(San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1999).
Reviewed by Dr. Gigy Joseph
“Quite simply, Paul Vitz’s Faith of the Fatherless is a minor classic, a book that should be on the short list of all those who want to understand, in the deepest terms, the ill effects caused by failures of fatherhood.” (Benjamin Walker, Author, Architects of the Culture of Death)
“In deploying Freudian theory against atheism itself, Paul Vitz has proven beyond a doubt what’s missing from secular accounts of secularization, namely, actual human beings. His thesis is intellectual jujutsu of the first order.” (Mary Eberstadt, author of The Loser Letters and Adam and Eve After the Pill)
In Faith of the Fatherless: The Psychology of Atheism, Paul Vitz, professor of psychology at New York University, revisits Sigmund Freud’s “projection theory,” which proposes childish craving for security or “wish-fulfilment” as the basis for religion and God. He turns it on its head, proving that the argument could equally be used to understand atheism. Freud concluded that psychological factors render belief itself suspect or false. Vitz argues how, by the same logic, unbelief also can be explained.
The loss or absence of a father, or having an abusive and violent father in the formative years, can result in different degrees of rejection of God because a child’s “psychological representation of his father is intimately connected to his understanding of God.” He notes that the “atheist’s disappointment in and resentment of his own father unconsciously justifies his rejection of God.” Vitz makes a historical survey of more than twenty prominent thinkers of our time.
Special attention is given to political atheists, like Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler and Mao Zedong, each of whom were victims of violently abusive fathers. The similarity of their upbringing, like the similarities among the regimes they led, are striking.
Complementary to this is Vitz’s survey of believers, converts and apologists of Christianity, where he finds very few defective fathers. His list includes outstanding figures like Chesterton, Martin Buber, Bonhoeffer and Blaise Pascal.
Vitz also makes a comparison of male and female atheists. Female atheists are not as many as the male—something worth thinking about. Vitz does not say that there is psychological determinism at play. People are not automatons. The point is that, though bad fathers or failed fathers do create a strong predisposition to atheism, in the end it is the choice of the individual that decides, plus some circumstances that may offer moments of choice. This we see in the case of atheistic converts to belief.
A touching true story to conclude with. At the end of a talk by Paul Vitz on this topic, a young man from the audience told Vitz: “My life fits your theory to a ‘t.’ I am an atheist and my father abandoned our family when I was small. What advice do you have for me?” Dr Vitz replied, “Go, find a child who is in the same situation that you were in, and be the father figure for that child.” David Charlesworth, who narrated this incident, adds, “There wasn’t a dry eye in the audience; I’m still moved just relating the exchange.” (Amazon.com, under reviews of this book.)
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