A Secular Age (2007), by Charles Taylor, and God’s Funeral (1999), by A N Wilson

Authors: Charles Taylor, A N Wilson. Review by Neil Morgan

by Neil Morgan 8th September 2023

There is a (probably apocryphal) story of a meeting between Napoleon Bonaparte and Pierre-Simon Laplace, the astronomer and physicist, in 1802. Napoleon comments that he has heard that Laplace has written ‘a large book on the system of the universe’ without mentioning God at all. Laplace’s cool, perhaps even dismissive, reply is: ‘Je n’avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là’ (‘I had no need of that hypothesis’).