The retreat of God, religion, and Christianity through philosophy and science is a story of gradual transformation from a metaphysical to a naturalistic view of the world. It begins in the Middle Ages, when the Christian worldview was dominated by Scholasticism, and extends to the present, where scientists like Lawrence Krauss and Stephen Hawking have pushed the boundaries of our understanding of the universe.
Thomas Aquinas and the Medieval Worldview
In the 13th century, theologian Thomas Aquinas significantly shaped the Christian worldview. He combined Aristotelian thinking with Christian faith, creating a synthesis of faith and reason. For him, the world was divinely ordered, and all being and knowledge ultimately stemmed from God. The existence of God was logically provable for him—such as through the so-called “cosmological argument,” which claimed that everything that exists must have a cause and that this first cause is God.
Aquinas’ theology was for a long time the intellectual cornerstone of the Church. The world was created by God, and humanity was situated within a hierarchically ordered creation where every being had its fixed role. Reason and faith complemented each other, but reason always had its limits in the divine mystery. Humans were limited in their ability to understand because God, as the unmoved mover, was beyond human comprehension.
This theocentric worldview dominated the Middle Ages, but it was in constant tension with the emerging desire to understand the world through the senses and reason, independent of divine explanations. This tension was the seed for what would later lead to secularization during the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution.
The Scientific Revolution and the First Disenchantment of the World
With the Renaissance and the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries, the slow disintegration of the idea that the world could be explained solely through divine order began. Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, and Johannes Kepler revolutionized the understanding of the universe. The geocentric worldview, which considered the Earth the center of creation, was replaced by the heliocentric model. Humanity was no longer the center of the universe—a blow to the theological self-understanding of the Middle Ages.
Isaac Newton further advanced this disenchantment of the world. His mechanistic description of the universe showed that the movements of the planets, which had previously been seen as expressions of divine will, could be explained by mathematical laws. Nature was understood as a system governed by immutable physical laws, and God was increasingly displaced from this description. Although Newton himself remained religious and saw God as the creator of these laws, the door was now open for a worldview in which God played no role.
The Enlightenment and the Philosophy of Atheism
The European Enlightenment of the 18th century accelerated this process. Philosophers like Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant argued that humans were capable of achieving moral and intellectual autonomy without relying on divine revelation. David Hume went even further, questioning the validity of classical arguments for the existence of God. Hume saw no compelling reason for the existence of a God in the world. He argued that the concept of causality, on which theological arguments relied, was not an absolute necessity and that the order of the world could also be explained through natural causes.
Kant struck the next blow against religious authorities by asserting that humans could understand the world only through their own reason. Moral principles, such as the categorical imperative, were, for him, justifiable by reason and did not require divine legitimation. The universe was a realm of natural laws, and humans had the ability to understand it—a notion that made belief in a transcendent God seem superfluous.
Darwin and Biology as a Challenge
Perhaps the most significant challenge to the religious worldview came in the 19th century with Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution. Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” (1859) provided a natural explanation for the diversity of life that did not require a divine creator. Humans were no longer the product of a divine plan but the result of a long, blind process of natural selection. Chance and adaptation to the environment explained the emergence of life, rendering the biblical creation story obsolete.
For many, this was the definitive proof that religion did not offer a viable explanation for the existence of the world and life. With Darwin, science was able to answer questions that had traditionally been the domain of religion.
Einstein, Quantum Mechanics, and the Relativization of Religion
In the 20th century, Albert Einstein posed an even deeper philosophical question about the relationship between science and religion. He was not an atheist in the strict sense but rejected the notion of a personal God who actively intervenes in the world. For Einstein, religion was more of a “cosmic reverence”—the admiration of the beauty and complexity of the universe. In his eyes, scientists were the true priests, striving to decipher the deep mysteries of reality without resorting to supernatural explanations.
Einstein’s theory of relativity and the subsequent development of quantum mechanics by physicists like Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg shook Newton’s mechanistic worldview and showed that nature, on a fundamental level, was much more complex than previously thought. But instead of making room for religious answers, these discoveries opened the door to an even deeper and more humble form of atheism: the universe was not only explainable but also full of uncertainties that could not be explained by either divine or absolute rational principles. Quantum mechanics showed that the world was probabilistic and indeterminate on a deep level—a realization that ultimately called into question the theological need for an omniscient creator.
Stephen Hawking and the Universe Without God
Stephen Hawking continued this trend, arguing that the universe exists by itself and does not need a creator. In his work “The Grand Design” (2010), he argued that the universe could arise from nothing according to the laws of physics. Hawking further argued that science could answer all the questions humanity had previously left to religion—including the question of the origin of the universe. In his model, God was not only unnecessary but also irrelevant.
Lawrence Krauss and a Universe From Nothing
Lawrence Krauss, a modern physicist and cosmologist, took this position even further. In his book “A Universe from Nothing” (2012), he argues that the universe could literally arise from nothing—without the need for a creator. Krauss describes how the laws of quantum physics allow particles to spontaneously appear and disappear, and how this phenomenon on a cosmological scale could explain the emergence of the universe. For Krauss, belief in God is merely a relic from a time when humans did not fully understand the laws of nature.
Conclusion
The development from the theocentric worldview of the Middle Ages to a naturalistic and secular worldview is characterized by the increasing disenchantment of the world. Religion, which once provided an explanation for the universe and humanity’s place in it, has been gradually replaced by science. Each new scientific advancement has shown that nature is governed not by supernatural forces but by laws that the human mind can understand.
From Thomas Aquinas to Lawrence Krauss, this is a story of the liberation of the human mind. An atheist would celebrate this development as a great progression—a journey from superstition to reason, from metaphysical dogma to scientific knowledge. Science has taken the place that religion once held and today offers a far more comprehensive and precise explanation of the world in which we live.