THE DEATH OF GOD AND HOW IT HAS CHANGED THE WORLD

The German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, had argued that once we reject the Christian God, we have also rejected Christian values – equality, human exceptionalism, and an entire array of values that go along with them. However, the West naively thinks that they can retain Christian values after “killing” the Christian God. Os Guinness wrote of Nietzsche’s disdain for such blindness:

·       Nietzsche was a self-proclaimed “anti-Christ,” yet he had no time for complacent middle-class thinking that could say, “God is dead” and go on living as before. If God was “dead” for Western culture, then nothing was the same. It was time to face the consequences. (The Journey, 136)

What were the consequences? Anything would now be permissible! With God in the grave, our only moral rudder would be our desires and fears. Hence, the two great wars!

However, as in Nietzsche’s day, so too in ours! Few can perceive the consequences of their rejection of God. Atheists confidently explain:

·       We need not sink into a morally relativistic quagmire once we reject God. We still have absolute moral principles to guide us. For example, drinking water is absolutely good because it promotes survival and survival is absolutely good.

However, what makes survival absolutely good? There no longer exists an absolute principle that makes human survival more important than the malaria-bearing mosquito. Besides, is there anything that establishes that survival-is-good apart from our own subjective judgment? If the mosquito could talk, he might say that his survival is just as important to him as ours is to us. Besides, who can say otherwise with any authority, if God is dead! Is there anything left to argue in favor of laws that protect us over the mosquito, other than human chauvinism? A growing number would now argue, “No!”

This brings us back to moral relativism where morality is entirely relative to how I think and feel on any given morning. In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche wrote:

·       They are rid of the Christian God and now believe all the more firmly that they must cling to the Christian morality… When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet.

Truly, Christian morality rests upon an absolutely immutable and universal standard – God - but does it really matter? Yes! Our beliefs have consequences. The German Jewish poet, Heinrich Heine, noted these consequences back in 1832:

·       It is to the great merit of Christianity that it has somewhat attenuated the brutal German lust for battle. But it could not destroy it entirely. And should that taming talisman break – the Cross - then will come roaring back the wild madness of the ancient warriors.

What would happen once the Cross was broken? Heine continued:

·       And laugh not at my forebodings, the advice of a dreamer who warns you away from the Kants and Fichtes of the world, and from our philosophers of nature. No, laugh not at the visionary who knows that in the realm of phenomena comes soon the revolution that has already taken place in the realm of spirit. For thought goes before deed as lightening before thunder. There will be played in Germany a play compared to which the French revolution was but an innocent idyll.

It is inevitable that, without God, there will be little to restrain the madness. The late psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, Victor Frankl, reasoned:

·       I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek, were ultimately prepared not in some ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers. (The Doctor of the Soul)

Thoughts and philosophies precede plans and actions. Historian Richard Weikart, California State University, wrote in From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany about how the anti-God worldview of Darwinism impacted thought and action:

• By reducing humans to mere animals, by stressing human inequality, and by viewing the death of many "unfit" organisms as a necessary—and even progressive—natural phenomenon, Darwinism made the death of the "inferior" seem inevitable and even beneficent. Some Darwinists concluded that helping the "unfit" die—which had for millennia been called murder—was not morally reprehensible, but was rather morally good. 

Hitler didn’t invent eugenics. He gladly imbibed ideas that had become ripe in the Western world. According to Weikart, Darwinist thinking brought about policy and behavioral change:

• Those skeptical about the role Darwinism played in the rise of advocacy for involuntary euthanasia, infanticide, and abortion should consider several points. First, before the rise of Darwinism, there was no debate on these issues, as there was almost universal agreement in Europe that human life is sacred and that all innocent human lives should be protected. Second, the earliest advocates of involuntary euthanasia, infanticide, and abortion in Germany were devoted to a Darwinian worldview. Third, Haeckel, the most famous Darwinist in Germany, promoted these ideas in some of his best-selling books, so these ideas reached a wide audience, especially among those receptive to Darwinism. Finally, Haeckel and other Darwinists and eugenicists grounded their views on death and killing on their naturalistic interpretation of Darwinism.

Heine was clearly right. In the same way that lightening precedes thunder, thought precedes deed. In Markings, the later Secretary General of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjold, wrote:

·       God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our loves cease to be illuminated by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason.

Our death takes many forms once we kill God. Jesus had taught: “You are of more value than many sparrows.” (Matthew 10:31). Up to two hundred years ago, such a statement would not have raised an eyebrow. However, today it has become quite controversial within certain circles, where it is claimed that all life is of equal value.

However, most still believe that we are more valuable than sparrows, mosquitoes, and even cows. How do they justify this claim in our post-Christian society? They offer various possibilities, like, “Humanity is more valuable than animals because…

·       We are sentient being, or

·       We feel and love more deeply, or

·       We are intelligent and creative, or…”

However, these criteria of value, by themselves, are totally inadequate to justify our surpassing value. They merely shift the question of value to other unjustified criteria – intelligence, feelings, and creativity. What is able to impart value to these criteria, especially in view of a God-less world that lacks any inherent meaning?

The atheistic philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, was able to perceive this problem in the late 19^th century. In The Gay Science (Section 125, The Madman), he wrote:

·       “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 realized that without God, we would now have to “become gods” to arbitrarily and subjectively create our own values. There is no other alternative. However, we encounter another problem when we try to create value in a valueless, meaningless universe.

Besides, our determination of value cannot match God’s. For example, if our value depends on our higher intelligence or sentience, then we have to sacrifice other values, like human equality, in the process.

Why? Well, some of us are more intelligent, conscious, sensitive, or educated than others. Adults are more intelligent than babies and the elderly. They are also more successful and contribute more to society. Do we want a world where our relative value is socially determined according to our performance or status? Of course not! However, when we reject God, we also reject any coherent system of laws and values. Atheist Arthur Leff of the Duke School of Law had written:

·       “The so-called death of God wasn’t just His funeral, but was the elimination of any coherent ethical or legal system…As it stands now, everything is up for grabs…Napalming babies is bad, starving the poor wicked, buying and selling people is depraved—but, ‘Sez who?’ God help us.”

Leff understood that, without God, there exists no basis for any meaningful system of values or laws. Instead, we have banished ourselves into a meaningless, valueless, and lifeless desert, self-condemned to obsessively and hopelessly prove that we do have value. Consequently, it is likely that Heine’s words shall be once again vindicated:

·       It is to the great merit of Christianity that it has somewhat attenuated the brutal German lust for battle.