Summary
Title: God's Funeral
Author: A. N. Wilson
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0345439597
Book Review
Why had most intellectuals and writers in Europe abandoned traditional Christianity by the end of the nineteenth century? Was it a result of industrial and scientific progress? Was it Charles Darwin and his insightful writing on evolution? As A.N. Wilson writes, the sources of this skepticism and disbelief were many and varied
Synthesizing biography and intellectual history, Wilson traces the lives and ideas of people like Hume, Mill, Hegel, Gibbon and more to demonstrate that the seeds of the destruction of traditional religious belief had been sown long before Darwin.
Wilson also addresses the pain and confusion these intellectuals brought upon themselves when their achievements helped erode the social and intellectual foundations of their lives. Furthermore, Wilson shows how their crises of faith relate to our own.
Like our Victorian forebears, contemporary readers still must ask, “Is our personal religion that which links us to the ultimate reality, or is it the final human fantasy...?” and, “Is there a world of value outside ourselves, or do we, collectively and individually, invent what we call The Good?” God’s Funeral helps readers learn to ask these questions in smarter and sharper ways by giving them a clearer sense of how Western society reached its current state of confusion.
It would be accurate to note that the main thrust of the book is to explain the movement of atheism and agnosticism into the intellectual mainstream of Western Europe. Although Wilson does suggest that the discoveries of Victorian England do require a re-evaluation of religious faith (and especially of Christian fundamentalism), he does not argue that faith is obsolete or God is non-existent.
This is a great book on philosophy and intellectual history for people who don’t usually read - or can’t usually understand — such books.
