QuestionsDoes God exist?Religion, the opium of the people
Does God exist?AtheismCritique of religion

Religion, the opium of the people

Karl Marx 1818 · 1883History is the history of class struggles.
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What it claims

Religion is an illusory happiness, and to move beyond it one must change the society that needs it: the criticism of heaven turns into the criticism of earth.

Why

Religion arises from an unjust society, where people put in heaven what they lack on earth: it soothes without curing.

In short

"Religion, the opium of the people" is an argument by Karl Marx (Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Introduction (1844)) on the question "Does God exist?" (answer: atheism). Its claim: Religion is an illusory happiness, and to move beyond it one must change the society that needs it: the criticism of heaven turns into the criticism of earth. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P4). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 2 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Introduction (1844)
Valid with an implicit premise

Marx does not try to prove that God does not exist: for him Feuerbach has already shown it, and "the criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism". His question is different: why do people need religion? Nietzsche (Daybreak, 95) tells the history of a belief to make it superfluous. Marx looks for its causes in society: poverty and domination. And his conclusion is not just "stop believing": it is "change the world that needs this consolation".

P1Man makes religion; religion does not make man.
P2Religion arises from a torn, unjust, "inverted" society: people place in heaven what they lack on earth.
P3Religion expresses real suffering and protests against it: it is a sigh, a consolation, an opium that relieves without curing.
P4 · implicit premiseIf a belief is made by humans, born of their suffering and meant to console them, then nothing real answers to the happiness it promises: that happiness is an illusion.
P5Asking someone to give up an illusion is asking them to give up the condition that requires illusions.
Therefore religion is an illusory happiness, and to move beyond it one must change the society that needs it: the criticism of heaven turns into the criticism of earth.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P4, the computer finds a case where religion is made by humans, born of their suffering and consoling, yet the happiness it promises is real: God could exist all the same.
Valid with P4. Everything rests on it: that religion is made by humans, born of suffering and consoling does not by itself prove that nothing answers to it. Marx does not defend P4: he takes it from Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity, 1841) as settled. What is his own is P2, P3 and P5: the social causes, and the idea that one is not cured of an illusion by an argument, but by changing the life that makes it necessary. We file the argument under atheism because its conclusion says that the happiness religion promises is an illusion. But the properly atheist part (P4) is assumed, not demonstrated: whoever rejects P4 can keep all of Marx's social explanation without having to conclude that God does not exist.
Analogy. A prisoner paints a sunny window on the wall of his cell. Marx does not say: let us erase the painting. He says: the painting shows that a real window is missing, let us open the wall. The believer will answer: perhaps a real window also exists, elsewhere.

Objections

3

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (the argument from desire) 1952 · attacks premise 4

Explaining why we need a belief does not show it is false (logicians call this error the "genetic fallacy"; Lewis mocked it as "Bulverism", 1941). And need may even point the other way. We are hungry and food exists, we are thirsty and water exists. If we desire a happiness nothing on earth can satisfy, perhaps we are made for something else.

no reply
summary: their text is not yet in our corpus
No reply possible: objection raised in 1952, after the author's death (1883).
Where the debate stands (our summary)Open point: we have not found a published reply by a defender of Marx to this objection. Explaining where a belief comes from is not, in general, enough to refute it; what remains is whether Marx's extra premise (P4, taken from Feuerbach) is justified. Lewis's argument from desire is itself disputed, for instance by John Beversluis (C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion, 1985): a desire does not guarantee that its object exists.
L
Liberation theology (Gustavo Gutiérrez) 1971 · attacks premise 3

Religion does not always put people to sleep: it has carried revolts, from Thomas Müntzer's peasants' war to the Christian abolitionists against slavery, to the priests of Latin America alongside the poor. Faith can drive the struggle, not sedate it.

Marx replies
summary: their text is not yet in our corpus
Marx What the 1844 text already grants
Religious suffering is at the same time the expression of real suffering and a protest against it.
The debate goes on (our summary) Gutiérrez would reply that faith is not just a sigh of protest, bound to vanish once society has changed: it can remain a source of justice in a liberated society.
Where the debate stands (our summary)The disagreement is about the nature of religion: a sigh and a protest bound to vanish with misery (Marx), or a force that can also sustain the struggle for justice and outlast it (Gutiérrez). Marx already acknowledges the dimension of protest.
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism 1905 · attacks premise 2

Causation also runs the other way: Protestant asceticism (work hard, save, do not enjoy your wealth) helped give birth to the spirit of capitalism. Religious ideas are not just a reflection of the economy: they shape it too. Weber adds that he does not want to replace one one-sided explanation with another.

Marx replies
summary: their text is not yet in our corpus
Marx What Capital already says (1867)
For a society of commodity producers, Christianity, especially in its bourgeois forms (Protestantism, Deism), is the most fitting form of religion.
The debate goes on (our summary) Weber would reply that "fitting" does not say which came first: in his view, the Puritan ethic preceded and prepared modern capitalism.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Marx and Weber both admit a link between religion and economy; the disagreement is about causal priority. Weber himself says he does not want to replace one one-sided explanation with another.
What today's voices say
Defend it
Slavoj ŽižekIn On Belief he is tempted to revive the old line about religion as the "opium of the people", but aims it at "Western Buddhism" rather than at Christianity.
Criticize it
Jordan PetersonHe sets aside Marx's 'opiate of the masses' and refuses to reduce religious stories to a single cause such as power.
In the same family · Critique of religion
The Religion of HumanityAuguste Comte
Does God exist?Atheism 3
The historical refutationFriedrich Nietzsche
Does God exist?Atheism 3
Religion as man's projectionLudwig Feuerbach · 1841
Does God exist?Atheism 4
Religion, an illusion born of wishesSigmund Freud · 1927 · debate over 3 levels
Does God exist?Atheism 3
Religions contradict each other: why believe your own?Herman Philipse · 2012 · debate over 4 levels
Does God exist?Atheism 4