, but many of his ideas were farfetched.

In the realm of faith, Freud is being passed by. He developed the idea that religion was nothing more than wish fulfillment. He argued that we have invented religion as a way to escape from the hardships of this world. D'Souza points out:

Imagine a bunch of people who have gathered in a room because they want to avoid life's difficulties--sickness, suffering, death--by making up a religion that will make them feel better

And so, D'Souza goes on to add, the invention of heaven was made up by man in order to escape the hardships of the world. Freud's argument makes sense whenever it comes to explaining why people believe in a place without suffering or hardships. No more pain. No more suffering. No more crying. No more uncertainty. No more confusion. No more death. We all wish that. And religion has become the fulfillment of that.

But, as D'Souza points out, how does Freud explain concepts like hell, sin, damnation, judgment, and wrath? Most of the major religions include some form of retribution. In Christianity, hell is the eternal punishment for unrepentant sin. In other religions, retribution is seen in things like purgatory, reincarnation, etc.

How does Freud's wish fulfillment explain this? Heaven perhaps, but hell? D'Souza adds:

But I don't see why this group would come up with the concept of hell. (We are not talking about why priests might later use the concept to enforce doctrinal obedience or institutional loyalty. We are talking about why wish-fulfilling humans would invent the concept in the first place.) Hell is not only worse than sickness but also worse than death, because death is merely the end, while hell implies eternal separation from God. I also don't see why seekers of wish-fulfillment would come up with Christian morality. Who needs the Ten Commandments or other such rules which make our lives more difficult by asserting a series of "Thou Shall Nots"? A mandate for wish-fulfillment would seem to dictate a much more libertine social morality.

If evolution is true, then how do we explain the existence of hell and similar ideas? Evolution thrives on survival of the fittest. In other words, nothing is off limits. The name of the game is surviving. And then all of the sudden man makes up rules that limits their liberty and domination and invent a doctrine of worse suffering for eternity that what we face on earth. How can evolution or psychology explain such nonsense?

It can't. It only makes sense that revelation was given, someway and somehow. As Christians, we believe that revelation came from God through the Biblical writers, the prophets, the apostles, and through Christ. God's revelation is bound in the Bible.

And so, we find an argument for faith in those who deny it's existence. By looking into the holes of some of the great Horsemen of history, we find greater reason to affirm our faith. Man has yet to explain away the Christian faith. And as Christians, we must stand firm in the faith and know that fads like Marx and Freud will fade, but the Word of God will not.

D'Souza, continuing using secular arguments, concludes with the following:

Bottom line: Judaism and Christianity, not to mention the other great religions, hardly look like they are the product of mere wishful thinking. In fact, they posit a God and a moral universe that makes some fairly stern demands on humans. It's almost wishful to think that God does not exist, so that we can escape those demands. This is a point that does not seem to have occurred to poor Sigmund Freud.

And this is a significant point. If anything is a wish fulfillment it is atheism. How else could we explain the theory of wish fulfillment but by turning it on it's head. Freud is living in a world of wish fulfillment. He doesn't want God. He doesn't want to believe in God. Why? Because believing in God challenges our deepest desires. Therefore, in order to hold on to our lust, we must deny His existence. To put it another way, we must fulfill the wish that He does not exist and in so doing, we become define morality, and thus, return to the "anything goes," mentality. It is clear that man will do whatever he can to normalize sin so that he can get lost in it. And one of doing that is to deny the existence of a divine being.

Though men like Freud and Marx contiue to impact society, their voices are beginning to fade. History has kissed the arguments of Marx goodbye. His only remnants can be found in academic elite, class envy persons, and the far left. Freud, though influention, continues to fail to explain the psychology of the believer. And in so doing, has made belief more rational making Freud's ideas nothing more than wish fulfillment.