The Old Faith and the New

German philosopher and radical theologian David Friedrich Strauss (1808-1874) distinguished himself as one of Europe’s most controversial critics of the Bible and an intellectual martyr for free-thought. In The Old Faith and the New (1872), he uses both 19th- century science and leading philosophers to reject God as the creator of the universe and humankind, the divinity of Christ, and the reality of miracles (the Old Faith), thus consigning religion to the domains of history, myth, and ethics. With Christianity’s cosmology undermined, Strauss constructs a new view of the universe and humanity’s place in it grounded in science and contemporary technology, Darwinian evolution, and inductive reasoning (the New Faith), all of which offered the hope of finding solutions to human problems.