God Is Dead

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.” (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 1882)

Picture a man running into a crowded marketplace with a lit lantern in the middle of a bright morning. He’s shouting that he’s looking for God. The people standing around are mostly unbelievers, and they laugh at him. Did God get lost? Is he hiding? Did he go on a voyage?

Then the man turns on them. God is dead, he tells them, and we killed him. When nobody understands, he throws his lantern on the ground, where it breaks, and says he has come too early.

That’s the parable of the madman, from section 125 of Nietzsche’s The Gay Science. It’s where the line “God is dead” comes from. Most Latter-day Saints have heard the line. Very few have read the scene, and the scene changes what the line means.

I’ll tell you what I think Nietzsche meant, why the “death” of a God can feel like an actual death, and why I came out the other side not believing in God as the church describes him, yet still not anti-god.

Not a victory chant

Let me take the believer’s reaction seriously first. To a Latter-day Saint, “God is dead” sounds like blasphemy wearing a smirk. You’ve felt God’s love. You’ve prayed and felt answered. Someone announcing his death sounds like an attack on the most sacred thing in your life.

But look at who’s laughing in the parable. It isn’t the madman. It’s the casual unbelievers in the marketplace, and he’s appalled by them. He isn’t celebrating. He’s grieving, and he’s frightened.

Nietzsche wasn’t claiming that a supernatural being had literally died. He was describing something that had already happened in European culture. The Christian God had been the foundation for morality, meaning and value, and belief in him was quietly becoming unbelievable to many people. Nietzsche asked what would hold everything up once the foundation was gone. His worry was that nothing would. That’s nihilism.

So the line isn’t a taunt. It’s a diagnosis. Whether he was right about Europe is a debate for someone else’s blog. But I think he was right about what it feels like.

What it feels like when God dies

I saved a longer version of that passage in my notes years ago, under the heading “Gods, Too, Decompose”:

“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?”

That’s how it feels. Not triumph. Disorientation, and a strange guilt, as if you did something terrible by noticing.

Mormonism gave me a very particular conceptual model of the world: God, the cosmos, the origin of life, prayer, what I ate and drank, the words I spoke. When I made room for other ways of seeing, the anthropomorphic God at the center of that model didn’t survive. I do not suspect that there physically exists a God as described in the church.

And when the center goes, it doesn’t go alone. For a while, nihilism swept in, just as Nietzsche predicted. It seemed there was no purpose or meaning to anything. (I wrote about how I found my way out of that in Meaningness.)

So that’s one open question this essay owes you an answer to: if the God I was taught is gone for me, why am I not an atheist with a lantern, shouting it in the marketplace?

His shadow on the wall

Nietzsche has another passage, earlier in the same book, that I think about more than the famous one. After the Buddha died, he says, people kept showing his shadow in a cave for centuries. And then:

“God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown.”

Nietzsche saw that shadow as something left to defeat.

This is where he and I part ways. I don’t want to defeat the shadow.

I do not ascribe to the kind of atheism that tries to be the opposite of what theism is. I am not anti-god. I think religion and church institutions have crucial roles in modern life, and I do not want to see them disappear. Spirituality is an inseparable part of being human. I still make room for it.

Here’s the best way I know to explain it. We outgrow our belief in Santa Claus, but not necessarily the principle of him.

I know that comparison can sound flippant. I don’t mean it that way. Think about what actually happens when a child stops believing in Santa. The generosity doesn’t stop. The child becomes the one who fills the stockings. The belief was outgrown, and the principle got handed on to someone who could carry it.

I call that keeping the principle of him. God, Jesus, heaven and hell, the Book of Mormon and its stories, and the Bible still mean a great deal to me, as metaphorical and conceptual artifacts. Redemption, forgiveness, a second chance, love that doesn’t keep score: I didn’t throw those out with the literal claims. If anything, I can see them more clearly now that I’m not defending the history.

Humble about the rest

Let me be careful not to swap one certainty for another.

I absolutely leave open the possibility that there is a supreme being, just as I leave open the possibility of many worlds. I just know of no evidence for either one. If I died today and woke up in heaven or hell or somewhere else, I would be surprised, but happy.

That’s not a dodge. It’s simply the most honest place I can stand. I’m skeptical of the God I was taught, but I don’t know enough to rule out every possible God. I also find I don’t need to settle the question to live a good life, love my family, or feel awe when I look at the night sky.

Too early, or just in time

The madman broke his lantern because nobody was ready to hear him. He’d come too early.

I’m not carrying a lantern into your marketplace. I’m not here to announce anything to you, and I’m certainly not here to take your faith. If God is alive for you, I’m glad you have that. What I’d ask for is a little room for people like me: people for whom the God of their childhood quietly died, and who are still, as you’d recognize if you met us, deeply spiritual people.

If that’s where you are, read Meaningness next. And if you’re my family wondering what all this means for us, my letter is the place to start.