Enlightenment and the Death of God
Intellectual thought since Nietzsche has found itself one way or another addressing the death of God. Most of this thinking, however, has taken place from an atheistic starting point and has not considered its own presuppositions. It strives to find consistent outworking from these presuppositions and to eradicate the shadow of God carried over from the Enlightenment tradition because of its grounding in a theistic worldview. However, the outcome and implications of thinking after the death of God has been found hideous and many attempts have been made to transcend the absurdity there.
THE DEATH OF GOD
Nietzsche proclaimed in The Gay Science, "God is dead: but given the way men are, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown.-- And we -- we still have to vanquish his shadow, too."[1] The death he witnessed was the tide of atheism that has dominated science and philosophy since his time. This atheism invariably comes from one of two different backgrounds: Enlightenment science and Enlightenment morality.
One of the major products of the Enlightenment was science. As humans were deprived of their previous significance as children of God in the center of the universe, human knowledge was elevated and empirical science became enthroned as the greatest realization of human knowing. As a result, metaphysical knowledge was pushed aside in favor of strict empiricism. God and Christianity were not so much denied as pushed aside, first into deism, which removed him from the world without clashing too much with Western culture, and then all the way into atheism. For the most part, atheism that comes from this perspective has not been bothered b...
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...but it has for the most part been unable to completely escape Enlightenment rationalism with its presupposition that metaphysics can be known objectively and exhaustively by human beings. The pragmatic rationalism of Habermas provides an auspicious postmodern beginning for discussing the problem of God again.
FOOTNOTES
[1] page 191 in our book.
[2] see Psalm 13, Ecclesiastes 8:14, Job 21:7-21.
[3] James says, "we consider blessed those who have persevered" (James. 5:11a, NIV).
[4] The Brothers Karamazov, p. xiii.
WORKS CITED
Nietzsche, Friedrich. On The Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. New York: Vintage/Random House 1989.
Camus, Albert. The Plague. New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1980.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Nausea. New York: New Directions 1969.
Habermas, J. Class handout.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. New York: Bantam 1981.
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