The Three-Letter Word That We Dare Not Speak : God: In modern life, we have faith in cars and in surgeons and find meaning in movies.
“God is dead,” Nietzsche wrote 100 years ago. The profound import of this simple and yet deeply disturbing statement lies in its repeated demonstrability. Nietzsche may have killed God, but we in the late 20th Century have buried him 6 feet under without any hope of resurrection. God’s death is no longer a metaphysical possibility, but rather the reality of our age, when science and technology have become our defining teleology.
God is no longer an animating force in our hearts. He is obsolete. We the moderns with all of our sophistication have no need for him. Today, in our world of computers and fax machines, God has become an anachronism. We no longer need God to answer the worn-out interrogatives of our existence, of our place in the universe; we have hope and faith in quantum mechanics and the unifying theory. We no longer need God to intervene on our behalf; we have sophisticated technology. We no longer need God to console and comfort us; we have modern psychology. We no longer need to pray and worship God; we have other creations for that. We no longer fear God; we have laser-guided nuclear bombs that can do far more damage than a 40-day flood.
The objects of our faith today are science and technology. We have faith in our cars, we have faith in the surgeon’s hands, we have faith in probability. The Kierkegaardian leap is no longer meaningful. Ours is a different kind of leap; a leap that embraces the world. We the moderns of the late-20th Century accept without question the fruits of science; we accept without question the inevitability of our own progress. The old walls that separated the sacred from the profane are crumbling.
There are some who naively cling to the nostalgic memory of God. The average churchgoer takes a few hours out of the week to experience the sacred; to experience God. But the rest of the time, he is immersed in a society that no longer acknowledges God as an omniscient and omnipotent force to be loved and worshiped.
Yet this person, who continues to accept God as his savior, is a willing participant in the very society responsible for killing God. This person may accept certain scientific conclusions that directly contradict what she hears every Sunday. He may seek the services of a psychologist to adjust his emotional state. She may drive a car, use a phone, work on a computer, watch television. The only problem is that his everyday world is devoid of God. In time past, God was not only a living force in people’s hearts, but also part of our everyday world. We were not just reminded of him on Sunday, we breathed him in the air. God was part of our language, part of our life.
Today, we are too sophisticated for God. We can stand on our own; we are prepared and ready to choose and define our own existence. Nietzsche did not proclaim the death of God with eager delight; he uttered the words with profound anguish and despair. Today, the second death of God is accepted as a matter of fact. But only fools could believe that we can stand alone in a universe that is the result of blind chance.
In the late 20th Century, human beings are reduced to numbers. It is an age of fleeting images and instant information, of self-help cults and pop psychology, of loneliness and existential Angst. This is what we have to accept as the price for our final sin against God. The death of God means that we have to confront the absurdity of our own existence head-on. Science has unveiled all our mystery, dissected us under a microscope and left us to live our lives in naked isolation.
God, with all his theoretical complications, gave us morality, decency and hope. He gave us something permanent to hold on to. We used to find shelter and meaning in God. Today, we find meaning and shelter in physical sensation; we escape our lives through television, the movies, music, sex and drugs. We seem to need more and different sensations to feel anything at all. We have killed God, all of us together. Our hands are stained with the blood of our father. May he rest in peace.
