One of the things that struck me in Alister McGrath's The Twilight of Atheism was the link he makes between the Reformation and the rise of atheism. He says A distinctive feature of the Reformation, particularly associated with the leading reformers Huldrych Zwingli and John Calvin, is the "desacralisation" of nature....The declaration that the natural world was not in any way sacred opened the way to its scientific investigation. There could be no religious obstacles to the analysis of the world. The world increasingly became seen as a machine or an instrument - of divine origins, of course, but increasingly distant from God. The material world might have been created by God; it could not, however, convey the divine presence.... ....in popular Catholicism sacred and secular times, events and places were so closely associated that they were often indistinguishable....The individual had a strong sense of place within the cosmos that radiated the glory of God and
'Contemplating the teeming life of the shore, we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp.' - Rachel Carson