Silliness and secularization

What happens when God is dead?

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him,” said German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in 1882. I don’t pretend to have deep knowledge of Nietzsche’s philosophy. As with Hegel and Kant before him, I find his writing very difficult to understand. What in the world are these people on about? In the case of Mr. Nietzsche, I suspect that it is worth understanding him. Here is my synthesis of what many other authors had to say about him. There are other views.

“Portrait of Friedrich Nietzsche”, by Edvard Munch, c. 1906.

Nietzsche wrote in the warm glow of the Enlightenment period and wasn’t exulting about the death of God but rather was asking the obvious question,

“Well done all you knavish ubermensch. Now what?”

The Enlightenment was a period of religious bigotry during which Voltaire and others who hated the Catholic church, lauded the scientific advances of polymaths like Sir Isaac Newton. During this nascent period of science and reason there was no room for God. He was, in fact, dead. No one paid attention to the fact that Newton, the new icon to the power of reason, was a devout Christian who wrote more about theology than he did about science. In a parallel development, those who promoted the fatuity of a period of enlightenment underscored their view by defining the prior period as a period of darkness - the Dark Ages. Light is bright only to the extent that the background is dark.

But was there a period of intellectual darkness? Most historians disagree with the concept of a Dark Age. “But the glories of Rome were lost to the unsophisticated invasion of hairy, blonde people from the north!” Forgotten is that Rome was a slave economy whereas the Christian Goths ended Roman slavery. It is unlikely that the freed slaves, who made up perhaps 60 percent of the Roman population, saw the fall of the last Roman emperor, Romulus Augustulus, as a bad thing.

Back to Mr. Nietzsche… Recognizing that the entirety of European history and culture was built on belief in a transcendent God, Nietzsche concluded that the next stage of development would necessarily involve the collapse of that culture. What would become of these “murderers of all murderers”?

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?

What moral system would replace the Judeo-Christian, God-based system? Nietzsche’s fear was that the only direction available to his culture was down, where values would be without foundation and therefore infinitely variable. The response of those living under this new ethical system would be apathy and despair. Kierkegaard argued that when there is no certainty and life is no longer based on a moral system delivered by a transcendent rule-maker, then the universe and human life is pointless. Presaging Brave New World, Nietzsche suggested in Thus Spake Zarathustra that, in the absence of God and certainty, we are left with shallow entertainment.

Behold! I shall show you the Last Man....The earth has become small, and upon it hops the Last Man, who makes everything small... A little poison now and then: that produces pleasant dreams. And a lot of poison at last, for a pleasant death. They still work, for work is entertainment. But they take care the entertainment does not exhaust them... No herdsmen and one herd. Everyone wants the same thing, everyone is the same: whoever thinks otherwise goes voluntarily into the madhouse... ‘We have discovered happiness,’ say the Last Men, and blink.

When we lose God, we don’t gain reason. We just get another pseudo-religion known as scientism. Perhaps it was fear of this pseudo-religion that so horrified Nietzsche. His madmen did not see the death of God as the end of superstition but as the beginning of nihilism and despair. He argued that science and religion were two sides of the same coin; that they were fruit from the same tree. “God is Truth and Truth is Divine,” said the madman. Nietzsche was right to be a bit depressed. “You will own nothing and be happy!” Just take the soma…

I thought of this recently while listening to a podcast by Jordan Peterson. In his talk he made a comment remarkable given the time in which we live.

This is what is happening to the entire atheistic scientific community.  God died in 1880 (Nietzsche).  It is God first and then it is science.  Those are 100% casually related.  There is no way we are going to hold on to some notion of a beneficial objective truth in the absence of a transcendental underlying religious substructure.  That is not going to happen.

The first instance that I can find of this type of thinking - apart from Sir Isaac himself - was a speech by Alfred North Whitehead in 1925.

The greatest contribution of medievalism to the formation of the scientific movement was the inexpugnable belief that… there is a secret, a secret which can be unveiled. How has this conviction been so vividly implanted in the European mind… it must come from the medieval insistence on the rationality of God, conceived as with the personal energy of Jehovah and with the rationality of a Greek philosopher. Every detail was supervised and ordered: the search into nature could only result in the vindication of the faith in rationality.

Only a rational God can create a rational universe and only a rational universe is knowable. Sorry but Darwin’s evolutionary thesis has nothing to say about the provenance of the immense amount of information of the human genome and how it is packed into each cell of our bodies. Waving one’s simian arms and mumbling “survival of the fittest” is satisfactory only to Richard Dawkins. Is it any wonder that “science” was pondered and developed only where the Christian God was honoured? Is this perhaps why theology was named the Queen of the Sciences by medieval scientist-priests?

It was a theme pounded on by Dr. Francis Schaeffer in the early 1980’s. He warned us in no uncertain terms that the loss of faith meant the loss of science. Oh yes, the fumes of would warm us for a time but these too would attenuate until we regressed to changing lead into gold or pulling out the still beating hearts of our sacrificial victims to placate gods we can’t know or understand.

“Follow the science!” we are regaled. “Safe and effective!” we were assured. “97% of scientists agree so the science is settled!” But science is not something to be settled, followed, and venerated. It is a process towards understanding. Therefore, if we follow “the science”, we undercut the epistemological limb upon which we sit. As God is bled out on the mortician’s slab are we really better off?

Can biological men really menstruate, give birth, and suckle babies? Are gender and sex really the same thing only on a sliding scale that is dependent, not on chromosomal differences, but upon the concentrations of dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins flood our brains from time to time? Is it true that killing innocent children at all night dance parties and murdering babies in their cribs while raping the mothers in front of the fathers is only heinous in a relative sense? Are we sure that even though my truth is not your truth they are equally valid? There is a lot riding on the answers to these questions, so we had better get them right.

I read some interesting statistics on charitable giving in Canada based on 2010 data. Canadians who practiced their faith constituted 32% of the population and were responsible for 65% of charitable giving. When giving to religious institutions was discounted, these 32% made 42% of the contributions to secular institutions. Thirty percent of Canadians were responsible for 85% of volunteering. Mr. Burke’s little platoons will be getting exhausted by now.

The “God is dead” crowd brought us the most violent century in human history in which an estimated 200 million people died at the hands of their own heads of government. Pretty much as Nietzsche predicted.

But what if God isn’t dead? What if, as Thomas Jefferson said about slavery,

Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever…

Nietzsche believed that the rush to murder God was a very bad idea. He might even have felt it to be a postmodern idea, birthed by silly people. Even though his discomfort with God’s passing caused him to predict the terrible events of the 20th century, he was not entirely pessimistic.

Indeed we philosophers and free spirits feel, when we hear the news that the old god is dead, as if a new dawn shone on us, our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, premonitions, expectations. At long last the horizon appears free to us again, even if it should not be bright; at long last our ship may venture out again, venture out to face any danger.

I hear less and less about following the science. No one tells me that the shots are safe and effective. Covid exposed that the old god in the old wineskins was a phony. It makes a difference to whom we offer our incense. Perhaps I am wrong, but it seems that perhaps a little personal freedom is leaking back into public discourse. Until I am elected king, nothing will be perfect, but the world seems to be at least looking for its kilter. Perhaps Nietzsche’s optimism was sparked by the optimism of Henry Longfellow who penned his Christmas carol following great personal tragedy during the American Civil War,

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,

God is not dead nor doth He sleep. It feels to me like our ship may venture out again. Science has taken a real shellacking these past ten years, but my confidence is building that it too shall prevail. Many more will die before we overcome our silliness but the sunlit uplands are once more visible in the distance.