It's an issue that has dogged humanity since before we invented the word 'dog' - this thorny issue of God. Jeremy Mahadevan checks out an exhibition compiled with the hope of snipping off some of those thorns.
'Early man has a moment to reflect and he thinks to himself, 'Well, this is an interesting world that I find myself in,' and then he asks himself a very treacherous question. Man the maker looks at his world and says 'So who made this then?'
When the late Douglas Adams this in a speech in Cambridge in 1998, he expressed a sentiment which has brewed in Western liberal thinking since the Renaissance: that humans are not only individual, but alone products of impersonal physical and chemical processes that are incapable of wrath, mercy, love and all the other things we ascribe to divinity.
The deconstruction of religious thought has been gaining steam even as religious fundamentalism becomes a larger and larger problem in John Gray's best-selling 2003 book Straw Dogs went so far as to denounce humanism itself as a relic of Western religion, stating outright that humans are animals and all our technology and civilization akin to anthills and termite mounds on a spectacular scale.
Seasoned cushion-rocker David Gray's new album even has a song in it that's based on the teachings of his namesake John.
But while beating up on religion may seem like a de rigueur ritual for intellectual liberal types, that doesn't stop a lot of them from steering towards a belief in spirituality of no particular sort, a faith in an unidentified higher power of vague goodness, great benevolence and general indeterminacy.
