How did modern agnosticism as well as modern atheism become an option for Westerners? How did the “sacred canopy”–in the words of the sociologist Peter Berger–fold up? And what existential significance do these questions have for us today?

I won’t take these questions up today, at least not in full, but I will say a few things about the ramifications of unbelief as we reach the second half of the nineteenth century and beyond. In this, I’ll be drawing from James Turner’s marvelous book Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America (1985).

In “The Epilogue,” Turner traces out three broad patterns that can be discerned from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. There were, at least, three dimensions that were once crucial to an understanding of God’s existence: nature, morality, and mystery (or transcendence).

We need to be careful here as we consider the first dimension. For Turner as well as for Michael Buckley, it wasn’t scientific materialism that immediately offered an alternative naturalistic explanation for physical phenomena without the need any longer to refer to God as a First Cause. Instead, this naturalistic explanation was a late–Buckley would add: a “dialectical”–development as earlier attempts in natural theology to ground God’s existence (via inference) were supplanted by later, fully naturalistic accounts. Turner summarizes: “Roughly speaking, one aspect of God–the Ruler of Nature Who satisfied the desire to understand our surroundings and ourselves–was abstracted into naturalistic scientific explanations. The study of nature yielded no longer evidence of God but simply knowledge of nature” (p. 265).

Nature, at this point, was submitted to human-centered accounts that were comprehensible, to whatever degree they were, by finite human minds. Nature, you might say, seemed to be illuminated by human lights alone.

Nature, for Kant, tells us what is while morality prescribes what ought to be the case. For Victorian agnostics, Turner shows, morality, the second dimension, no longer required “divine sanction” (p. 265); instead, humanitarianism–improving the welfare of fellow humans–become a moral task for more and more reformers. We can, of course, see the humanitarian tendency run all the way into the twenty-first century. As for unbelievers then, so for many contemporaries now: this secular moral commitment would be, it seemed, sufficient to provide one with a legitimate reason for living; secular morality, that is, would be the basis for meaning.

And what of the withdrawal of the sacred? Hitherto, there has been a place, in Western Europe, for the mystery of God’s transcendence: God could not be measured by human standards just because He obviously exceeds them. Well aware of this, negative theologians went about negating human predicates of God (e.g., “God is not good” where “good,” in this context, is a human concept) in order to secure the unthinkability or ineffability of the Divine Source. More and more as the new sensibility took shape in the nineteenth century, however, a sense of mystery, a sense for ultimate mystery fell out of favor as the dominant ethos–analytical, empiricist, materialist–failed to make room for precisely what necessarily eluded human categories.

These, Turner notes, are the “humanizing” tendencies that hold sway as we come into full-blown modernity. Most charitably put, I’d like to claim that humanism needs to be sublated: nature, morality, and immanence need to transcend the limits of humanism in order for human existence to find its place, and purpose, within the unfathomable, and unfathomably glorious, boundlessness of Reality.