Kant had shown that we cannot prove whether God exists or not. He argued that if we were to try to show that God does exist, then we would be doing exactly what he said we shouldn’t do – trying to prove something that you might not even be sure about yourself. Therefore, if we wanted to prove that God existed, we had to accept that we couldn’t ever prove anything at all. We had to accept that we really didn’t know anything. This idea influenced other philosophers, such as Hegel and Marx, who argued that religion was a form of alienation and that the solution lay in abolishing belief in God altogether.
Marx saw religion as the opium of the people because it allowed people to escape reality and focus on something else. Religion gave people something to cling to when they felt like their lives weren’t going well and provided false hope. If we were to abolish religion, we would need to replace it with something that was less likely to cause harm. A Marxist view would argue that education is the key to solving problems and that we should provide education for everyone to enable them to think rationally and act according to their own interests.
