THE QUESTION OF GOD

A careful examination of two major, and conflicting, currents of modern thought.

Those currents, in the view of Nicholi (Psychiatry/Harvard Medical School), turn on the question of whether God exists. The founder of modern psychotherapy thought not; Sigmund Freud held that the belief in an “idealized Superman” is “so patently infantile and so foreign to reality that . . . it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never rise above this view of life,” asserting that only scientific education could turn people away from “the fairy tales of religion.” British writer and popular theologian C.S. Lewis argued in the affirmative, having turned from youthful atheism to a more or less orthodox Christianity in middle life and becoming preoccupied thereafter with the “questions of how to escape corruption in living and how in death to give meaning to life.” Setting these thinkers in opposition is admittedly an artificial construct; it can be objected that Freud (1856–1939) and Lewis (1898–1963) were two generations apart and did not publicly debate each other. (Although Nicholi speculates that they might have met briefly at the very end of Freud’s life.) Einstein and Muggeridge, Bohr and Schweitzer, or even Sagan and Tolkien might have done just as well in serving as spokesmen for their respective causes and in making the author’s point. Yet Nicholi ably makes his case for pairing Freud with Lewis, and his essay takes inspired turns as he examines how believers and nonbelievers think about such thorny matters as forgiving those who have trespassed against us, dealing with the pain the world deals us, and even loving ourselves.

Palatable food for thought for readers preoccupied with life’s big, ultimately insoluble questions.