Review: All in the Mind: A Farewell to God by Ludovic Kennedy

The notion explored in this often fascinating book by the famous broadcaster, Ludovic Kennedy, is that rather than the religious notion that man was created by god, rather it is god that was created by man. I must say – at the outset – that this is a view that I share and consequently I found much to agree with in Kennedy’s – necessarily brief – romp through the history of human religious ‘thought’ from early mythologies and through the history of the Christian religion in the west.

I suppose one of the few faults I find in the book is the concentration on the Christian religion at the expense of other religions, but then it is Christianity that has helped shaped western thought to a far, far, greater extent than any of the other current religions.

However, the period of the church’s greatest influence was also a period of almost stagnation in the intellectual life of the west – a period which later became known as the Dark Ages. It was only when the church’s power and influence was challenged, questioned and finally broken from the Reformation on through the Enlightenment and the rise of science, humanism and rationality that mankind was then able to take the great strides it has done over the following centuries.

Probably the best part of the book for me is the last third where Kennedy sketches the rise of atheism from Sozzini, d’Hobach, through Hume and Paine and on to Darwin and evolution. Then – post-Darwin – the rapid growth in atheism from that point on to the present day where religions – despite their increasingly frantic rearguard actions continue their inexorable decline into irrelevance as mankind leaves behind its superstitious childhood at last.

Kennedy concludes that he finds spirituality, the numinous and al those other consolations that religion is supposed to find in nature and in art. Here, in addition, I would come down on the side of Kennedy, but also adding Richard Dawkins contention that science does far more to aid our understanding of the universe and our appreciation of its beauty to a far greater extent than religion ever could. All in all, then, All In The Mind is an excellent book, one that I highly recommend.