Great War and the Death of God

the long version

The catastrophic Great War left humanity in a world no longer trustworthy and reassuring but seemingly meaningless and indifferent. Instead of redressing humanity's cosmic alienation, Postwar Western culture abandoned its concern for metaphysical meaning, lost its confidence in human reason, and enabled the scientific worldview of neo-Darwinian materialism to emerge and eventually dominate the Western mind. This book attributes the remarkable and unwarranted success of this atheistic cosmology in displacing the deeply rooted belief in nature's divine governance to the First World War and its effect on Western theology, philosophy, literature, and art.