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igmund Freud and Karl Marx adopted similar strategies to discredit belief in God. Freud held that belief in God arose from an unconscious childish wish for protection from a heavenly father figure: “At bottom God is nothing more than an exalted father.” Marx held that belief in God arose from economic alienation: “Religion is the opium of the people.” According to Freud and Marx, the belief in God arose from wish fulfillment or exploitation, and so, it might be concluded, God does not exist.

Both of these critiques are logically fallacious. In his book Socratic Logic, Peter Kreeft points out that the genetic fallacy:

consists in “refuting” an idea by showing some suspicious psychological origin of it. . . . No matter how egregious the psychological origins of a belief may be, the logic of the argument for it is independent of the psychology. If Einstein had been a vicious Nazi and had discovered the Theory of Relativity only in order to give Hitler the atom bomb to kill his enemies and conquer the world, that would not prove that E does not equal MC².

In fact, important scientific discoveries have had unlikely origins. The inventor of the periodic table, Dmitri Mendeleev, discovered the relationship between chemical elements and atomic weight through a vivid dream. The chemist August Kekulé gained insight into the structure of atoms in benzene when he dreamed of a snake eating its own tail. The microbiologist Alexander Fleming discovered that penicillin destroys bacteria because he didn’t properly clean his lab. The genetic fallacy shows that genesis of an idea does not determine the truth of an idea. So, even if Freud and Marx were right about the psychological origins of belief in God, that would not show that God does not exist.
#God #Christianity #Catholic #faith #reason #Aquinas #CS Lewis #Jordan Peterson #Freud #Marx