Nietzsche's "God is dead"

In Section 125 of The Gay Science (Die froehliche Wissenschaft), published in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche tells a short parable. A madman lights a lantern in the bright morning and runs into the marketplace, crying that he is looking for God. The crowd, many of whom do not believe in God, laugh and ask if he is lost or has emigrated. He stares at them and says that we have killed him, you and I. He asks how we could drink up the sea, wipe away the horizon, or unchain the earth from its sun. He says God is dead and remains dead, and we have killed him, the holiest and mightiest being the world has had, and no water can wash the blood off us. At last the madman throws down his lantern and says he has come too early, that the deed is still farther from the people than the farthest stars, though they have done it themselves.¹²

Nietzsche (1844 to 1900), a former professor of classics at Basel, was not cheering for atheism here. Those who laugh are unbelievers who do not see what follows. The madman means that the Christian God has ceased to be believable in modern Europe, given the effects of science, the Enlightenment and historical criticism, and that all the values that rested on that belief, from morality to meaning, are now without foundation. The danger is nihilism, the sense that nothing matters. A first hint appears earlier in the book, in Section 108, where Nietzsche says that God is dead but that caves may show his shadow for thousands of years. The challenge, which Nietzsche took on in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, is for humanity to create new values.¹²³

The phrase became one of the most quoted in modern thought. In 1966, Time magazine ran a cover asking Is God Dead? as theologians debated a death-of-God theology.²