Return to Religion

on its cover: “Is God Dead?” Among intellectuals today, God is not pronounced dead easily. Science and religion are not necessarily incompatible, and logical attempts to disprove God’s existence are viewed as somewhat arcane; this would have surprised our intellectual predecessors. At the end of the 18th and to the middle of the 19th century, almost every enlightened thinker expected religion to disappear in the 20th century,” Daniel Bell said in a seminal lecture, “The Return of the Sacred,” at the London School of Economics in 1977. “The belief was based on the power of reason.” The theory was that man could use his mind to overcome his problems, and religion would wither away. But that has hardly been the case. “We’ve gained enormous power over nature via technology,” Bell said in an interview. “And yet, the 20th century is probably the most dreadful period in human history.” For intellectuals, according to Bell, there have always been secular alternatives to religious faith: rationalism and the belief in science; aestheticism and the belief in art; existentialism as expressed in the works of Kierkegaard and the early Sartre, and politics—the cults of Stalin, Lenin and Mao. Yet, one by one, those alternatives, according to Bell, have exhausted their power to move individuals. “It is ironic that my generation should be the one coming—back to religion,” says Alan Dershowitz, 45, professor of law at Harvard Law School. “We were the generation that had all the freedom and all the choice.” And yet, it is the rootlessness of much of that freedom that has brought so many intellectuals back to religion. “I can’t say to you I believe in God,” says Coles, who might be described as a spiritual wanderer rather than