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 PrintableVersion Faith of the FatherlessFAITH OF THE FATHERLESS Probably most readers will be familiar with the central psychological hypothesis which Paul Vitz seeks to stand on its head in this book. That is, the idea that religion is some kind of projection of those characteristics we want in a father figure, but have never found. The pop versions of this idea have filtered down to us in comments like: 'All Christians are weak people who need a psychological crutch in God.' This initial thesis which Vitz spells out is related to that of another, the famous Oedipus complex formulated by Sigmund Freud. And, like the projection idea, it has become something of a commonplace in discussions about God. Freud claimed that young boys want to supplant their fathers and take their place at their mother's side, in a kind of psychological remix of Sophocles' Thebian plays, where the anti-hero, Oedipus, unwittingly ends up doing just that: patricide and incest. Vitz takes these two theories, both defended by Freud (though not original to him) and inverts them. That is the genius of this book, and it is worthy of a wide circulation if only for that reason. There are other reasons for reading it - not least that it is eminently readable, being written in straightforward, non-technical prose. Why reject God?So what is Vitz's point? That, in fact, the two theses advocated by Freud, which have had such an impact on the contemporary mind, work better in reverse. Far from accounting for those people who are weak enough, or psychologically damaged enough to need a god to help them through this difficult life, he finds that these ideas can be used in a similar way to account for atheism. That is, atheists are guilty of projecting their own bad images of fatherhood onto God with the result that they reject any notion of deity. This has a similar application to the Oedipal idea of supplanting one's father, which is, as it turns out in the case of prominent atheists, as much to do with the defective image of fatherhood as anything else. This on its own is an interesting way of turning the tables upon atheists in discussion when the old Freudian chestnuts are used as a 'disproof' of God. Atheists are as open to the charge of psychological crutches as Christians are, just crutches of a different (inverse) kind. But Vitz is attempting to do more that provide a pat apologetic argument. He is trying to account for the psychology of a modern malaise that has infected all walks of life, and, in particular, the intellectual groves of the Academy. Biographical evidenceCan we account for the atheism of some of the most prominent men (and it is largely men) of letters who have informed and, arguably, shaped the present secular society in which we live and work? The answer from Vitz is affirmative: he finds that numerous prominent intellectual atheists have had poor or absent, or non-existent father figures (and the length of the list is quite impressive). The ensuing deficit in their psychological and emotional development has been such that they have sought to oppose and destroy any other father figures they have come across, particularly that of God. Vitz gives us cameos of these thinkers and presents a simple but compelling case. Two examples may suffice: that of Nietzsche and Russell. Nietzsche is infamous for his rejection of all things Christian and his impact on modernity. He was Hitler's favourite philosopher, and his ideas about overcoming the weak and ineffectual morality of Christ with the Will to Power of the superman, are well known. Vitz argues that his childhood and the early death of a weak father, followed by the suffocation Nietzsche felt with being brought up in an all-female environment, can largely account for his antagonism to the faith and God which his weak father espoused. Bertrand Russell is another well-known atheist philosopher. He also had a tragic early life. Both his parents died and he was brought up by an austere grandmother. His daughter, whom Vitz cites, explains how she feels that the whole of her father's life, in mathematical philosophy and opposition to Christianity, was the search for a secure certainty that he had lost in his childhood, coupled with the rejection of the father figure of the Christian God. Good families and exceptionsIn sharp contrast to these unhappy stories, Vitz goes on to detail numerous theistic thinkers whose childhoods were happy and whose relationships to their fathers were positive and enriching. Thus the Wilberforces in the 19th century and Bishop Berkeley in the 18th demonstrate that a balanced set of family relationships can have important implications for the development of a child's receptivity to religious ideas. Vitz also takes into consideration several kinds of potential exceptions and qualifications to his view. Women represent one of these. Their psychological development is, in most cases, different from men, in that women relate to their father, and to subsequent father figures, in terms of their relationship to them, rather than in abstract terms as do men. So the removal of a father figure in a male life typically precipitates a loss of faith in the principles for which he stood: integrity, truth and ethical maxims. For women, by contrast, the loss of a father is seen in relational terms, and often leads to a search for other relationships to compensate for this loss. Another potential problem involves those intellectual figures who buck the trend: thinkers whose fathers were adequate, but who still turned out to be atheists and theists who had little or no relationship with their fathers. Of this latter group, Vitz cites examples (such as the novelist Hilaire Belloc) who may have had little contact with their actual fathers, but who nevertheless were significantly influenced by other father substitutes who took their place, providing the needed psychological support in development. Of the former group, Vitz cites examples like the French encyclopaedist Denis Diderot, who seems to have been an atheist with a stable family background. But here Vitz brings in a supporting hypothesis (while frankly admitting that this is an exception in part to his original theory), that the place a child has in order of birth can also affect their self-perception and eventual rebellion against existing norms, such as religion and the establishment. A second child in a large family can often end up feeling alienated from his parents, and tends to rebel against established norms, as in the case of Diderot. Ill-founded secularismWhat Vitz shows is that the received wisdom (or rather, folklore) of present secularism is based upon thinkers whose rejection of religion and God are as much, if not more, dependent on their experience of fatherhood, as the theistic position is. The link between fathers who were weak, absent, dead, or abusive (and this last is particularly sobering when seen in the lives of Stalin and Hitler), and the development of atheistic worldviews, is striking whatever opinion one comes to at the end of the book. What is more, Vitz makes a compelling case for the idea that many of the factors which go into the make-up of a religious worldview (including, of course, atheism) are non-rational, psychological and social factors which the person in question may not always be completely aware of. Some may find aspects of the material presented a little too neat, with too little regard given to exceptions to the hypotheses Vitz defends. But, despite that, the book is a fascinating insight into the unacknowledged arrogance and presumption of the modern secular - and largely atheistic - mind. Oliver D. Crisp© Evangelicals Now - April 2000 |
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