At the dawn of the 20th century, materialists could rightly claim victory in the debate about God. The four preceding centuries had yielded scientific discoveries that fortified the materialist worldview. These discoveries profoundly unsettled the mind of a Europe that had, until then, been Christian, and seemed to render the notion of a Creator God unnecessary to explain the universe.
The Earth was no longer the centre of the universe, and the sun no longer circled around it (Copernicus, 1540 to Galileo, 1610). Physical laws governed the stars’ motion (Newton, Descartes, Laplace, 1650-1800). The Earth had not come into being required to explain the world, it was because He didn’t exist!
