James Henderson's Reviews > God's Funeral: The Decline of Faith in Western Civilization

Religious skepticism was becoming more popular at the end of the nineteenth century among many intellectuals and writers in Europe. Why had they abandoned traditional Christianity? 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, Hardy and others to demonstrate that the seeds of the destruction of traditional religious belief had been sown long before Darwin. I appreciated his insights into some of my favorite authors like Hardy and Hume. However, the main purpose of the author is to explain this growth in atheism and agnosticism and as such it is a useful guide. In it Wilson covers the breadth of Victorian intellectual thought regarding theism and atheism.