Philosophical Critiques of Religion: Feuerbach to Mounier
Ludwig Feuerbach
His Ideas
Man is distinguished from animals by the ability to develop self-awareness. Religious individuals project their consciousness outside themselves, attributing their own qualities to a being called God. All attributes and predicates that religion regarded as God’s own actually belong to man. God is not a mirror reflecting man but a mirage. Religion is a projection of human consciousness pursuing happiness. God is an imaginary and perfect double of man. Man is alienated. We must end religion for man to truly be himself. Religion will be overcome when it is fully absorbed into man.
Reply from Faith
The fact that man has always desired the existence of a god does not prove or disprove their actual existence. The assumption that man without God is more fully himself is unproven and unverifiable historically. This critique highlights the temptation to construct a god to suit our desires or interests, risking the manipulation of God rather than accepting him as he is.
Sigmund Freud
His Ideas
The human psychic structure comprises three levels:
- The Id: The instinctive part of our personality, formed by basic instincts of sexuality and aggression, and including repressed desires. It operates on the pleasure principle (satisfaction-dissatisfaction). If satisfaction is not achieved, it remains unfulfilled.
- The Super-Ego: Represents the ethical and moral aspects of the person, including internalized cultural and moral values from childhood. It is the ego ideal and acts as a conscience, approving or disapproving behaviors. It operates on the principle of duty (good-bad).
- The Ego: The conscious elements, whose mission is to adapt to reality. It operates on the principle of reality (convenient-inconvenient).
For Freud, religious ideas are an illusion originating in the depths of the psyche. Prayers and religious rites only seek to calm anxiety.
Reply from Faith
The fact that individuals seek psychological security in God does not prove or disprove the existence of a god independent of human desires. Freud’s critique rejects the childishness of faith, where individuals take refuge without personal maturity or facing life’s difficulties. It also unmasks false images of God as an authoritarian figure of rules and punishments.
Friedrich Nietzsche
His Ideas
Dissatisfaction with reality stems from a profound life experience. We need to focus and order our world, relying on something or someone because, in our weakness, we cannot withstand life alone. Resentment towards the real world leads to the belief in an apparent world and a real world.
Christian morality has strengthened a weak conception of existence. Jesus built a religion of the weak and resentful. Nietzsche proclaims the death of God, impacting man’s life and existence. Without morality and without God, there is nihilism. A new humanity must emerge beyond good and evil, represented by the Superman, who will overcome God and morality by saying yes to life.
Reply from Faith
This critique misunderstands the humiliation of Jesus and the humility of a believer. The proposed meaninglessness of life makes it difficult to build a coherent structure and personality integration within a community.
Albert Camus
His Ideas
Harrowing experiences like World War II raise questions about the absurdity of human existence. Camus highlights the problem of evil, pain, and death. He acknowledges evil in the world but avoids religious solutions. He rejects a world where the innocent suffer and believes in action: a choice determined by the humiliated, for justice, or doing everything for the sake of others without expecting reward. A human revolt against human evil and against God’s allowance of it.
Reply from Faith
Evil is the absence of good as known and desired by man, who instinctively seeks happiness and fulfillment. Human limitations, evil, and death can lead man to the transcendent, that is, the search for meaning in life beyond man and his history. In rejecting this significance, man loses the desire for happiness and fulfillment and the meaning of the struggle against evil.
Emmanuel Mounier
His Ideas
1. The Person
A person is a spiritual being with a unique existence and independence. They maintain their being through adherence to a freely adopted hierarchy of values, assimilated and lived through responsible commitment and constant conversion. A person is not merely an individual but a unity to be achieved, an internal work to be undertaken for authentic development. Vocation is the call to internal construction, defining values assimilated and lived in freedom. All elements of life are organized around these values.
2. The Fundamental Value
Personalism is not individualism. Personalism affirms the absolute value of the individual. The person commands absolute respect, superior to any material fact or social or individual consideration. No other person or organization can legitimately use a person as a means. God, in Christian doctrine, respects their freedom. A personalist civilization is oriented towards the personal fulfillment of each individual, maximizing initiative, responsibility, and spiritual life.