Nietzsche said people will, would rather believe in nothingness than have nothing to believe in. They will take up destructive purposes. They will be harmful. There will be, uh, blood in the streets rather than have no belief at all. We are a belief-hungry species, and we need something.
And science, the very thing that we have seen Descartes, Hume, and Kant dedicate themselves to founding to, to, to justifying, to explaining, to understanding, has taken that away from us. And this general phenomenon is what Nietzsche calls the death of God. "Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the marketplace, 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. 'Is he hiding? Is he afraid of us?
Has he gone on a journey? 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 backwards, 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? God is dead. God remains dead.
And we have killed him. There has never been a greater deed. And whoever's 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. '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 ti- 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 the most distant stars, and yet they have done it themselves.'" Very, very famous passage.
And notice some of the phrasing that Nietzsche uses. Uh, who gave us a sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? We've unchained this earth from its sun. Is there any up or down? He is talking about raindrops.
He's talking about the lack of orientation. He's talking about a complete... the universe becoming completely blank, being an inhospitable environment. That it's just a physical location and not home anymore. And this is the trauma that he sees coming. This is the catastrophe that he thinks we are plunging headlong towards and that we have no idea how to handle.
We've had one way for millennia to give our lives meaning, and this way is not working anymore. This way has been hacked apart by science. We thought, well, it's an eternal being. It's an omnipotent God who is giving us meaning. It's, it's, a, a, a, a being that cannot ever go away.
That's as reliable as it can be. Until belief in that being falters. And it turns out we are the turkey and Thanksgiving has come. Notice in the story something that people don't, don't us- usually notice. We think that the people that the madman is speaking to are pearl-clutching religious people who are horrified at what he's saying, but that's not the case at all.
They're atheists. They don't believe in God either. The difference is they make light of it. They joke about it. What the, what the madman knows that they don't isn't that there is no God.
They all agree on that. What the madman knows is the gravity of the situation, that this is an event that splits history in two. There is before and after That this fundamentally changes everything. Now, Nietzsche's not writing this to, to, to, to scare us or depress us, nor is he creating this. Who killed God?
You and I. God is no longer... I- I... This is an analogy. He's not saying there was a deity and now he has croaked.
That's silly. What he's saying is that for a long, long time, religion sustained us as a civilization. Religion structured our lives. It told us who and what we were, where we were going, what things meant, why anything was important. That's what's gone.
That's what has melted and, and dripped away, leaving nothing in its place. And again, humans would rather believe in nothingness than have nothing to believe. So what Nietzsche wants to do is show us that this is happening, he's not making it happen, and help give us a way through it. So the death of God is not a statement about the change in the s- in the status of the deity, but in, of our belief in the deity. Nietzsche thinks there never has been a God, of course.
It, it, it, it, it's been us all along. It's always been our hand up the, the s- great sock puppet in the sky, uh, all this time. Uh, and that itself could be the key to our survival of this phase.