God is dead

"God is dead" (German: Gott ist totⓘ; also known as the death of God) is a statement made by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. The first instance of this statement in Nietzsche's writings is in his 1882 The Gay Science, where it appears three times. The phrase also appears at the beginning of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

This article is about the philosophical concept described by Nietzsche. For other uses, see God is dead (disambiguation).

The meaning of this statement is that since, as Nietzsche says, "the belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable", everything that was "built upon this faith, propped up by it, grown into it", including "the whole [...] European morality", is bound to "collapse".

Other philosophers had previously discussed the concept, including Philipp Mainländer and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. The phrase is also discussed in the Death of God theology.

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