The horrific devastation of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan provides the evidence – if any more evidence is needed – that we live in an impersonal universe, and that nature is all that there is. Whether the majority of people are mature enough to accept this reality is a different matter.

When disaster strikes, nations rush to help each other. When you and I see a child in grave danger, we do our best to save the child. Not so, the so-called “personal” God that people are indoctrinated to believe in! During earthquakes and tsunamis, supernatural aid is not forthcoming and guardian angels are nowhere in sight to save the lives of children and babies. Thousands of men, women and children suffer horrific deaths without a helping hand from their personal God.

Nietzsche was right when he declared that God was dead (meaning that belief in God was no longer tenable).

Actually, the decline of the belief in God began long before Nietzsche. “In Christendom,” writes Will Durant in his Lessons of History, “we may date the beginning of the decline of religious belief from Copernicus” (1543).

In Kant’s final analysis, found in his private papers after his death, God was a useful fiction developed by the human mind to explain the apparent absoluteness of moral commands. Schopenhauer thought that the whole idea of a “personal” God as little more than anthropomorphism.

Einstein probably had anthropomorphism in mind when he wrote to a correspondent: “The idea of a personal God is quite alien to me and seems even naïve... It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but expressed it clearly.”

“Does history support a belief in God?” asks Durant. “If by God, we mean not the creative vitality of nature but a supreme being intelligent and benevolent, the answer must be a reluctant negative... Add to the crimes, wars, and cruelties of men the earthquakes, storms, tornadoes, pestilences, tidal waves and other ‘acts of God’ that periodically desolate human and animal life, and the total evidence suggests either a blind or an impartial fatality, with incidental and apparently haphazard scenes to which we subjectively ascribe order, splendour, beauty, or sublimity.”