In his seminal work, "A Secular Age," Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor poses a brilliant question: "Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, the year 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000, many of us find this not only easy but even inescapable?" Over the next 800 pages, Taylor provides a three-part answer to the question.

First, he argues that in the pre-modern world, people instinctively viewed the cosmos and their place in it as an unquestionable artifact of a magnificent creation of God.

The natural world, it was believed, was forever giving evidence of supernatural interactions in the earthly realm, evidenced through events in the natural order: storms, floods, droughts, pestilence and "exceptional fertility and flourishing." All of these things inescapably pointed to the supernatural world and God, who actively directed them.