The Death of God: Alternative Conceptions of the Almighty

Philosophy of Religion
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Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: “I seek God! I seek God!”—As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated?—Thus they yelled and laughed.

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Whither is God?” he cried; “I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. 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? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us—for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto.”

Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. “I have come too early," he said then; “my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars—and yet they have done it themselves.”

It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: “What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?” - Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

While I find Nietzsche to be a tad inconsistent and at times “out there” in some of his books, he truly can be called, along with Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky, a great prophet of the 20th and 21st centuries. The Parable of the Madman is possibly one of the greatest things he’s ever written (other than Thus Spoke Zarathustra). If, discussed from a Western Christian mindset, people are leaving the organized churches, then Christianity will survive without religion (my thoughts on this can be found here). Assuming a religionless Christianity will take root in the Western world, that one simply cannot accept the established claims of the popular forms of Catholicism and Protestantism, this leaves us with a few options:

  1. Atheism, specifically the so-called “New Atheism” that was made popular by people like Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Dan Dennett, and Richard Dawkins a few years ago.
  2. Alternative concepts of God altogether as found in the philosophical systems of antiquity, namely, Greek, Chinese, Persian, and Indian.
  3. A “revaluation of Christianity,” leading one to writings, individuals, and churches historically deemed heterodox, finding in them a source of true faith.

I believe that these are states that some people, not all, go through, myself being one such person. The atheism of Nietzsche was a spiritual state for him, I think. The statement “God is dead” was a terrifying reality for him as it was for so many other people. He writes the following in The Antichrist:

The ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ is a condition of the heart — not something that comes ‘upon the earth’ or ‘after death’.”

I strongly believe that he is on to something here. I don’t think any of the New Atheists would disagree with Nietzsche here. I do think there are some differences in the atheism of Nietzsche and New Atheism, though. Nietzsche couldn’t believe because he saw the contradictions between the Church and what Jesus actually told his disciples to do, while New Atheism promotes scientism as a source for the answers to all our questions. There is a reason why the “Four Horsemen of New Atheism” have all fallen from grace. A worldview where science becomes a god is just as idolatrous as the Israelites worshipping the golden calf. Alan Watts, who to this day plays a role in my thinking (although I don’t agree with everything he says), said the following in one of his lectures:

“I have advocated something called atheism in the name of God, that is to say an experience, a contact, a relationship, with god (that is to say, with the ground of your being) that does not have to be embodied or expressed in any specific image.” - Images of God

His notion of “atheism in the name of God” is not the atheism of Nietzsche nor is it New Atheism. Ironically, it is to understand God via negativa, without clinging to images as a source of religious truth. Images in general are not bad, but some images can, have, become idols. This leads us to the idea that agnosticism states that we cannot know what is unknowable, and it is precisely that when one grasps the idea of what “unknowing” is, one can actually start looking at alternative conceptions of God. We have several models that people can look into: The distinction between Brahman and atman, the Godhead and the self, in the Upanishads and other Indian religions like Sikhism, the idea of the Dao found in Confucianism and Daoism (which C.S. Lewis considered akin to the logos in his masterpiece The Abolition of Man), theistic forms of Buddhism like Jodo Shinshu, and the teachings of the Persian sage Zoroaster. However, let us assume that one does not have all the time in the world to study Indian, Chinese, and Persian thought; One does not have to go far. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle had some incredibly profound ideas about God. Stoicism, the most accessible philosophy for people interested in Greek thought in my opinion, has God written all over it. Take in what Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius write:

“If, indeed, I were a nightingale, I should be singing as a nightingale; if a swan, as a swan. But as it is, I am a rational being, therefore I must be singing hymns of praise to God. This is my task; I do it, and will not desert this post, as long as it may be given me to fill it; and I exhort you to joint me in this same song.” - The Discourses

“Everything suits me that suits your designs, O my universe. Nothing is too early or too late for me that is in your own good time. All is fruit for me that your seasons bring, O nature. All proceeds from you, all subsists in you, and to you all things return.” - Meditations

And more mystically put, we have Plotinus and Proclus reviving Platonic thought:

“The One is not, as it were, unconscious, rather all things belong to it and are in it and with it, it is completely self-discerning, life is in it and all things are in it, and its intellection of itself is itself and exists by a kind of self-consciousness in eternal rest and in an intellection different from the intellection of the Intellect.” - The Enneads, V.4.2

“All that is Good is The Unifying Principle of Its Participants, and All Union is Good, and The Good is The Same with The One. For if The Good is The Preserving Principle of All Beings, (for which reason It is also The Object of Desire for All) but That which is Preservative and Connective of The Essential-Being of every being is The One (for All are Preserved by The One and dispersion removes every being from its Essential-Being). For The Good Completes and Contains those, in which It is present, according to One Union. And if The One is Collective and Connective of Beings, then It will Perfect every-being by Its Own Presence. Accordingly then, it is also Good for All these to be United. If then, The Union is according to The Good Itself, and Good is The Unifying Principle, then The Simply Good, and The Simply One are The Same, Unifying, and at the same time, Benefiting Beings. Hence it is certainly the case that, those who, in a certain way, fall away, from The Good, are at the same time, also deprived of The Participation of The One. And those which become destitute of The One, are “filled” with separation, and are also, in the same way, deprived of The Good. Accordingly then, Goodness is Union, and Union is Goodness, and The Good is One and The One is Primarily Good.” - Elements of Theology, proposition 13

This brings us to the last stage: A revaluation of Christianity. What exactly would this look like? If one has seen Catholicism and Protestantism as legalistic forms of Christianity, it will be funny to find oneself actually returning to Catholic and Protestant thinkers like Meister Eckhart and George Fox, and perhaps even finding oneself studying Orthodox Christianity and reading what the Church Fathers have to say. A revaluation of Christianity is to piece together what true, authentic Christianity is, a Christianity that changes the individual from an old man and into a new one, where Christ is the substance that changes him, as St. Paul writes:

“It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me.” (Galatians 2:20)

Going from the Western Christian tradition and flowing through all these states of being, as I experienced and I think many others do, is important. Adopting a Christianity without religion, as I see it, is not to be anti-denominational but open to what every denomination has to offer so long as it brings about a change of consciousness that is objectively real to the individual.

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Please provide a more precise citation of the Plotinus material.

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The Fifth Ennead, Fourth Tractate, section 2, specifically the Loeb Edition. I will update this in my initial post.

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Consider the following alternatives to “supernatural – transcendent – deity” concepts (e.g. theism … animism):

(A) From the “Epistle to Menoeceus” (or De Rerum Natura), Epicurus’ (Lucretius’) natural Gods – perfect, immortal beings dwelling (dreaming?) far away from imperfect worlds (or universes) in the void between them in perpetual bliss (without need, pain or fear) – the perfection of which mortal beings may contemplate as an ideal of natural happiness

(B) From the Ethics, Spinoza’s “Deus, sive natura” (re: sub specie aeternitatis natura naturans aka "acosmism"¹ (or sub specie durationis natura naturata aka "pandeism"²))

[1] Acosmism - Wikipedia

[2] Pandeism - Wikipedia

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Spinoza is one of my favorites, I must admit. Though I tend to read him as a panentheist rather than a pantheist, he provides an interesting conception of God. Epicureanism, despite its “bleeding heart agnosticism,” as one could call it, has a lot of profound moral insights. One of the first things I was exposed to was the Epicurean paradox:

God, says Epicurus, either wants to remove evils, but cannot; or he can, but does not want to; or he does not want to and cannot; or he wants to and can. If he wants to, but cannot, he is impotent; which is inadmissible in God. If he can, but does not want to, he is envious; which is also alien to God. If he does not want to and cannot, then he is envious and impotent; and this too cannot be attributed to God. If he wants to and can, which alone is proper to God, then where do evils come from? Or why does he not remove them? - Lactantius, On the Wrath of God

I still find engaging with it interesting because, honestly, no one can really know anything about what lies in the hereafter. Is there a heaven? A hell? A purgatory? Or is there nothing? A void? I like to strongly believe that there is an afterlife where we are judged based upon or morals. But, if there is an eternal void, I honestly wonder what that would be like.

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The element that most influenced me from Spinoza is the continual insistence that we cannot use our experience as creatures to imagine a creator. So the view of nature that is presented is not a replacement for our anthropomorphic tendencies of the transcendent. It is the distance created by the degree of the desire for that transcendence.

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Why hold onto Christianity?

Tradition?

Or something else?

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I wonder whether one of the limitations of your model is that it tends to treat faith as a disconnected abstraction. What keeps Christianity vital is not spirituality, but the community that embodies and sustains it. As soon as believers begin to reflect on moral obligations, codes of conduct, and their place in the world, faith necessarily becomes social and political. When we consider what belief in God implies for questions such as trans rights, homosexuality, euthanasia, stem cell research, gun ownership, welfare provision, or the role of women, we move beyond private conviction into a discussion about the kind of society that faith calls us to build. This will inevitably generate dogmas and doctrines.

At that point, faith ceases to be merely an internal experience. It generates shared values, collective action, institutions, identities, and disagreements. These are not accidental by-products of faith but natural consequences of it being lived out in the world.

I don’t think faith can exist as a purely individual phenomenon. A faith that endures requires a community to sustain and interpret it, and from that community religion inevitably emerges. Religion is not an addition to faith but the social form that faith takes in the world.

As an atheist, and among my atheist friends, New Atheism was generally viewed as more of a publishing and marketing phenomenon than a serious intellectual movement. It did not represent a significant development in freethought. Hitchens and Dawkins tended to attack a caricature of theism rather than its most sophisticated forms, and they did not do so particularly well.

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There are very good arguments for subjective atheism. New Atheism tended to be more of the way college professors would go when I was in school, and I find it refreshing that you view it as a hindrance to freethinking. I think it’s interesting to view atheism as a state that people find themselves in, a natural state that I like to think everyone finds themselves in to some greater or lesser degree at some point in life, and I think it’s even more interesting to see what the implications of atheism sponsored by the state as we have found in the Soviet Union, Maoist China, and North Korea are on people. Of course, we see the implications of forced religious belief in certain countries, and the results are terrible.

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To me, Christianity makes the most sense in my study of history but that is only because I have been able to get behind what the Ancient Church was getting at; Its about a change within the person. Christianity is not the great moralizing force of the world just like I think any other religion should not be considered as such. Religious belief is up to the individual alone. If I was raised a Jew, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Jain, Confucianist, or Daoist I would still strive to examine what an authentic faith would look like that promotes change. I think, personally, that there are good in all these religions. But if someone were to try and force any type of religious belief on me without my consent, that would not align with the ideals of secularism, which I think is the correct way of thinking.

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I’m not really sure what you mean here. New Atheism was not a school of thought. The writers involved had different approaches. If you mean that some college professors attached themselves to attacking the low-hanging fruit of biblical literalism, sure. But that’s how popular atheism has worked for decades.

Can you name something genuinely new that the New Atheists added to the discourse? What seemed new was the militant reaction to Islamic terrorism and the idea that a particular religion contained strong strands that sought to destroy the West.

But isn’t this unrealistic and abstracted for reasons I described earlier? A strong faith leads to a strong community of practice. How do you avoid this?

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Other than a focus on terrorism, probably the idea that science is the only way to understand the world around us and that religious people are stupid. Yes, some people have always believed this, but they seemed, ironically, evangelical in their approach with people that I don’t think exist in the honest works of Bruno, Khayyam, Spinoza, Hume, or Nietzsche.

To your point, I believe that you are right. It is about the community that does the sustaining. Taking a step back from a Western mindset where a majority of us are raised as Christians, and we all live in secular societies, the Islamic world, as it stands, is probably the strongest religious community out there. If you were to ask me, “Do you really think that the account of creation in Genesis is actually true and accurate?” I would say it is from an allegorical standpoint. Optimistically, I like to think that even the most ardent Calvinist would believe it to be allegorical. If you were to ask a Muslim, “Do you think Muhammad really flew to heaven on a winged horse?” many devout Muslims would simply not take this as an allegory (according to historical poll data that has been done). I think the Islamic world can have a genuine form of faith, but it should keep in mind the values of secularism. And it is important to note that they don’t need to be “westernized” to accept the possibility of a secular state. Avicenna, Averroes, and Omar Khayyam (the most ardent skeptic of the Islamic Golden Age, I like to think) have a lot to say on how to make this happen.

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This was standard mainstream atheist polemic, perhaps best exemplified by Madalyn Murray O’Hair and related movements, decades before the New Atheist publishing gimmick came along.

Isn’t America already blurring that boundary? Consider the Supreme Court, the influence of evangelical Christianity, and the Christian nationalist drive within MAGA.

Isn’t biblical literalism a significant problem in the United States? Elsewhere, not so much.

I can’t quite determine what you’re arguing for or how it would work. Are you advocating for a more secular society?

One’s faith isn’t just a private mind game or an intellectual abstraction, shut off from the quotidian. It leads to actions and values that affect the world. It necessarily involves taking a stance on culture, politics, and morality. From there emerge communities of practice, traditions, and institutions, which is to say, religions. How do you avoid this? If faith has consequences for how one lives and what one believes ought to be done, how can it remain purely private or detached from communal forms of life?

What you might be arguing for instead is not the end of religion, but the rehabilitation of religion.

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That is kind of where I am going with this. Religious thinking, be it Christian or otherwise, should serve the modern world, and this can only happen if it is divorced from a strict institutionalized dogmatism. Ultimately, I don’t know how it can be detached from the public sphere. Perhaps a balance between, classically understood, the active life and the contemplative life? That balance, as I see it, is secularism.

In my personal opinion, no, unless you look at politicians like Ted Cruz who try and quote the Bible as a means to suggest that “Real Christians are Zionists” or fringe pastors like Steven Anderson who think the Ten Commandments should be made legal law and, if broken, punishable by death, or people like Shirley Phelps Roper and the Westboro Baptists (who I think are all but extinct) that picket funerals of dead soldiers and shout “America is doomed.” Most people of faith, I think, find people like these detestable. People who identify as everyday Calvinists, I like to believe, are rational people who have a brain. Although there are a few who probably do adhere to some form of “Hyper-Calvinism,” as it gets called, as the answer to everything; They are no different from Strict Observance Thomists within Catholicism.

I think this will die out in the next few years. And I think evangelicals are not the problem. It’s certain pastors, known conmen, who have a say in political thought that are the problem.

In the Islamic world, most definitely. If the established political governments in countries like Iran want a society of progress, then they need to find a balance between religious practice and the values of liberalism. But, as of right now, I cannot even fathom a possible solution.

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(God, (peace, love, compassion, mercy, unity,..)) is an n-ad in my system that attempts to capture what God means to believers. This is God as the father figure, giving away patriarchy as the predominant familial structure. A classical theistic interpretation of God as a personal being, who hears your prayers and looks out for you has taken a severe beating. Theism is no longer tenable. It never was but it hadn’t been put through a public litmus test until the 18th century and onwards into the early 20th century.

Now, if some sources are to be believed, God is just the ground of all being. Gone is YHWH who would bring plagues and part seas and what replaces Him is a vague answer to a metaphysical question.

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The irony that strikes me here, is that this is exactly what many a Christian spiritual counsellor would say! But if you tried ‘condition of the heart’ on Richard Dawkins, you would be fixed with that look of withering scorn tinged with sarcasm at which he so excels.

As for Nietszche — i will confess to never having read his essays. I first encountered him via an infamous Time Magazine cover , Is God Dead? in about 1966, which referred to his original proclamation. I thought at the time that the idea of the ‘death of God’ was a preposterous notion, as God is by definition immortal. I now understand that his proclamation was not atheist triumphalism, more of a lament, as Nietszche really understood how momentous the loss of faith would be for culture and the subsequent epidemic of nihilism (‘The Meaning Crisis’). But I was never able to understand or even comprehend his myth of the Übermensch and his ‘will-to-power’ as remedy. As my reading matured, I came to think that one could either admire Plato or Nietszche. (I admire Plato.)

With respect to your passages on the via negativa, I’m completely on board with those. The way I understand it is through the ‘great negation’, similar to the advaita ‘neti, neti’ –not this, not that. The objectifying consciousness is the obstacle to this understanding. this ‘not manifest’ is represented in Mahāyāna Buddhism by the sanskrit letterअ (a-) which is the negative particle, equivalent to the English ‘un-’ As in, uncreated, unmade, unborn, which is subject of an elusive aphorism in the early Buddhist texts:

There is, monks, an unborn — unbecome — unmade — unfabricated. If there were not that unborn — unbecome — unmade — unfabricated, there would not be the case that escape from the born — become — made — fabricated would be discerned. But precisely because there is an unborn — unbecome — unmade — unfabricated, escape from the born — become — made — fabricated is discerned | ref

अ is said to be ‘the Prajñāpāramitā in One Letter’ (read that in a textbook on Buddhism long ago.)

This bears comparison to the ‘wisdom uncreated’ of the Western traditions, although as is well known, Buddhism is not theistic in the sense understood by the Semitic religions. But there’s also something understood in Buddhism, I think, which has no direct counterpart in the Western traditions. This is the ‘parable of the raft’, whereby the teaching of the Buddha is compared to ‘a raft assembled from sticks and twigs’ by which the ‘river of suffering’ is crossed, but which, having served its purpose, is discarded (ref). And I think that’s close in spirit to the kind of understanding you’re trying to point towards, but perhaps also more inimical to the Biblical tradition than to the Buddhist (even though in practical terms, very few really ‘cross the river.’)

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That’s a nice line and, perhaps, the classic, contemporary bifurcation…

Although I choose neither. :wink:

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Yeah but then you do often say you’re not a philosopher :wink:

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Isn’t that a bit modest? Prominent evangelical/fundamentalist Christians in the Trump administration would include Russell Vought, Pete Hegseth, Mike Huckabee, Kristi Noem, Brooke Rollins, Tom Homan, Scott Turner and Ben Carson. On the Supreme Court wouldn’t we include as evangelical/fundamentalist-aligned justices; Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh?

But isn’t this just a values claim?

No one minds the quiet, low-profile faiths. The only real tensions associated with religion come from movements that oppose secularism which is seen as weakening the cultural, moral, or social influence of their faith. Examples include some Hindu, Buddhist and Christian nationalists, Jewish settlers in Israel and Islamic Law Muslims, who all believe that religion should play a central role in public life and national identity. A common theme among religious groups that resist secularism is the belief that religion should help shape society, laws, and public values, rather than being confined to private belief and practice.

What mechanism do you use to determine that a religion should “serve the modern world?”

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An excellent question, I think. ‘Serving the modern world’ surely means ‘capitulating to naturalism’, does it not? And though I’m not one to quote biblical verses, surely ‘no man can serve two masters’ is relevant.

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