Nietzsche was right: God is dead

For that coroner to divinity, God wasn’t a person whose life had come to an end. He was dead because clever people could no longer believe in him.

Nietzsche was absolutely right: scientific advances, social and political developments, new eudemonic philosophy with man as its fulcrum had all conspired to vindicate his conclusion – and it’s even truer now than it was then.

So yes, clever people can no longer believe in God. However, supremely intelligent people, serious thinkers, can’t function at any level above quotidian concerns without faith in a supreme being.

The tragedy of Nietzsche’s time, and even more of ours, is that many brilliant people who would otherwise be lavishly equipped to make the next step into supreme intelligence are held back by their atheism.

I can’t blame them, especially since some of them are among my closest friends. A man can no more be blamed for having no faith than for having no musical gift. For faith is a gift too, in the strict sense of something presented by an outside donor.

This is a blanket observation, one that applies equally to the lowliest of peasants, the loftiest of intellectuals and everyone in between. However, though none of the atheists can be blamed, some can be pitied.

These are clever people who really do try to understand the world, not just to survive in it comfortably. If they’re serious in that effort, sooner or later they’ll reach an impassable barrier with a sign saying ‘thus far but no farther’.

This isn’t to say that an equally intelligent believer will have no limit to his intellectual reach. He will, but for him it’ll appear farther down the road.

An atheist, however high off the scale his IQ, is by definition deficient in his ability to ask the next question. To paraphrase Wittgenstein, he may get as far as wondering how the world is – but not that it is, and especially not why it is.

Such questions aren’t answered, nor indeed asked, by natural science, politics, sociology, economics or double-entry accounting. The questions of being and existence are the domain of metaphysical philosophy and, ultimately, the highest of all sciences, theology.

This is a matter of fact, not opinion, and any intelligent atheist will accept it. The admission would be easy for him: he has implicitly agreed to apply dampeners to his thought and doesn’t see that as a problem.

He’ll usually just say that such things are so far beyond human understanding (meaning his understanding of course) that one might as well not bother. Being able to figure out today’s trials and tribulations is both hard enough and rewarding enough. Life’s too short.

That’s where he does a disservice not only to himself, but, if he has an audience, which some of my brilliant friends do, also to others. For, without understanding that, rather than being short, life is eternal, it’s impossible to solve even the simple problems he has set out to solve.

In my book The Crisis Behind Our Crisis, I analysed the far-ranging effects of atheism on economic behaviour, specifically the kind of behaviour that had caused the 2008 crisis – or rather the crisis that had come to the fore in 2008, the year in which it neither began nor ended.

It takes a book, rather than an article, to cover such issues adequately – and even a longer book to expand beyond economics into such areas as law, education, crime, social interactions, public morality and so on.

All such areas are beset with problems, and any ultimate solution can only come from an approach springing from fundamental philosophical verities. Intelligent atheists know this, and even a cursory investigation makes them realise that, in the West, such verities can only be found in Christianity.

The investigation doesn’t have to be more than cursory because ample empirical data, their ersatz deity, are in plain view.

Any honest observer will know that every attempt to replace Christianity with a secular alternative has failed miserably and catastrophically. The twentieth century, the first atheist one from beginning to end, spilled more blood than all the prior centuries combined – and it doesn’t take a crystal ball to predict that the worst may yet come.

That’s why Douglas Murray most recently and many brighter atheists before him have concluded that a return to Christianity is necessary to anchor reality and prevent it from being cast adrift.

At this point, I stop pitying atheists and start blaming them. For they effectively return to Nietzsche, with themselves cast in the role of der Übermensch.

Yes, they imply, of course God is dead, but only for us extremely or, as in Murray’s case, moderately clever people. We know better than to believe in all that mythical nonsense. However, our better knowledge can’t keep hoi polloi in check, maintaining social order, stability and liberty.

The masses need to be kept on the straight and narrow, for if they’re allowed to deviate, they may well threaten the existence of the clever people who know better. And centuries of trial and error have shown that only Christianity can steer the human herd into the right avenue.

I’ve stripped this kind of thinking to its essentials the better to show its hubristic, megalomaniac dishonesty.

After all, these people are atheists. Hence they believe that Christianity is false. To them it’s a lie, but a socially useful one, the kind they, clever people who know better, can use to build a successful society.

Well, I’ve got news for them: if a society is built on a lie, it won’t stay successful for long. And conversely, if it stays successful for long, it’s built on truth.

Christianity can only deliver a lasting social success if it’s true. And because it’s true, it did indeed deliver such success for centuries. Things only went terminally awry when God died – that is, when clever people could no longer accept the truth of Christianity.

Thus these neo-Nietzschean atheists can’t solve the problem for the simple reason that they themselves are the problem.

They should really stay off the subject of God altogether and concentrate instead on social commentary or, as in Murray’s case, the dangers of Islamic homophobia. They just might do some good that way.