Is God Really Dead?
Checking in on the current condition of God
At the beginning of Moonage Daydream, the documentary film on David Bowie, a quote Bowie made in 2002 appears on screen. He is talking about Nietzsche’s proclamation that God is dead, and that man, seeing himself as God, could only produce disaster. This leads to a “terrifying confusion”, reads the quote, “for if we could not take the place of God, how could we fill the space we had created within ourselves?” Bowie expands on this in a rather obscure interview from 2002 - www.good.is/videos/david-bowie-philosophical-interview.
For Bowie, Nietzsche’s proclamation was the “culmination of all the thoughts of the previous century” and “the idea that everything we’ve known before was wrong.” Consequently, he observes, the 20th century starts with a “clean slate,” where humans are now “the Gods.”
Because of a decline in faith and religious institutions in the Western world during The Enlightenment and beyond, Nietzsche saw Western civilisation as being at a perilous crossroads. Despite his atheism, Nietzsche’s declaration was not made in a celebratory way (as is often misconstrued). There was a fear for Nietzsche, and for many of his contemporaries, that the death of God, or the death of the idea of God, would create, as Bowie alludes to, a void in which life would be rendered meaningless. Making his declaration in parable form in The Gay Science, in an aphorism entitled ‘The Madman’, Nietzsche, in the voice of his madman, writes as if at a loss, frantic, almost. “How shall we comfort ourselves,” the madman asks, “the murderers of all murderers?”. There is a pleading to his lamentations, despair at there being no one to “wipe the blood off us”.
If we try not to overthink Nietzsche’s proclamation, and, for the need to be relatively brief, simplify things a little, events in the wake of The Enlightenment, such as the Industrial Revolution and the advent and triumph of capitalism, are the blades in which humanity inflicted the death of God, in the Nietzschean sense. In declaring God’s death, Nietzsche foresees a dangerous uncertainty around the new world, now that the old one has been done away with.
Again, this is a simplified summarisation of a huge subject made for a larger point. What I’m interested in is whether or not the idea of God is actually dead and why the idea of God being dead or alive in our age matters, if at all. But more than that, what I am most interested in is where we are today and where our ways of life are taking us as a civilisation.
The first, and easiest dispute to have with Nietzsche’s declaration, is the fact that his mindset is rooted firmly in Christian theology. Being a 19th-century man writing about 19th-century concerns, Nietzsche cannot escape this narrow worldview. When Nietzsche declares that God is dead, he is talking solely about the Christian, Western conception of God and the decline in so-called Christian values.
But is the conception of this God really dead, even in the Nietzschean sense? On the one hand, 142 years after the publication of The Gay Science, Christianity still has its reach in positions of power in the West, despite, on the other hand, a widespread decline of Christian practice and worship in daily life. The idea of God, though, persists and has never gone away. The diminishing of something is not the end of something. In the globalised world of the 21st century, this notion of God’s death maintains its relevance. Unlike Nietzsche and other thinkers of his time, we cannot ignore the idea of God outside of the West. The world no longer revolves around Western thought. If the idea of God is in peril in the West, which I would say is still a bit of a stretch (especially when we consider its hold over the US), then it certainly isn’t in the East. Just look at Islamic fundamentalism and Zionism, fanatical ideologies firmly rooted in an idea of religion, and of God, which are to me, opposite sides of the same coin. These are, of course, the most extreme examples of religious fanatism, but even moderate practitioners of Islam and Judaism are not giving an inch for any debate on the non-existence of God, or a toning down, shall we say, of traditional monotheistic teachings.
Conversely, the decline in the Western world of practicing and adhering to Christian ways of life is a factor in the resurgence of hard-line conservative doctrine seen in Europe and the US, most weirdly in the support of as non-religious a figure as Donald Trump. Even in the UK, we have Nigel Farage, another un-Godly figure by anyone’s standards, as far back as 2014 bemoaning the loss of “Judeo-Christian” values. In hindsight, we can see that this appeal for a return to those values foreshadows Trump, Brexit, and the huge gains in support of conservative and right-wing parties across Europe, all of which have an anti-immigration stance firmly rooted in the fear of the Other, namely that of people deemed to be ill-fitting, or unwilling, to “adapt” to “western values”. What this proves is that Farage, Trump, and other heroes of the right are fully in touch with the dismay at the loss of these values, which includes many non-religious people. This is where we return to Nietzsche and his madman – “I have come too early”, he says, "my time has not come yet. The tremendous event is still on its way, still traveling - it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time, the light of the stars requires time, deeds require time even after they are done, before they can be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the distant stars - and yet they have done it themselves."
If the idea of God did die, then, back in Nietzsche’s time, then there are many today who have still not received word. Or perhaps what is happening is an attempt to resurrect the Christian God, to raise him from the catacombs built for him by secular society, compounded by Globalisation and Neo-liberalism.
For those of us who see hardline adherence to religious doctrine, as dictated by organised religion, as anathema, the re-emergence of conservative ideas on, to use one example, abortion, on top of a renewed enthusiasm for the nation-state and defence of cultural identity, both of which are borne out of paranoia and confusion generated from the bewilderment of a changing world in which borders and national identity are becoming less important, is something that must be outright rejected. The question is, how do we affirm our rejection effectively?
Firstly, and as difficult as it sounds, there has to be a small concession, or an understanding as to why people are retreating to, or attempting to save, a dead, or dying, idea of God, or to be more precise, to certain ideals. There has to be an acceptance or questioning of legitimate concerns around the modern Western world. The easiest concession to make is of the damage caused to Western minds by atrocities carried out by Islamic fanatics, starting, of course, with 9/11. That is not to simply discard the nuances and complexities around the issue, which we can return to another time, but for everyday people, the sight of planes being flown into buildings, cars being driven into crowds, bullets sprayed into restaurants and bars, and of commuters and concert-goers, many of which were children, being blown up, has inflicted a mass traumatisation upon western society. There’s no getting away from this issue, not after so many attacks (bear in mind I am focusing on Western perspectives and am fully aware that people in the East have suffered much more violence from Westerners than Westerners have from them).
Another concession that is less easy to make relates to a shift in sense of place, and the confusion, disorientation, and sense of loss people have, not just with the modern world, but with their cities and towns. Essentially, there is a disconnect from the environment of their upbringings, and with their way of life. This is difficult simply because resistance to societal change is manifested, predominantly, in xenophobia and prejudice, but we have to accept, first of all, that a shift in sense of place is real, and the disillusion and resentment felt are real, even if ignorance and bad education are exacerbating factors (in terms of pinning the blame on particular groups). This is a complex issue to tackle, one which, as with atrocities carried out by Islamic extremists, needs expanding on at another time, but there is evidence, I think, of too much change being carried out in too short a space of time for many people. Again, I need to clarify that this is not to make apologies or defend any form of prejudice or xenophobia, but rather my expression of a need to understand a disease in order to find a cure.
The final concession is the most difficult of all, as it requires us to find a way past a complicated contradiction, that of a failure of Capitalism, specifically the neo-liberal, globalised model, and an acknowledgment of that failure, met with an unwillingness to entertain an alternative. The irony here is that everyone, conservatives, liberals, socialists, even the lunatic MAGA cult in the US, knows that something is not right with the way the world is run, and how wealth is distributed. For conservatives and most liberals, the problem is that we are practicing the wrong form of capitalism or an excessive form of capitalism. There is even a complete obliviousness to capitalism having any role to play in people’s problems, and in the kind of issues that impact them. The late Mark Fisher summed this up best in what he termed ‘Capitalist Realism’. “It is easier to imagine the end of the world”, he said, “than it is to imagine the end of capitalism”.
For most people, the world we have constructed for ourselves just is. Our problems and the things that ruin our existence, such as bills, rent, and employment, for example, are just a part of life. Nothing can be done about them. In addition, this ‘Capitalist Realism’ is more or less intrinsically tied to Judeo-Christian traditions and values, as the two ideas have more or less developed together in the Western world.
During the 20th century, Bowie says, “the greatest thing we could do as God…was create the bomb. That was what we were good at doing. And I think that in itself...the repercussions of what we had done by standing in for this idea of morality, creating it all ourselves, so destroyed our fix on what we should be doing in life that we’re still living through that chaos right now.”
Over twenty years on from Bowie’s observation, that chaos has intensified. Shifts in sense of place, massive technological advances, incomprehensible in Nietzsche’s time, and new ideas around identity and borders, to name just a few things, have added a new dimension to the debate around God’s death, human morality, and the meaning of existence. We have now ventured into uncharted territory, a realisation, particularly for people born in the 1980s, like me, that we have long since entered the future we looked forward to in wonder. We are like a sleepwalker, jolted awake, finding ourselves disoriented by this new reality we are marooned in. The transition from one age to another, from what was once the present and into the future, was so seamless we hardly seemed to notice. After the arrival of the year 2000, an event that can only be appreciated by those alive at the time, there was a decade long hang-over where, culturally, nothing happened. Guitar bands re-emerged, much more boring than their predecessors, Hip-Hop and R&B sank into superficiality and meaningless, something that it has never recovered from. There was, briefly, the staleness of UK Garage, far less exciting than the Jungle music that preceded it. Again, we turn to Mark Fisher, who reflected on this time, and cultural stagnation, in his book Ghosts of My Life, writing of a “slow cancellation of the future…accompanied by a deflation of expectations”.
This recycling of 20th-century culture in the noughties and 2010s were part of a neo-liberal overdrive, a form of mass marketing for globalisation. Interspersed with this globalisation were terror attacks, the “War on Terror”, and the arrival of social media. These are the primary factors that have shaped the human psyche of our time. But as all this was happening, there was, for many young people coming of age during the turn of the century, a search for excitement and meaning, something that ultimately failed. Excesses of drugs and alcohol rendered us defenceless, more or less, our attempts to express ourselves lost in the haze of nights and smoke-filled kitchens and bedrooms, our attempts to make sense of the world, the thoughts and perspectives we shared, swallowed up in the abyss of cyberspace, scattered amongst the thoughts and perspectives of everyone else.
Obviously, social media and 21st-century culture are not entirely negative. The point, though, is that the explosion of information, entertainment, and distraction, all at our fingertips all of the time, and the shifts in sense of place, have seen us arrive at another crossroads, where we are questioning everything that has come before with a skewed sense of morality. We can justify homelessness, economic inequality, and the bombing of children, while simultaneously clinging to an idea of God and supposedly superior “Judeo-Christian” values. This raises the ultimate contradiction of our age – neo-liberal capitalism propped up with Christian dogma.
Ultimately, God is not dead. He (I say He in the Biblical sense, if God does exist, it is not a man) has never been dead, not since Nietzsche’s proclamation. That doesn’t make him wrong, though, just as Capitalism’s triumph doesn’t make Marx wrong in his critique of it. Nietzsche was right to condemn organised religion and foresee the potential for moral collapse in the absence of its total control over our ideals. The point of Nietzsche’s proclamation, for me, is to oversee the death of God (Christianity, Judeo-Christian values, whatever you want to call it, but it does not mean the literal God, whatever it is) and figure out, through each individual, our values and meaning.
The task facing humanity today seems to me an impossible one. If we are unable to kill the old ideas of monotheism, and its domineering nature we are subjected to, as well as all-encompassing forms of Capitalism, then the future looks increasingly bleak for all of us.