God's Funeral Book

In the course of the nineteenth century, the idea of God became unknowable and then impossible. Scottish philosopher David Hume wittily but devastatingly kicked away the logical underpinnings of Christian theology; Carlyle, taking his cues from German philosophy, concluded that Christianity was not true; Nietzsche 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 the passionate, intensely logical arguments against the existence of God made by such eminent Victorian intellects as John Stuart Mill, George Eliot, and Charles Darwin, the need for faith endured. 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.

Drawing on a wide-ranging knowledge of western culture and a keen understanding of human nature, Wilson has written a profoundly important book about the emergence of a new imaginative order. At once illuminating and anecdotal, rigorous and bracing, God's Funeral is a contemporary masterpiece that documents the presence of spirituality throughout history while providing lively and interesting portraits of some of the most popular and influential figures in western civilization.