What Is Existentialism Conflict With A Religion's Ideology?

In order to answer the question of whether existentialism is atheistic in nature or not one must first of all answer the question: does it conflict with a religion’s ideology. Throughout the course of my essay I shall be focusing on exploring the compatibility, or lack thereof, of the existential ideas belonging to Jean-Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche, Søren Kierkegaard and Paul Tillich with those of Christianity. To begin with, the definition of existentialism is one that varies from writer to writer and it is not an easy task to agree on one particular description. Having said this, for the purposes of this essay I would like to establish a simple working definition of existentialism as: a philosophical movement, esp. of the 20th century,

What is noteworthy about the way in which he denounces God is that it differs from the typical atheistic argument in which the lack of objective evidence for a God is put forth as a challenge. In asserting that “God is dead” what Nietzsche is in fact conveying is the view that the Christian God cannot serve as the source of objective moral principles. He believes that the western world is over-reliant on religion for its morals and expresses fear that were religion to disappear, the lack of a higher moral authority would create a world where nihilism ruled supreme. Therefore, Nietzsche’s goal was to re-evaluate human values at their core, going deeper than commonly accepted Christian values and culminating in the concept of the “will to power”. The “will to power” is what he saw as the fundamental driving force of all humans, claiming that “A living being wants above all else to release its strength; life itself is the will to power” (Aphorism 13) and that “all animals… strive instinctively for an optimum combination of favourable conditions which allow them to expend all their energy and achieve their maximum feeling of power” (3, Aphorism 7). Nietzsche advocates that only after abandoning God can people begin to realize the worth of the material world and work towards revaluating the values which can be considered as good and

Sartre’s existential philosophy is totally incompatible with Christianity as the assertion “existence precedes essence” contradicts the possibility of a God. Sartre claims that "man is nothing other than what he makes of himself” (p.20). What he means by this is that since there is no God to provide man with an essence, man must rely on himself and the free choices he makes to shape an essence unique to him. The possession of free will is in Sartre’s opinion definitive proof that God doesn’t exist, for if an omnipotent God existed the essence bestowed upon us by him would define who we are and the decisions we make. In a further argument made in Being and Nothingness Sartre states