The Age of Atheists

Peter Watson takes Friedrich Nietzsche's declaration of eighteen eighty-two that God is dead as his starting point, and sets out to tell the story of what came next. His argument is that in the century and a half since, tens of thousands of thoughtful and inventive people have devoted their creative energies to devising ways of living without God, drawing on self-reliance, invention, hope, wit and enthusiasm rather than on revelation. Watson traces that effort across an unusually wide field, gathering up William James and the pragmatists, Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis, Pablo Picasso, James Joyce and Albert Camus, the poets of the First World War and the novelists of the Second, scientists from Albert Einstein to Stephen Hawking, and the more recent writers known as the new atheists. The book presents this not as a record of loss but as one of the most important intellectual movements of the modern West, and Watson contends that many of the greatest achievements in art, literature, science and philosophy of the last century can be traced to the rise of secularism. He aims throughout to explain the big ideas and the connections between them plainly, making them simple without making them simplistic.

Written from the publisher description, Simon and Schuster.

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• Peter Watson