Paul C. Vitz - Faith of the Fatherless: The Psychology of Atheism

FAITH OF THE FATHERLESS

PAUL C. VITZ

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ATHEISM

Second Edition

IGNATIUS PRESS SAN FRANCISCO

First edition published by
Spence Publishing Company, Dallas, Texas
1999 by Paul C. Vitz

Cover art and design by Milo Persic

2013 by Ignatius Press, San Francisco
All rights reserved
ISBN 978-1-58617-687-7
Library of Congress Control Number 2013930575
Printed in the United States of America

This book is dedicated with love to my children:
Rebecca, Jessica, Daniel, Peter, Michael, and Anna, and now especially also to my grandchildren.

PART ONE
ATHEISTS, THEISTS, AND THEIR FATHERS

The Projection Theory of Belief in God

Freuds Unacknowledged Theory of Unbelief: Oedipal Atheism

A New Theory of Atheism: The Defective Father Hypothesis

An Extension of the Theory: The Attachment Insecurity Hypothesis

Attachment and Religiousness

Attachment and Unbelief

Dead Fathers

Friedrich Nietzsche

David Hume

Bertrand Russell

Jean-Paul Sartre

Albert Camus

Arthur Schopenhauer

Abusive and Weak Fathers

Thomas Hobbes

Jean Meslier

Voltaire

Jean dAlembert

Baron dHolbach

Ludwig Feuerbach

Samuel Butler

Sigmund Freud

H. G. Wells

Minor Atheists

John Toland

Robert Taylor

Richard Carlile

Contemporary Atheists

Albert Ellis

Madalyn Murray OHair

The New Atheists

Richard Dawkins

Daniel Dennett

Christopher Hitchens

Theist Control Group

Blaise Pascal

George Berkeley

Joseph Butler

Thomas Reid

Edmund Burke

Moses Mendelssohn

William Paley

William Wilberforce

Franois Ren de Chateaubriand

Friedrich Schleiermacher

John Henry Newman

Alexis de Tocqueville

Samuel Wilberforce

Sren Kierkegaard

Baron Friedrich von Hgel

G. K. Chesterton

Albert Schweitzer

Martin Buber

Karl Barth

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Abraham Heschel

Summary

Substitute Fathers

Don Bosco

Hilaire Belloc

Walker Percy

Political Atheists

Joseph Stalin

Adolf Hitler

Mao Zedong

The Atheist Father as a Positive Influence: James Mill and John Stuart Mill

Men and Women: Some Differences

Ayn Rand

Simone de Beauvoir

Jill Johnston

Kate Millett

Exceptions?

Denis Diderot

Karl Marx

Sam Harris

Other Psychologies of Unbelief

PART TWO
OTHER RELATED PSYCHOLOGIES OF UNBELIEF

General Socialization

Specific Socialization

Personal Independence

Personal Convenience

Another Exemplary Case: Mortimer Adler (1902-2001)

Autism Spectrum Disorder

ASD and Religion

The Positive Significance of Atheism for Believers

Historical Considerations

Intelligence and Ambition

Resentment and Will

Only as it reaches its extremes can we see how strange the modern world has become. It is natural that such extremes are needed for the characteristics of the modern to become obvious, and nothing has been more typical of public life than the presumption of atheism. God has been banished from public discourse so thoroughly that in todays high schools we teach about condoms and masturbation, but are legally prohibited from making reference to the Deity

The rejection of God in our schools is just one small example of the triumph of atheism. That such a rejection of God should have triumphed is quite remarkableeven bizarre. After all, the United States has long been known as a seriously religious country. In the 1840s, Alexis de Tocqueville clearly identified the profoundly religious character of the United States:

James Turner, a historian who has studied the origins of atheism in Western society and in America in particular, has pointed out that the known unbelievers of Europe and America before the French Revolution [1789] numbered fewer than a dozen or two. For disbelief in God remained scarcely more plausible than disbelief in gravity. Not until the past half-century has it become a predominant public assumption.

Yet even throughout these last fifty yearswhich is as long as the Gallup Poll

In the academic world, serious reference to God in scholarly writingnot to mention the use of notions like Providence is altogether taboo. Abstract secular concepts such as progress, class warfare, patriarchal society, self-actualization along with other often equally vague references to biological mechanisms, survival of the fittest , and evolution are, however, pervasive and accepted. The situation in the academy is such that to refer to God in any serious way would bring the legitimacy of ones scholarship into question.

In general, historians agree that explicit, systematic, and public atheism is a recent and distinctively Western phenomenon and that probably no other culture has manifested such a widespread public rejection of the divine. In view of the suddenness of the public shift from accepted belief to accepted unbelief, in view of its rarity in the historical record of other cultures, and in view of the continued high prevalence of private belief in God, atheism needs to be examined and much more fully explained or understood.

The importance of atheism is, I trust, obvious since it constitutes a major determinant of a persons worldview.

In contrast, the worldview of those who reject God creates problems like meaninglessness and the alienation of modern life that many report these days. Atheism, of course, has been a central assumption of many modern ideologies and intellectual movementscommunism, socialism, much of modern philosophy, most of contemporary psychology, and materialistic science. Indeed, I will take it for granted that atheism is one of the distinctive features of what is meant by the modern.

Now some might say that the reason for the dominance of atheism is that it is true: there is no God. I will address some aspects of this question but primarily from a psychological perspective. For now, let me simply point out that although it may be possible to prove the existence of God, it is clearly impossible to prove the nonexistence of Godsince to prove the nonexistence of anything is intrinsically impossible. In other words, atheism is an assumption made by certain people about the nature of the world, and these people have been, in the past century, extraordinarily successful at controlling the acceptable view on the matter. In particular, there seems to be a widespread assumption, throughout much of our intellectual community, that belief in God is based on all kinds of irrational, immature needs and wishes, whereas atheism or skepticism flows from a rational, grownup, no-nonsense view of things as they really are.

To challenge the psychology of this viewpoint is the primary concern of this book. As I present the evidence from the lives of atheists, I will be looking for regularities, for patterns that distinguish their lives and psychology from those of a comparable group of theists or, in the case of autism, from people in general.

There are three new topics that are quite relevant to the psychology of atheism that have come to prominence since I was collecting evidence and preparing the first edition of this book, published in 1999. They constitute the major reasons for this new edition.