Event: Europe

At the beginning of the twentieth century, materialists could feel triumphant. The four preceding centuries had yielded a rich harvest of scientific discoveries that fortified the materialist worldview, drawing most scientists and philosophers to its side. These discoveries profoundly unsettled a Europe that had, until then, been Christian. The first shock, administered by Copernicus and Galileo, showed the Earth to be no longer the center of the universe, with the sun no longer circling around it. Newton, Descartes, and Laplace revealed that the stars, rather than being pushed through the heavens by angels, were governed by laws of elegant mathematical simplicity. Buffon argued that the age of the earth dated back beyond any biblical account, establishing chronologies that spanned tens of thousands, even millions, of years. And man himself—long regarded as the handiwork of God—appeared in the works of Lamarck and Darwin as the product of an immense evolutionary history, humbled by his descent from an ape, or something very like one. Taken together, these discoveries seemed to render the notion of a Creator God unnecessary; the universe could be explained without him. Around 1800, the French mathematician Laplace presented the mathematical equations governing our solar system to Emperor Napoleon. Napoleon reportedly asked him, “M. Laplace, they tell me you have written this large book on the system of the universe, and have never even mentioned its Creator?” Laplace is said to have replied, “I have no need for that hypothesis.” Whether true or embellished, the anecdote neatly captures the spirit of the age: If a ­Creator was no longer required to explain the world, it was for a very simple reason—he just didn’t exist! Others went further, arguing not only that God did not exist, but that belief in God was harmful. Religion was the opium of the people,…