Myth:
Atheists reject God because they have bad relationships with their fathers.
Response:
It sounds bizarre to suggest that atheism has anything to do with one's relationship with their father, but this myth has become popular due to the efforts of Paul Vitz, a psychologist and former atheist who argues that the basis of atheism can be found in a person's defective relationship with their father. Thus the denial of God — the Heavenly Father — is a reflection of our inability to be close to an earthly father. There is no reliable, scientific evidence to support this, just cherry-picked data from a few biographical studies.
Most of Vitz's arguments are contained in his book Faith of the Fatherless. Anyone who reads it will find, however, that Vitz's evidence is scanty at best. All he did was look at the lives of about a dozen prominent atheists over the past couple of centuries and compare them with the lives a prominent theists from the same time periods. What he found was that with the atheists, the fathers were all dead, abusive, weak, or had abandoned the children. The theists, however, had strong and loving relationships either with biological fathers or substitute fathers.
The weaknesses of Vitz's position should be obvious, though he doesn't seem to have ever noticed it. The mere fact that a dozen atheists had poor relationships with their fathers while a similar number of theists had good relationships with their fathers is, statistically speaking, utterly meaningless. It has absolutely no implications whatsoever for any other atheists or for atheism in general. No conclusions whatsoever can be drawn from that data — not that this has stopped Vitz and many other apologists who seem to be desperate for something negative to say about atheists.
If Vitz were genuinely interested in developing psychological data about atheists as compared to theists, then he would study large numbers of both. Once he has a broad, representative sampling of atheists and theists then he might be able to claim some statistical relevance to this conclusions. Vitz would also have to find ways to eliminate a variety of factors and, in particular, figure out what to do with people who switch between atheism and theism at some point during their lives. After all of that, maybe, just maybe, he might be able to arrive at some interesting data.
Of course, even if it could be shown that there is a strong statistical relationship between atheism and having a defective relationship with one's father, what implications would that have for atheism? Well, none at all to be quite honest. The quality of such a relationship simply has no bearing upon whether or not atheism is reasonable. If there are no good arguments for atheism, then atheism is unreasonable even if all atheists have great relationships with both parents. If there are good reasons for atheism, then atheism is a reasonable position even if all atheists have terrible relationships with both parents.
To suggest otherwise is to commit a type of ad hominem fallacy known as the Genetic Fallacy. This fallacy occurs whenever someone attacks the origins of a position (usually psychological or political) rather than addressing the position itself. Here, Vitz is committing the Genetic Fallacy because he is trying to attack atheism solely on the premise that an atheist's relationship with their father has played a role in why that person became an atheist.
