Lagura: Humanity, Yes; God, No!

Fr. Flor Lagura SVD

Auguste Comte

(1798-1837)

BORN in Montpellier, France on January 19, 1798 and baptized with a “mouthful of a name”: Isidore Marie Auguste Francois Xavier Comte, the father of philosophy of science, would later shake the academic and religious world of Catholic France with his claims.

Going against the traditional intellectual pyramid placing sciences at the bottom with philosophy and theology or religion at the top, Auguste Comte, founder of positivism challenged every academician with his claim that knowledge progresses through three stages:

1) First, the theological or religious stage which grew from a) idol worship to b) worship of many gods to 3) worship of One God;

2) metaphysical or philosophical stage when the One God got reduced to abstract metaphysico-philosophical concepts;

3) the last and final stage is positivism which places importance on scientific observation leading to math and sciences, most of all to the science of humanity or sociology.

When humanity reaches the third stage worshipping Humanity as the New Supreme Being, then the God of Christianity has to disappear. Consequently, Auguste Comte’s followers called for the pulling down of the images of the saints and replacing them with the goddess of reason.

Calling for the death of religion and its symbols, Auguste Comte’s followers put up in the city of Paris a statue with the Blessed Mother and Her Child (the Fount of Wisdom and Wisdom himself) at the bottom while the bust of Auguste Comte towers over them.

Critical observers noted that Comte’s main principle, namely “For a proposition to be true, it must be scientifically observable” itself is not scientifically observable, hence is not necessarily true! Moreover, doubts remain whether sociology is a true and certain science.

Sadly, Comte’s faith in humanity as the new deity got shattered with the numerous wars, notable the two world wars where “men became ‘wolves’ to their fellowmen.” Sadly, too, Marie, his wife of several years, left him, “the high priest” of humanity as the new god of secular religion.

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