Out of the 19th century have come three major challenges of Christianity: Marxism, Freudianism, and Darwinism. Each of these claimed to have done away with the possibility of Christian faith. Karl Marx declared religion the opiate of the people—a false belief foisted on the working classes to keep them from crying out for social and economic justice. Freud saw religion as wish-fulfillment and a projection of the super-ego. God was simply a creation of our psyche. But the nations that swept away religion did not become bastions of liberty and equality—but rather horrific killing fields, massive prison systems, and oppressive dictatorships. Every place it has been tried, Marxism has self-destructed and become the best argument against itself. The theory of Freud, for which he and his many disciples claimed the status of science, has also been rejected by most psychologists. The quick rise and fall of Marxism and Freudianism has made me quite skeptical of the claims of the last 19th century challenger—Darwinism.
What all three of these challengers have in common is the reductionistic nature of their claims. Marx claimed that all of history could be understood as a materialistic dialectic of economic struggle. Marxism became a lens through which literature, art, science, history, philosophy could all be viewed. All of life and thought could be economically interpreted. In a similar way Freudian approaches and interpretation could be applied to almost every cultural and academic topic. Freudian interpretations of literature abounded. And now the word evolution is applied across the board to non-biological topics. People speak of the evolution of societies, ethics, language. And socio-biologists have sought to explain the evolutionary advantage of practically every kind of human activity: religious belief, music, play, even altruism.
I call all these “philosophers” suicide bombers because their ideas blow themselves up while attacking orthodox Christianity. Marx argues that what we believe is not based on the truth but on economic self-interest. But if true, it must also be true of the idea of Marxism. So Marxism is logically no truer than any other theory. And if all our beliefs are really expressions of our unconscious and merely wish-fulfillment, then so too are the beliefs of Freud. If the belief in a benevolent God is fulfilling a wish for a loving father, then atheism fulfills a wish to strike back at an unloving father. All reductionistic theories are self-negating—self-exploding. Even socio-biology forces us to ask what the evolutionary advantage of believing in evolution is. Do biologists enhance their importance in the human herd by displacing priests and pastors and becoming the new guardians of ultimate truth? Do they become the alpha academics?
Behaviorism, the theory popularized by B. F. Skinner, sought to reduce all human behavior to our responses to stimuli. Skinner argued that freedom of choice was an illusion and that all supposedly free decisions were really the result of conditioning. But once again, this idea self-destructs because it means that even the theory of behaviorism is accepted or rejected only because of the conditioning a person has received. In fact, all these deterministic philosophies that have been so popular for a season in academia eventually fade away not only because they are self-negating, but also because they fail to correspond to how we live. Even those post-modernists who argue that all ideas are simply social constructions, which are neither true nor false, speak and write as though we should believe this idea because it is “true”. But logically, even the claim of reality as a social construction, must also be merely a social construction—not truer than any counter-claim.
Although all these theories explain important truths, they become diabolical when they are forced to explain everything. Ironically, in light of how popular the theories are with many secular humanists, all these theories attack the dignity of man. Skinner, in his book Beyond Freedom and Dignity, is forthright in his attack. These theories fail not only because they deny God—they fail because they deny humanity. It is no accident that Christian witness and teaching about the nature of man played an important role in unraveling the lies of Marxism first in Poland and then in many of the other Communist countries.
As the empires of these reductionistic theories crumble to dust, biblical revelation stands as a solid rock. Only in God is there a secure anchor to our conviction that all men have been endowed by the Creator with certain inalienable rights. History clearly teaches that when we lose God, we lose man. And to find God, is to discover who man truly is. I see you as my brother only when I behold God as our Father. I discovered my true identity only when I lost myself in God.
