Who killed God?
If God is making a comeback, where has He been all this time? Well, literally speaking, He didn’t go anywhere. He’s just been banished from the landscape of respectable “scientific” discourse. But if one takes the long view of history, this dramatic banishment happened very recently indeed. It wasn’t so long ago that even notorious freethinkers like Voltaire took God’s existence as a matter of course. But with the rise of methodological naturalism and the wide acceptance of naturalistic frameworks like Darwinism, a new consensus gradually formed that God had been put out of a job. Theism became a fringe view, something “serious” academics didn’t entertain in public if they wanted to be “respectable.” If the word “God” pops up in a physics book, like Stephen Hawking’s Brief History of Time, it’s understood to be metaphorical, a place-holder word for the ultimate all-explaining mathematical principle. What happened? The status game changed. “We’ve become very guild-oriented in scien