Is God Dead?

On Good Friday, 1966, Time issued its magazine with the cover emblazoned with three words: Is God Dead? What followed was a firestorm; Christians once again felt threatened by an ever more hostile culture, atheists and free-thinkers eagerly awaiting what they just knew would this time be the final victory. But both the question itself and what played out were really nothing new. To be sure, the cover garnered much attention and sparked much debate, but it was really nothing new under the sun. The same question had been raised for centuries, millennia even. The truth is, the question of the death of God was first raised by Lucifer when Eve, in some sense, agreed with him. It seems to me there truly is nothing new under the sun, not even a question about the death of God. Sure enough, thousands of years later, Friedrich Nietzsche’s Madman asks the same ageless question: “Do we not hear the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God? . . . What are these churches now if they are not the tombs and monuments of God?” These powerful and timeless questions reside deep in almost all men’s souls: questions that demand answers, questions that deserve answers. And that is precisely the intent of this weekly column: to look at the evidence available to help answer the timeless question: Is God dead? Whether you are a Christian, a seeker, or a nonbeliever, I welcome you to join us each week to consider the evidence for yourself.

To begin to answer the question, Christian philosopher Charles Taylor may be on to something when he asks a related question: “Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, the year 1500,” while today things are so very different. In the year 1500, there really was no question as to whether you would believe in God. In fact, it was a foregone conclusion that anyone you met on the street would believe in God. Today, obviously, that is not the case. So, what changed? A lot of things changed. However, these things that have changed, as they relate to religion and belief in God, can be grouped into three broad categories. The first category is the natural world, which, in the year 1500, was seen as a grand and constant testimony to the design and purpose of God. Looking into the cosmos, there was no question who made the moon and stars and who constantly kept the planets in perfect orbital motion. However, the scientific revolution that began in the 17th century eventually gave people a scientific theory about how the moon and the stars came into being without the help of God. In that way, science gave people an option of belief.

The second category is that society itself was understood in the year 1500 to exist as being grounded, or anchored, in something higher than the actions of man. God, it seemed, was tightly interwoven into every aspect of society. Man on his own, it was thought, could not have organized themselves into productive societies, and there were no questions about it; God’s hand actively held society together. On the other hand, modern man considers society anchored and grounded in his brilliance and industry, and that man alone is the master of his destiny. That independent and autonomous mindset became especially entrenched as a result of the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century.

The third category of things that have changed since 1500 that impacted belief in God is that people then recognized that they lived in an enchanted world. These three lived categories, working together, pointed people living in the year 1500 inescapably toward God. Taylor argues that the upending of these three modes of “God’s felt presence” in the world has ultimately led us to where we are today. Although the decline in belief in God is an extremely complex issue, I think Taylor is spot on with these three very broad categories of lived and felt changes that have occurred over the last 500 years.

Yet again, the question presents itself: Is God dead? How a person answers that question directly reflects that person’s worldview. Everyone has a worldview. But the worldview of the Christian and the worldview of the atheist are, in many ways, very different from one another. It is so different, according to some, that there can be no meaningful conversation about the existence of God between them. However, there does exist some common ground between the believer and the nonbeliever. Christians believe this common ground exists as a result of all humans being universally created in the image of God (Gen 1:26-27). And it is from this shared common ground that the evidence from history, philosophy, and scientific discovery can be investigated to help answer our ultimate question: Is God dead? However, in truth, the question of whether God is dead hinges upon whether there is, or ever was, a God to begin with. Quite simply, for God to be dead, He must have first existed. And this truly is the question: Does God exist? So, then, it would seem, before us lies a task to answer the question of whether God exists; only having answered that timeless question can we then answer the question of whether we have killed Him.