God's Funeral : A Biography of Faith and Doubt in Western Civilization

by WILSON, A.N.

• ISBN13: 9780345439598
• ISBN10: 0345439597
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 2000-09-01
• Publisher: Ballantine Books

Summary

In the course of the nineteenth century, the idea of God became unknowable and then impossible. Scottish philosopher David Hume had wittily but devastatingly kicked away the logical underpinnings of Christian theology a hundred years before; Nietzsche then declared God dead; and Thomas Hardy, through his poetry, presided glumly over his funeral. And yet, as award-winning novelist and biographer A. N. Wilson asserts in this dazzling synthesis of biography and intellectual history, "The God-question does not go away." Despite passionate, intensely logical arguments against the existence of God, the need for faith endures. While Sir Charles Lyell demonstrated that the book of Genesis laughably contradicted the facts of geology, splendid new churches rose in the cities of the West. Marx, Engels, and Freud rocked the very foundations of public and private life by positing the new atheistic "religions" of socialism and psychology, yet these revolutionary dogmas opened an abyss that still blights our spiritual landscape today. At once illuminating and anecdotal, rigorous and bracing, God's Funeral is a contemporary masterpiece, a profoundly important book about the emergence of a new imaginative order.

Table of Contents

Illustrations	vii
Foreword	ix
God's Funeral	1	(16)
Hume's Time-bomb	17	(22)
The Religion of Humanity	39	(14)
Carlyle	53	(26)
Not Angles but Engels	79	(20)
Living in a Lumber-room	99	(28)
George Eliot, The Word, and Lives of Jesus	127	(26)
A Passion for Generalizing: Herbert Spencer and the Modern	153	(22)
Science	175	(28)
Swinburne and the Gods	203	(28)
In the Name of the Father	231	(24)
Two Prophets: Arnold and Ruskin	255	(24)
The Most Inexpressible Calamity	279	(26)
William James	305	(28)
Conclusion: The Modernist Experiment	333	(22)
Notes	355	(16)
Bibliography	371	(14)
Acknowledgements	385	(1)
About the Author	386	(1)
Index	387