11.30.05
God’s Funeral
Rereading A. N. Wilson’s God’s Funeral I was struck by the ambiguity of what we mean by secularization, and the peculiar status of Darwinism in that context. The book is really about the late nineteenth century (the title is from a poem by Hardy), with two openers on Kant and Hume, and is a well-done snapshot of the emergence of modern atheism, or at least of this as a result, since its latency period, as with so much else, is much earlier– in the early modern. (If you don’t think so it is worth pursuing the ‘god is dead’ theme via Hegel to the early Protestant hymn with that for a title. ) There is a irony here. We think that Darwin is the primemover in the passage to modern secularism, collated wrongly by some with atheism in one to one fashion. But in fact we see the process well underway before Darwin. If anything the onset of the idea of evolution in Darwin’s version is simply reacting to its times rather than casting a new foundation stone. The curious problem is that Darwin’s theory represents the onset of a new myth made to prop up a crystallizing belief system, and from that point a counterattack slowly begins. This sudden metaphysical vulnerability has, if anything, done a disservice to secularism by narrowing its focus, and preempting a broader modernism sourcing in an Enlightenment we have reduced to cliches of positivism, and much deeper than what we currently take as its legacy.