God's funeral : a biography of faith and doubt in western civilization
- New York Ballantine Books 1999
- 402p.
In the course of the nineteenth century, the idea of God became unknowable and then impossible. The author had wittily but devastatingly kicked away the logical underpinnings of Christian theology a hundred years before; Nietzsche then declared God dead; and Thomas Hardy, through his poetry, presided glumly over his funeral.