Nietzsche Is Dead

When God created the universe He placed it very carefully into a Blg Black Box. People have always been curious to find out the boundless mysteries of the Black Box but all that they have found are sporadic morsels of iffy speculations. However, God immensely enjoys seeing how humans keep trying to figure out the cryptic contents enmeshed in infinite enigmas that are hidden in the Black Box. The devout debate between believers in God and those who deny His existence provides for Him an amusing permanent show. Criticism of religion and Atheism have a long history. For example, the ancient Greek poet and sophist Diagoras of Melos 26 centuries ago was accused of impiety in Athens and was forced to flee the city. Two millennia later, the Italian Dominican friar Giordano Bruno got into trouble by challenging Catholic dogma. Bruno believed in the plurality of words and proposed that the cosmos was Infinite, that the stars were distant suns surrounded by their own planets and could foster life of their own. Beginning in 1593, the Inquisition tried Bruno with heresy, charging him, among other things, with the denial of the Divinity of Christ and the virginity of Mary. In the winter of 1600, Pope Clement VIII declared Bruno a heretic and he was burned at the stake in the Campo de' Fiori in Rome. In the Age of Enlightenment criticism of religion Intensified. The French Catholic priest Jean Meslier (1664-1729) , for example, rejected even the concept of God, as well as of the soul, of miracles and theology itself. The philosophers of the Enlightenment, among them Diderot, Voltaire and Rousseau, attacked and ridiculed religious dogmas. In the 19th century, Marx claimed that "religion is an opium of the masses"; and Nietzsche declared that "God is dead". The eminent Oxford philosopher Antony Flew must have made God laughing wholeheartedly several times. For much of his career, Flew advocated atheism. He wrote books, lectured and participated in public debates proclaiming that there is no God. He argued that the onus of proof for the existence of God must lie upon the theist. However, at some point he made an about-face and reversed his position. in 2004 Flew said that he became a deist, a believer in God, in divine creation, but not in revelation. Three years later Flew published "There is a God", which he co-authored with Roy Abraham Varghese. Flew‘s conversion from atheism to deism was inspired by his conclusion that inert matter, a presumably mindless pyisical universe cannot produce organisms with powerful intelligence, consciousness with intrinsic ends, or self-replicating capabilities. Furthermore, argues Flew, a reductionist science of mechanical materialism cannot explain abiogenesis, the origin of life. Flew believes, that the biochemical coding of nucleic acids, self-replicating DNA and RNA molecules, the irreducible complexities inherent in the phenomenon of life and in evolution, must involve intelligent design and a divine creation. God perhaps smiles at all this. Perhaps He even laughs wholeheartedly Following with great interest how humans keep trying to figure out the infinite enigmas and indecipherable mysteries that are hidden in the Black Box. I remember, once walking on a New York street, I was amused to see graffiti on a wall that said: "God is dead. Nietzsche." Under it there was another written statement: "Nietzsche is dead. God."