The Unseating of Man

Atheistic Scientism's Attack on Human Dignity

One of the most popular criticisms used by atheists against Christians is that, whereas medievals placed man at the center of the universe and subjected everything to him, science “unseated” man and effectively humbled him.

Sigmund Freud proposed one form of this argument. For him, this unseating began with Copernicus, who placed the Sun, a mere ball of inanimate plasma, at the center of the universe - not man, who became simply a speck on one of the spheres of rock rotating around the Sun, what Carl Sagan would call the “pale blue dot” floating unremarkably in an infinite universe. Galileo, so the story goes, then helped to solidify this unseating by fully substantiating heliocentrism, despite the arrogant attempts by churchmen to curtail his efforts and cling onto their power, both over the minds of men and in the cosmos.

Darwin followed these early scientists, proving that man was not a special creation of God in the Garden of Eden, endowed with a rational soul made in His image, but only a “well-dressed ape,” as the more modern phrase puts it, just a primate with more developed versions of faculties shared with other apes. Our ancestors were no longer Adam and Eve but homo erectus, homo africanus and other pre-human primates and, even earlier, various other species which themselves evolved from simple organisms that popped into existence in the primordial sludge millions of years ago. As such, humans were not special in the cosmos or on Earth; not only our biological origins but our capacity for knowledge, our morality and our afterlife were all limited to the material, to whatever was discoverable by science. Freud and the psychologists further contributed to this “unseating” by identifying every human thought, feeling and action as rooted in bodily drives and environmental conditioning, all derived from natural selection and determined by brain chemistry.

For atheists, this unseating or dethroning of man was a good thing, so far as anything can be called “good” from a materialistic perspective: it dispelled the eternal aspirations and spiritual preoccupations of man, destroying the foundations of his prideful self-righteousness which, they argue, had been used to justify millennia of violence and tyranny and prevented man from living a truly tolerant, free and happy life. History has shown the true consequences of this atheistic unseating of man.

Early on, slavery made a reappearance in Europe after having been eradicated following the Christianization of Rome and the conversion of the barbarians; its justification was in reference to antiquity and to utilitarianism, while the Catholic Church consistently taught against it from the beginning. By the twentieth century, Nietzsche had proven that, rather than dethroning, science had in fact deified man as the sole source of meaning in existence, possessing the will to impose his meaning onto others and conform reality to himself. Combined with scientific social Darwinist race doctrine, this mentality went on to fuel the atheistic regime of Nazism which, alongside atheistic Communism, contributed to the genocide of tens of millions in the twentieth century.

While deifying some elites, this dethroning of man also showed another side: as a mere primate, a “clump of cells” from conception to death, man could no longer claim any dignity or immunity from coercion and manipulation; accordingly, human rights were erased, and regimes could eradicate whole populations merely to test a new social plan. This has continued today, as man, while simultaneously filled with pride and entitlement to do whatever he pleases, including mutilating his body to suit his current “gender identity,” is also routinely murdered in the womb, a modern genocide which, unlike earlier ones, is publicly funded by governments without any need for secrecy, openly supported by celebrities and the media as the key to women’s happiness and solving “overpopulation,” and even advocated as a “human right” by thousands of voters.

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So, in the end, the atheists are right: science was used to unseat man from his privileged place in the universe as an image of God for whom Jesus Christ suffered and died to save us from our sins and give us access to eternal life. By doing so, science, or more accurately the atheists who appropriated it from those Catholics who first established it, has relativized morality, enabled political collectivism and despotism, justified genocides and experiments on human life, prioritized environmentalism over human liberty and prosperity and mired modern man in a suicidal malaise of meaninglessness, hedonistic distraction and self-mutilation.

In truth, science can never contradict the truths of the Faith, nor can it replace the invaluable insights made by philosophy. Christianity recognizes the human person not as the center of the universe, who is God, but as a free, rational agent, designed to give himself in love to others in reflection of the interpersonal communion of the Trinity; only in this way can he be truly happy, and only in the light of God's truth, as discoverable in the natural law and divine revelation, can he know himself and live as he is meant to.