Is God Really Dead?
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?
— Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Section 125, tr. Walter Kaufmann
Why did Nietzsche grieve over the loss of something he could never prove? Even though there are plenty of people who still believe in the existence of deity, we in the WEIRD world cannot avoid that tiny brush of doubt, the faint tinge of embarrassment to speak of belief in the unprovable. Those who do display faith seem fake, or perhaps self-righteous.
WEIRD is an acronym for the western countries who accepted the precepts of the Enlightenment and benefited greatly in terms of wealth, day-to-day safety, and longevity. WEIRD stands for Wealthy, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. And we are not the norm. Not on Earth.
Most of humanity does believe in god, gods, ancestors, nature spirits, or other manifestations of the unseen world. And they don’t struggle with the idea as we in the WEIRD world often do.
Nietzsche’s declaration is no cry of victory. He speaks of blood and atonement. The worst part is the loss of guidance. A child crying in the darkness because he can no longer see a clear path forward through the trees, and the terrors that live among them.
He did his best to imagine what might replace the deity, but his concept of the ubermenchen was a failure. It was a failure because - as both Freud and Jung both agreed - we don’t know enough about ourselves to make good choices. No matter how smart we think we are, there is still plenty that we know nothing about. The human brain simply doesn’t have the processing power to handle the great everything. We are limited by time and materials.
It is my personal opinion that Nietzsche went mad because he tried to grasp the great everything. He did his best to build a map of the abyss that others might follow. But the abyss stared back. It is not darkness alone that lives there. Even with the life-raft of faith, the unknown sends out tendrils that tease and tickle our monkey curiosity. Pursuit of such tendrils can have big rewards.
They can also lead to a downward spiral of meaninglessness and terror.
Meaning - the ‘why am I here?’ And ‘what should I be doing?’ can’t be answered with reason. Try, and you find there is no there there. And that’s best case scenario.
The enlightenment cracked our ability to reach beyond what we could see or hear or touch. But it didn’t kill it. Nothing could, because the ability is know - and to have faith in - what is beyond our senses is built in. It is part of our brains, a function of our biological architecture.
Whether one believes in god or not, god lives. Because the unknown is always with us.