There have been cultures and civilizations without science and technology, but there has never been one without religious sentiment, without religion. This is because self-awareness, which emerges in human life around the age of 6 or 7, is contemporary with the certainty that one day we will die.
Because of cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am, I know that one day I will cease to exist. The three questions that every human being asks of himself or herself – where I come from, where am I going, and what is the meaning of life – surface in the consciousness on the day he or she becomes self-aware. Religion is the answer to these three questions.
Biography of Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872)
Born in Rechenberg in 1804, Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach was a German philosopher known for his study of humanist theology. He was a student of the philosopher Hegel, but abandoned his Hegelian studies to take up studies in the natural sciences in 1828.
His most important work is called “The Essence of Christianity”, in which he discusses the true essence or anthropology of religion and concludes that all religion is a form of alienation in which people project their concept of the “human ideal” onto a higher being. Feuerbach makes the transition from German idealism to the historical materialism of Karl Marx and the scientific materialism of the second half of the 19th century.
Religion as Man's Projection
Homo homini Deus est – Christianity set itself the goal of satisfying man’s unattainable desires, but for this very reason, ignored his attainable desires. By promising man eternal life, it deprived him of temporal life, by teaching him to trust in God’s help, it took away his trust in his own powers; by giving him faith in a better life in Heaven, it destroyed his faith in a better life on earth and the effort to achieve it. Christianity gave man what his imagination desires, but for that very reason, did not give him what he truly wants.
For Feuerbach, theology is pure anthropology, for it was not God who created man in his image and likeness, but on the contrary, it was man who created God in his image and likeness. Everything that is said about God belongs to man; the images of God and everything we know about him is anthropomorphic. Man, projects all his aspirations, desires and ideals outside of himself, onto an abstract being he calls God. “God is nothing more than the human spirit projected towards the infinity”.
“My first thought was God, my second thought was reason, my third and last thought was man”. This brilliant philosopher began his career as a student of theology, later abandoning it to become a disciple of Hegel. Feuerbach was the first great atheist of modern times. A real blaze of fire, which is what his name means. In truth, I believe that all those who came after him said little or nothing truly new, merely repeating his basic ideas with other words.
For this reason, Feuerbach is the great inspirer and precursor of Karl Marx, in the sense that he is the first to proclaim and fight for man’s emancipation from the tutelage of religion, which weakens him and deprives him of his own power. For Feuerbach, “Morality that does not aim at happiness is a word devoid of meaning”. And he warns us that “whenever morality is based on theology, whenever what is right becomes dependent on divine authority, the most immoral, unjust, and infamous things can be justified and imposed”.
As brilliant as it may seem, Feuerbach’s criticism of faith and religion is nothing more than sophistry. Man’s projection outside himself says nothing about the existence or non-existence of God: God can exist with or without projection.
Human projection, precisely because it is human, has more to do with human nature than with God’s nature. Thus, human projection can explain why the thought of God has always existed in the minds of all men at all times; but it has nothing to say about the hypothetical existence of God. On the contrary, the persistence of the very thought of God in our minds is more proof of God’s existence than of His non-existence.
If a person is thirsty or has a desire to drink water, it is because there must be water to quench his thirst; it is more logical to think that water creates the desire than to think that the desire creates water; especially since, chronologically in the history of the Universe, long before the appearance of man, there was already water; therefore, water pre-exists the desire to drink it. I believe that if water did not exist, neither would thirst.
Returning to the sequence of Feuerbach’s thoughts from God to Man, unfortunately, Feuerbach did not stop at the third thought, God – Reason – Man. After having lowered and degraded God to the category of pure human conjecture, he did not stop there but continued with his fourth thought which was the sensible, with the fifth which was nature, and with the sixth which was matter, going so far as to foolishly state that “man is what he eats”.
In other words, when you degrade God, you end up degrading the creature He created in His image and likeness as well. According to the book of Genesis, God took us from matter (clay) and made us as persons in His own image and likeness. If we deny God’s existence as a person, we also deny our existence as persons, because we owe it to Him.
If we are not a person, then we return to what we were before God created us, that is, matter. In conclusion, what Feuerbach is doing to the human being is a Darwinian involution…
Conclusion – For Feuerbach, it was man who created God in his own image, projecting his aspirations and ideals onto God, and not the other way around. However, the human desire for something transcendent can be proof of God’s existence. There is no thirst without water and no water without thirst.
Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC
Thank you Father Jorge 🙏❤️🙏
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