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Verse:“For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” —Genesis 3:5
Psychologists have wrestled with the question, Did God create man, or did man create God? Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), the founder of psychoanalysis, was born to Jewish parents in Freiburg, Moravia, in the Austrian Empire, on May 6, 1856.
As one of the most influential and controversial thinkers of the twentieth century, Freud challenged the concept of God and the nature of religion.
He envisioned a mature society filled with people living moral lives free from religion. Based on the child’s need for “a father’s protection,” Freud viewed the notion of God as a human projection of this need; that is, as “the figure of an enormously exalted.” According to Freud, religion is “an illusion” and can be compared to “a childhood neurosis.”9 While other atheists strongly denied the existence of God and the meaning of religion, Freud suggested an attractive and convincing psychological process for people to migrate from that infant religious camp into the mature unreligious society.
No wonder Tony Campolo called Sigmund Freud “the apostle of disbelief” and declared, “There is no doubt that religion had already waned under the onslaught of the Enlightenment, but it was Freud who provided the radically new understanding of human nature that made any religious explanation of the whats and whys of our personhood seem naïve.”10 From a biblical perspective, the whole notion of maturing away from God and His Word echoes the speech of the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Subtly, the serpent first characterized God’s word as too restrictive and unreasonable and then offered a more liberated and reasonable approach.
In Genesis 3:5, the serpent argued, “For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” Freud died in 1939, but many of his faithful disciples continue to label God and religion as he did. Perhaps you are even under psychosocial pressure to give up your supposed “infant religion.” Never be ashamed of your loyalty to God and His Word (Luke 9:23–26)!