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Isaac Newton (1643-1727) was one of the greatest physicists of all time and the man who laid the foundations for...Einstein's relativity theories...Newton was a devout Christian believer. He and virtually all the other major scientists of his day confidently explored the mysteries of the solar system, the fundamental properties of matter, and the structure of physical laws because they believed that God's laws were both [unchanging] and knowable....

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (German philosopher 1770-1831) completely rejected the Christian [and Jewish] faiths – and their message of hope – as the basis for any effort to restore the human being...Without Hegel [and his ideas], there would have been no Marxism, no Leninism, no Nazism, and the entire tragic history of Communist Party rule in the 20th century might have been averted...Before Hegel and his followers, great thinkers were all generally on the same page about God...But after the 1840s, a huge shift in intellectual attitudes took place in Europe...Karl Marx's collaborator Friedrich Engels did not exaggerate when he wrote in 1844: "The question has always previously been: what is God? And German philosophy has answered the question in this way: man is God." It is striking to note that Germany, the starting point of the Protestant Reformation [Martin Luther] and the soaring upsurge in Christian hope that fueled so many good things in Western history, should have also been the starting point of so much of mankind's darkness. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), whose work contains the most sustained attack on the Christian view of life of any of the anti-Christian German writers, wrote: "God is dead." Marx and Sigmund Freud sought not just to banish traditional Jewish and Christian faith in God but to replace it with completely new systems of belief....

Four major sources of hope arose from the ideas left by Hegel and his followers: (1) the emergence of atheism ("God is dead" and "man is God") into politics; (2) the emergence of optimism about the power of science to solve human problems; (3) the emergence of the belief that psychology held profound insights into the workings of the human mind; and (4) the introduction of Hindu and Buddhist ideas into small but influential circles in British and American society. All four of these sources of hope have proved to be false, yet all are still influencing major areas of American life....

Humanism is a descendent of Hegel's ideas. Humanist Manifesto II, signed in 1973 by so-called intellectuals of American politics, thought, education, etc., affirms that humanists believe that "humans are responsible for what we are or will become. No deity will save us; we must save ourselves." The original Humanist Manifesto was signed in 1933, a heartbreaking year to be so upbeat about human potential for good. It was in 1933 that Adolf Hitler came to power. Yet, 40 years later, the second of the two humanist policy books speaks as though nothing in human experience has modified the belief that, by making decisions without God, somehow there is assurance of human progress and hope. Humanists believe that humanity will simply die out, the chance victim of the law of death and decay. Yet, it clings to an entirely irrational hope that human beings will somehow get it right in the end. Humanism offers a hope hinged to optimism about human nature in the face of relentlessly accumulating evidence that human nature is truly fallible and truly "fallen."

David Aikman, Ph.D.
"Hope: The Heart's Great Quest"