Reproduced, with permission, from THE FUTURIST, Published by the World Future Society, 7910 Woodmont Avenue, Suite 450, Bethesda, Maryland Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote a fictional account of a madman who went about the town proclaiming that "God is dead." Nietzsche's story is illustrative of a wave of atheism that spread through the intellectual circles of Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but that never caught on in society at large. The idea of the divine demise, however, did not die: A movement by theologians resurrected Nietzsche's thesis in the 1960s, amidst the other forms of radical thinking that characterized that decade. Thecover of Time magazine for April 8, 1966, summarized it best with theboldfaced headline, "Is God Dead?" Despite the theologians' doubts, the next few decades marked a riseof religious fundamentalism among many Christians and Muslims and areturn to traditionalist thinking among many Jews. Today, 96% of theU.S. population say they believe in God, a slight increase compared withsurveys done half a century earlier. If he were to appear today,Nietzsche's madman would still find that he had come too early. What is the future of God? Will He ever truly die? One difficulty inanswering these questions is the word "God." It may seem like a simpleword, but "God" doesn't mean the same thing to everybody: Various imagesand ideas of the deity appear throughout different times and cultures.So the first issue we need to look at is semantic. We need to study theway people have understood God in the past and what they believe today.Then we can address what concept of God is emerging for futurebelievers.MANY GODS OR ONE GOD? One common theory about the Western image of a single, distinct Godis that He arose out of a more ancient era of polytheism. Indeed, thefirst books of the Bible tell how the Israelite God Yahweh forb...
