God's Funeral
Subtitle: The Decline of Faith in Western Civilization
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: June 1, 1999
Language: eng
Number of pages: 402
ISBN-13: 9780393047455
First sentence: THE ENGLISH POET Thomas Hardy, some time between 1908 and 1910, wrote a poem in which he imagined himself attending God's funeral.
Description: By the end of the nineteenth century, almost all the great writers, artists, and intellectuals had abandoned Christianity; many had abandoned belief in God altogether. This was in part the result of scientific discovery, particularly the work of Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species and the controversy that followed. But the doubt about religion had many sources. A. N.

Wilson demonstrates in this synthesis of biography and intellectual history that the real destruction of religions belief had been achieved well before Darwin's momentous publication.

Yet despite the fact that the church had essentially become an edifice empty of faith, it survived into our century because so few of the fascinating, tortured people Wilson portrays could face the brutal consequences of their own logic. Whether or not God was dead, they still needed to believe, hence the great spiritual angst of their culture which is now echoed in ours.