Beginning in earnest with the Enlightenment but gaining speed in the 19th century, Western culture pretty much decided that God was no longer indispensable. With newfound confidence in the power of reason and science, the idea was that human beings finally could solve life’s most vexing problems.
No longer held back by primitive beliefs and mystical obfuscations, humanity was now in a position to uncover the hidden secrets of the universe previously obscured by the prejudices and ignorance of the past.
Humanity now would be able to harness this immense power for the benefit of all. Yet while this appears outwardly an unalloyed good, if unchecked, such untested optimism might also prove foolish if not dangerous. Worse still, it might even prove inhuman!
Which is not to say that science and reason haven’t brought about much good and many blessings. One need only consider the advancements in medicine alone, to cite just one obvious example. For me, a recent visit to the dentist underscores the point.
Yet the problem, as I say, is over time God may no longer seem necessary. Additionally, as science progresses, and as countless human challenges are overcome, it’s easy to think that life is progressing on all fronts. Heaven can be stormed.
From seeds planted centuries earlier during the Enlightenment, a number of influential 19th century intellectuals logically concluded that God was indeed wholly irrelevant, if not dead (Nietzsche). Human beings, not God, were now “the measure of all things.”
With the loss of God came a commensurate loss of faith. And with this the loss of heaven, i.e. life after death. For many, this world would be all there is.
And yet how this new belief denies what is fundamental to human existence. We are made to aspire to heaven, to perfection. It’s in our DNA. The human soul is not content with the brokenness of this world and will not rest in its inequalities and injustices.
Enter the social reformer. The promise here is that we needn’t live with brokenness. It can be fixed. Heaven can be built here on earth. We shall accept nothing less…or else.
Our longing for God is based, in large measure, on the need to be released from the pain of being human, and especially our existential fear of death. Wthout a Creator, as Blaise Pascal once noted, human life is “intolerable.”
This festering anxiety and fear is the cause of most human wrong. The heedless wish for more than this life, for more than is possible, is itself the cause of more human misery than any other.
In ancient Greek mythology, Prometheus is the pagan god who steals fire from the gods and brings a piece of heaven to earth. It is this same fire with which we hope to transform our world into a paradise, without God, and without any awareness of our innate limitations (not to mention sin).
It is this “desperate hope” against the vagaries of human existence that all utopian schemes find their root.
For Karl Marx religious belief was not a consolation for human unhappiness but its cause. The “fire,” in other words, is not in heaven but in each of us. In place of the Final Judgment and a world made holy through divine intervention, Marx promised Social Justice, a world redeemed through the actions of ordinary human beings.
For the devoted, the source of human misery cannot be located in a deficiency of self. It is located in “society.” The mission of the social reformer therefore is to root out and cleanse all such corruption, thus reversing the human Fall. This is the secular purification of the world. Indeed, the more beautiful the dream (of overcoming evil), the more one is justified by whatever means necessary.
The history of the 20th century, the “Christian Century,” proved anything but liberating. It is estimated, for instance, that the devotees of Marx alone were responsible for roughly 100 million deaths.
I, for one, could do without such “progress.”