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The eternal and the infantile

To the proposal of eternal life with the loving Father the Freudian atheist objects with the ad hominem sounding retort that it is to wish to return to infantile bliss.

To that objection, one might reply: surely this is a scientifically testable thesis, so how would you test it? I have an idea: look for someone who surely did not experience infantile bliss yet does wish to experience eternal life in union with the loving Father. If the Freudian atheist is correct, then no such person exists, for the only plausible cause of such a wish is the memory of having experienced something like it in the past.

Has this experiment been conducted? No? If not, then why does the Freudian atheist pontificate so confidently?

What would happen if we found an individual who most definitely did not experience anything like infantile bliss yet desires eternal happiness. Would the Freudian, ala Popper, simply admit that their (as in "her" or "his") claim was false?

No, they would recast their claim, but this time no longer dress it up like science. They would say that it is childish to desire eternal bliss. This new claim is more like the statement, which Alaistir McGrath is so fond of mentioning, that "democracy is better than fascism," than it is like something said by a scientist. That is, such a claim that can neither be proven nor disproven via the scientific method, yet it can be reasonable and argued for and against (actually, this statement seems to me to be more like "fascism is better than democracy," but that's beside the point I'm making now).

Now that the newly dressed, no longer Freudian, atheistic criticism is now dressed in the language of philosophy rather than science, it no longer has recourse to a pseudo-scientific ad hominem. Now we can talk about the relation between the desire for eternal happiness and those desires had by a mature adult.

And in defense of the desire for eternal bliss I would pose the following quasi-rhetorical questions: Isn't it also an adult desire to be happy and loved? Isn't such a disposition the mark of a healthy person? Why not want more of the most important thing (or one of the most important things) in life?
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Unknown said…
Great points. The other response I'd have to that fallacy is to point out that it assumes you only get "benefits" from faith. What about martyrdom? Or anything one's faith demands that's difficult? Where's Daddy's candy for Thomas More?
11:16 AM
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