The Death of God

….Framing him jealous, fierce, at first,
We gave him justice as the ages rolled,
Will to bless those by circumstance accurst,
And long suffering, and mercies manifold.

‘And, tricked by our own early dream
And need of solace. We grew self-deceived,
Our making soon our maker did we deem,
And what we had imagined we believed.

‘Till, in Time’s stayless stealthy swing,
Uncompromising rude reality
Mangled the Monarch of our fashioning,
Who quavered, sank; and now has ceased to be…’

(‘God’s Funeral’, Hardy, Collected Poems, 307.)

Thomas Hardy

In his famous poem God’s Funeral, Thomas Hardy, together with many other Western Europeans in the last 100-150 years, having converted from Christianity to intellectual scholarship, tells us that the so called God that we ourselves fashioned for our own selfish needs, is no longer alive. It has died a regrettable death. This God or the objective truth, he reminds us, is the projection of our own thoughts. Now that it is no longer required, it can be conveniently discarded. Is God, therefore, dead?

Let us investigate?

Gibbon and Hume

Gibbon and Hume together with Voltaire argued, from a Deist point of view, that although the physical and moral laws in the universe are the creation of the Deity, this Godhead, however, does not choose to intervene in it. Like the Master Clock-maker, he sets the machine in motion and then allows it to work of its own accord. Where does that place God?

(Hume, Dialogues, ed. Kemp Smith)

Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant, having rejected the three conventional proofs of ontology (God is a necessary truth), cosmology (God is the cause) and Argument by Design (God is the Master Architect), arrived at two possible ways of understanding God: The immanentist for which God is an inner reality and the Transcendental, for which God is an objective reality. But, he argues, if God is no more than something or some feeling within ourselves, then he has no objective reality. There must be something outside ourselves, beyond the empirical world. In the absence of such knowledge, however, all we can go by, he argues, is what he calls the categorical imperative, this innate moral duty or sense of right and wrong, over and above rational explanations. Is this the only way of proving the existence of God. Is conventional God, therefore, dead?

(Kant Selections, ed. Greene, 372)

Thomas Carlyle

The world of Nature, he argues, is the Phantasy of Himself; this world is the multiplex Image of his own Dream. Carlyle argued that the tragedy of the nineteenth century was that religion, which is basic to human character, was directed, on the one hand to soul-destroying gods of mammon and Commerce, and on the other to incredible, outworn creeds. Somewhere in the husk of these creeds was something called Faith which could be cherished in the age of unbelief.

Does a dead faith amount to a dead God?