According to the theories most influential among intellectuals over the past 200 years, godless Tübingen is not exceptional but a typical, positive example. According to such theories, religion is a relic of a bygone, superstitious age.

August Comte (1798-1857), the father both of modern sociology and (with David Hume: 1711-1776) the philosophy of positivism, posited three stages of mankind: The mythological, the metaphysical and the positive. In the positive stage, which we should by now have attained, religious meanings have withered away, and men rely on science alone to explain the world.

Theories such as Comte's always assume that religion is the product of ignorance and superstition, which would fall away like the scales before men's eyes, once they saw the light.

"God is dead" announced a young Hegel (1770-1831), almost 200 years ago; Nietzsche (1844-1900) would repeat the observation, with more volume, towards the end of the 19th century. The claim is either absurd or means something other than meets the eye. For man does not pronounce God dead, though the converse may be true.

"God is dead!" expresses not a philosophical or theological principle but a sociological observation. For if God was, He is and will ever be. The observation was saying that men had ceased believing in Him. But which men? Not the vast majority, who continued to bow down to their various gods.

Were the intellectuals heralding the demise of the deity, saying that the masses only thought they believed, but that the intellectuals knew better? That is part of the answer.

Another part was the projection of the intellectuals' own hostility towards belief onto the common folk. Yet as long as one soul believes in an idea, that idea is not dead. (For proof of this case, one need look no further than American Neo-Marxists, many of whom today call hemselves "multiculturalists.") And if every soul stopped believing, that would still be irrelevant to the question of whether God exists.

Off with Their Heads!

The anti-religious sentiment that would later so enthuse the scribes came largely from the French Revolution. The church would play no role in the new, rabidly Jacobin order associated closest with Maximilian Robespierre (1758-1794). Even the calendars were changed in France, to signify that with the Revolution, time had just begun. (The notion of setting the beginning or ending of time without physical or geological methods is usually associated with millenarian religious movements promising salvation.) The new order would brook no clerics, no nobles, no kings. As Robespierre found out in the end, though, it was not only the representatives of the old order who lost their heads.

(According to David Hume's biographer, Ernest Mossner, Hume considered the radical atheism of the French Enlightenment's philosophes just as superstitious as the theists whom they attacked. As a result, he kept his own counsel as an agnostic, rather than go over to atheism. Hume was the greatest thinker of the Scottish Enlightenment, which ran concurrent with the French Enlightenment, but which was notable for its relatively sober assay of human nature. When academics and educated civilians speak of "The Enlightenment," they are usually referring to the French version.)

Homo Illuminatus

Thereafter, anti-clericalism became calcified in certain parts of the upper classes as anti-religious sentiment, if not out and out atheism. This development has come so far that today, many "enlightened" teenagers of the upper and even middle classes "know" that God is a myth. When teenagers are so enlightened, it is good to question the value of enlightenment.

Since the French Enlightenment, intellectuals have increasingly held to the expectation that with increased education and affluence, religious belief would die out. In this crude economic scheme, religious belief is a function of ignorance, which is in turn a function of poverty.

Many Americans, including "religious" people, believe in the economic model of religion sketched above. In Joseph Wambaugh's 1970 novel, The New Centurions, Los Angeles police recruit Serge Duran recalls overhearing the Irish Catholic priest of his childhood parish confide to a nun, "They are not good Catholics, but they are so respectful and they believe so well." They referred to the Mexicans. A deracinated American, Duran was going through an identity crisis, rejecting his dead Mexican parents' roots, including Roman Catholicism.

If any country disproves the economic theory seeing religious devotion as based in poverty, it is the United States. Almost everyone (app. 96%) believes in God, despite the lack of a state-imposed church. True, there are those who have argued that religious devotion among Americans is as shallow as it is broad. But note that for an atheist to decry the quality of religious devotion is to set himself up as a judge of true religious devotion. However, as an atheist he has already recused himself from the case for devotion. For an atheist, all devotion is based in ignorance, hypocrisy, oppression or a combination thereof.

For a characteristically American literary response to such "sophistication," a very American Serge Duran later returns to his Mexican roots, including the Church. He rejects not America, but a false sense of sophistication meant to disguise confusion, incoherence, and a lack of orientation.

An Overdressed Ape?

On the basis of what knowledge does the atheist deny the existence of God? He is a scientific man, and so he trots out the likes of Darwin and Freud as superior to the "creation myth."

Charles Darwin's (1809-1882) theory of evolution tells us that species developed, and died or thrived according to the principle of natural selection, or the "survival of the fittest." Evolutionary biology sees man as having evolved from the lower primates, which in turn developed from lower life forms, going back to the original "soup" of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen.

In recent years, Darwinism has been beset by so many problems that "creationist" Christians entertain themselves by pointing out the schisms and sectarianism with which the evolutionary movement is riven, and which increasingly make it resemble a scientific cult. Evolution's problems obtain on at least three levels: Evidence, the incoherence of, and gaps in the original theory, and equivocation in the attempts to save the original theory by combining it with new alternatives.

Dem Bones

Darwin based his theory on fossil evidence. Already the founder himself had problems matching much of the evidence with the theory, but shared his followers' confidence that over the years more fossil finds would provide a preponderance of evidence for the theory of evolution. With time, more advanced testing has not provided more fossil evidence, but rather has refuted much of the original evidence. Consequently, there is less fossil evidence supporting evolution today than when the theory was first proposed over 120 years ago.

The most plausible part of Darwin's theory was and remains "natural selection." This idea seems to offer a rational explanation for the passing from the scene of species. But that part is secondary to the real business of the theory, which is the origin and evolution of species. The principle of natural selection does nothing to explain the origins of species, and neither Darwin nor his successors have ever come up with proof of the evolution from one species to a new species. We are left not with one "missing link," the mythic species connecting man to his supposed simian forebears, but with an almost endless number of missing links between all "higher" and "lower" species.

Some evolutionists tried to remedy the problem of gradual, evolutionary explanation by positing a theory of sudden bursts of mutation to cover the gaps in the original theory. The problem with this theory is that it is no longer the theory of evolution. The gradual and the violent-change theory are mutually incompatible. The attempt to wed them is a case of equivocation. Equivocation is a common strategy theorists -- whether of biology or The Bible -- undertake when a cherished theory is shown to have failed to deliver what it had promised. The problem with equivocation is that it always involves combining two mutually incompatible theories or statements. Like a man simultaneously romancing two different women, each of whom is unaware of the other, the proponent of the "new, improved" theory then must constantly flip flop, compartmentalizing its different contradictory aspects at any given moment.

Meet Our Psychological Consultant, Dr. Sigmund Fraud

Then we have Sigmund Freud's (1856-1939) psychoanalysis. Freud posited any number of structures and forces in the psyche: The conscious and the unconscious; the id, ego, and superego; the pleasure principle (eros) and the death drive (thanatos). And then, of course, there are the defense mechanisms: Projection, reaction formation, displacement, repression; the theory of sexual hysteria in young women stemming from an early childhood trauma; and of course, the star of all psychic drama, the Oedipus Complex. The Oedipus Complex posits that each little boy experiences a desire to kill his father and marry his mother. The child sees his father as a rival for Momma's affections (which, indeed he is!), who must go.

One of the central tenets of the philosophy of science is testability. This concept, most closely associated with Karl Popper (1902-1994), holds that to be considered scientific, a theory must be testable. Testable means that there must be circumstances under which the theory may be either be corroborated or fail. Testing isn't the Holy Grail, because an untrue theory might at times be corroborated, and we might have good reasons to hold on to a theory, despite its having failed a test. However, a theory for which no test may be conceived, and which seems to apply unconditionally to any set of circumstances, simply is not scientific in character.

The above criticisms seem to apply to Freud's psychoanalysis. It is not that there is a lack of "evidence" for his theories but rather that everything seems to count as evidence for it, and nothing is allowed as a possible disproof. There is no independent standard by which we may judge the truth claims of psychoanalysis; the theory is self-validating. That makes it more a world view, or philosophy, than a scientific theory.

One becomes a psychoanalyst through studying the canons of the field, and through himself undergoing analysis with a veteran practitioner. There is no mechanism, however, for scientific testing of hypotheses or diagnoses.

To be scientific, a theory has to be amenable to testing by those who are not believers. A scientific theory cannot presuppose a world of righteous or healthy believers and evil or neurotic infidels. Freudians take the opposite tack, more common to religion than science: Only true believers may judge. And of course, the believers' judgment is in the affirmative.

Like followers of other dogmatic theories, Freudians reduce critics to cases of the theory. Disagreement must be the expression of a defense mechanism, or of someone who has not been successfully psychoanalyzed. As Leslie Stevenson has noted, a rational theory cannot reduce criticism to an instance of the theory. This is particularly common with theories which see human nature as fundamentally irrational. But if men are irrational, from what race did the Freudians spring?

Freudian analysts and their clients consider themselves enlightened, superior to the sort of poor souls who would debate how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

Even by the friendly standards of the psychological profession as to what constitute "symptoms" and "cure," you're as likely to be cured of what ails you with no therapy than with it. Consider then that one visit per week to a classic Freudian analyst costs $150 for a fifty-minute "hour," or $7200 per year. And how many times has anyone heard of a psychoanalyst sending a client with the ability to pay packing?

The magic talisman of designer therapy won't make a person healthier or wiser, anymore than wearing Ralph Lauren or working out at the New York Health & Racquet Club will, though the status it endows one with may make him wealthier. And that means going to heaven.

No snake-oil salesmen or crazy religious cults for Freud's devotees. To steal a line from a poet, it's a wonder Freudian analysts don't tear their eyes out, in light of the Freud they've been perpetrating.

If there is a science of mind, it knows of no arcane methods or expensive, exotic tools, for everyone possesses the tools. The science is philosophy.

The Frankfurt School

Moving away from such hard sciences, let us return to contemporary "social thinkers," the heirs curiously enough, to the apparently antagonistic French Enlightenment and Hegel.

As Richard Mitchell has observed, social thinkers tell us things like, "society oppresses women," as opposed to "'Mr. So-and-So' is oppressing 'Ms. Such-and-Thus.'" In social thought, "society" does things, just as like a person. A very special kind of person.