Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0393047458, Hardcover)
God's Funeral is A.N. Wilson's account of the decline of orthodox Christianity in Victorian Britain. The most popular explanation for this widely-recognized phenomenon is the acceptance by intellectuals of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. To disprove the notion that Darwin singlehandedly committed deicide, Wilson describes a host of secularizing predecessors and accomplices such as Hume, Gibbon, John Stuart Mill, Hegel, Marx, and Carlyle. All play major roles in Wilson's brilliantly staged reconstruction of the so-called death of God.
God's Funeral also takes account of the pain and confusion these intellectuals brought upon themselves when their great 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.
(retrieved from Amazon Tue, 05 Jan 2010 21:56:37 -0500)
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Wikipedia in English
The thing I found most notable is how much this 19th-century struggle between intellectualism and faith is still going on for many people today. It certainly was mirrored in my own life. After about age 17 or 18, I could no longer accept the dogmatic, literalist fundamentalism with which I had been raised, but I couldn't reject the concept of God out of hand. After several years of searching, I returned to Christianity, but a different faith tradition: one which allows and encourages me to think, to question, to come to my own understanding of God and a faith that works for me.
I found it interesting, and encouraging, that the book itself ends on a similar note. (