Honest Doubt Part 14 - God's Funeral

This program looks at Nietzsche and Thomas Hardy. Nietzsche of course wrote about the "death of God" and "living in the ruins of God", while Hardy wrote poems "God's Funeral" and "The Oxen" on the same theme.

The idea behind these ideas is that with God we have some objective moral basis, when we are describing morality, we are describing some external, objective fact. But for Nietzsche and Hardy without God this external foundation of values vanishes, and we are left like someone in a cartoon who has walked off a cliff and only just noticed, remaining for a moment suspended in the air before falling to the ground.

This is a useful observation to make, because at last we can see that religious language is much more about values and ways of life, than being about some supernatural method of accessing information about geology or history.

If I was to try to convince someone to adopt a different set of values, to change the way they live their life, the language I would be using would be some sort of religious language - even though how it is articulated today may be very different to how it was expressed two thousand years ago.

If someone decided that the best way to live was to be as selfish as possible, to not worry about anyone else, to only look after number one - how would you try to break them free of that perspective? There is no scientific, empirical way to do it. I'm sure science has a role - for example part of what we say may well be about looking after our environment, and we need science to tell us what is happening to our planet, but science doesn't give us morality.

(Although I believe there is an ethical aspect to science - if we define science as being evidence-based, about logic and reason, about being about to communicate and repeat our findings, and to some degree being able to anticipate the future based on laws and statistics, then this implies a global community working together, sharing, listening, supporting, correcting, explaining. There is something tentative and provisional in scientific knowledge that should keep us humble and willing to listen to others).

So where did Nietzsche look for a new set of values? He looked to the will - but how can the will create value? In his book on "Zarathrustra" the format is of a religious text - and here we can see the true source of value, from the depths of the unconscious, we have to wait on the ancient wisdom to arise and speak - we can't will it, but must wait, contemplate, meditate, listen and let the voice of God be heard once again.