Nietzsche Warned Us What Would Replace God
What rushes in to fill the void once the West stops believing in God?
“God is dead! And we have killed him!”
“But how have we done it?”
“How were we able to drink up the sea?”
“Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the whole horizon?”
“What did we do when we loosened this earth from its sun?”
“Whither does it now move? Whither do we move? Away from all suns?”
“Do we not dash on unceasingly? Backwards, sideways, forwards, in all directions? Is there still an above and below?”
“Do we not stray, as through infinite nothingness? Does not empty space breathe upon us? Has it not become colder?”
Friedrich Nietzsche, a fierce critic of Christianity, was under no illusions as to what it meant for a culture to turn away from God. When he wrote those lines, it wasn’t a celebration like many believe. He meant it as a warning, a cultural report that this religion would no longer organize Western life.
Loosening the earth from its sun means losing the fixed point every value was measured against. Now everything is up in the air. You see it every time someone says “your truth, my truth,” or that morality is subjective. And when the madman in Nietzsche’s passage asks, “Is there still an above and below?” he’s pointing to the loss of ranking any of those values. Without the highest good, there is no longer any higher or lower. You prefer pleasure, I prefer discipline, and well, who is worthy of judging which is better?
To dispense with God is to dispense with good and evil, justice, even truth.
Nietzsche understood that to give up the Christian faith is to pull the right to Christian morality out from under your own feet. In Tom Holland’s enlightening book Dominion, the historian traces the moral instincts the secular West views as self-evident, such as human dignity, care for the weak, and the evil of slavery, back to their roots in Christian theology. When the belief dies, you don’t get to keep the values.
This rejection creates a vacuum of meaning, which will be filled by other forces. Nietzsche feared these would be hedonism, nihilism, and unchecked state power.
Kierkegaard, a fellow existentialist philosopher but believer in Christ, called much of what we think of today as “mental health problems,” the despair that doesn’t know itself. People fill that void of meaning with fame, sex, money, and power, everything we consider “success,” and the modern world offers so many distractions that they aren’t even aware they’re in despair. Rip those creature comforts away and the anxiety immediately sets in.
But a vacuum of meaning is not the only vacuum created. If God is the ultimate source of authority, then to kill him is to create a power vacuum as well, one the state is happy to fill. “Shall we not ourselves have to become gods merely to seem worthy of it?” Religion placed the state below God. Get rid of God and the state becomes the highest authority. In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche wrote that the state lies when it says, “I, the state, am the people.” He called socialism despotism’s younger brother nearly 40 years before the Bolshevik Revolution. In Canada, with programs like MAID, the government is now becoming the arbiter of when a life is deemed valuable and when it is okay to end that life.
This is the battle of our time. If you’re wondering why people are losing their minds and can no longer agree on basic things, it is this issue. It is the death of God.
In episode nine of The Construct, I analyze this passage, what it means, and why it’s one of the most important philosophical observations of our time. I also get into slave morality, C.S. Lewis’s men without chests, Carl Jung on the state taking the place of God, and whether morality is something we create or discover.
If you’d like to hear the full conversation, you can watch the episode here:
You can also find episode seven of The Construct on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, X, or Rumble.
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