Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx and Charles Darwin are considered the pillars of modern western thought. They differed in many ways but had one thing in common—they were reductionists who claimed that all higher realms of existence could be explained by lower natural causes. They were the pillars of naturalism.
But their ideas were tested during the twentieth century and found wanting. Freud was the first fall. Incidents in his career were cited to call into question both his integrity and his scientific competence, and psychiatry seemed to make more progress through medication than through Freudian analysis. The collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s inflicted a death blow on Marxism, which is now seen as not only failing to deliver its promised utopia but as creating an inhumane tyranny. Darwin is the last man standing, but his theory is rapidly eroding as modern biological science reveals amazing complexity and design that cannot possibly be explained by Darwin’s proposed mechanism of random mutations and natural selection. This led Phillip Johnson to summarize the situation one day with the phrase that appears on this shirt: “Freud is dead, Marx is dead, and Darwin is not feeling very well.”
