This is the last in Books and Boots’ series on Sigmund Freud, where Freud presents one of his most wide-ranging polemics against Christianity. Reviewing that polemic leads the author to find Freud wanting in his critique, to say the last. Although he gives his own reasons, I have a different take on why Freud’s rabidly secular view will always come up short.
Freud himself admitted that science cannot furnish a Weltanschauung (worldview) because it is not complete. That simple observation eludes people, which is why it comes up again and again in our society. You see it on social media and it was certainly in evidence with the New Atheists twenty years ago, in the early days of this website. To put it simply, science can tell us how and why for the immediate cause but cannot address the issue of either ultimate cause, purpose or goal. That has to come from somewhere else.
That last point is crucial because Freud and others would like society to be directed in a scientific way to the best outcome for humanity. But what is the best outcome for humanity? The environmental movement has placed a special urgency to this question because it ultimately challenges our right to exist. Would mass suicide and handing the planet back to the animals be the best thing? Our compulsive amour-propre may push back against such a solution, but amour-propre is no excuse in the face of “science.”
It is also ironic–or maybe predictable–that the era of the zenith of Freud’s influence was, in this country at least, a Luddite nervous breakdown, one from which we have never fully recovered. It was an era which sought return to primitive life, to get away from the repressive necessities of civilisation. But, as Freud observed, without the repressions there’s no civilisation, and we’re too addicted to the benefits of that civilisation to part with them.
But enough of secular people chasing their tails…the whole business of worldview brings up a favourite topic in Christian circles, namely that of a “Biblical Worldview.” There are all kinds of ways to teaching this and then to disseminate it in society, such as the “Seven Mountains” business. While the essentials of this worldview are fairly straightforward, the details and the implementation method are complicated. To start with, let’s talk organisation (or lack thereof): do we aim towards a state church as we did at the start, or do we somehow rely on a combination of the morass of denominations, non-denominational churches and parachurch organisations under our Constitutional structure to win the day? And then there are hermeneutic issues. Do we enforce New Earth Creationism as Ken Ham insists, or do we let old-earthers like the late Pat Robertson have a seat at the table?
But there’s one thing for sure: those reborn in Jesus Christ have the best cure for amour-propre out there, and that’s the start to solving our problems.
Positive Infinity 