God is not Dead
God is not dead, as Nietzsche famously proclaimed, nor is he sleeping or dormant; he persists, active within the very institutions that were supposed to have committed the deicide (the god-killing); science and atheism.
As Stephen C. Meyer outlines in Return of the God Hypothesis, science-based skepticism is often cited as the cause of religious decline: ‘In one poll, more than two-thirds of self-described atheists and one-third of self-described agnostics affirm that “the findings of science make the existence of God less probable”’. This leads most of us to assume that there is a ‘deep or inherent conflict between science and faith’ — that the two are not only at war now, but that they always have been. However, as Meyer explains, this is ‘a product of late nineteenth-century historical revisionism’. Some of history’s greatest scientists (including Isaac Newton) saw the two as not only compatible but dependent.
According to the Abrahamic tradition, ‘the universe is governed by a single God, and is not the product of the whims of many gods, each governing his own province according to his own laws’ (Calvin). This notion, which we now take for granted, is the ‘historical foundation for modern science’. It was belief in a ‘rational and intelligent creator’ that inspired the development of modern science. It was not until the Enlightenment that thinkers such as Voltaire believed ‘that…
