The Death of God: meaning, morality, and the need for the transcendent

Objective morality must be grounded in God. For it is His existence that provides life with ultimate purpose, placing our experience within a transcendent context and imbuing our actions with meaning and moral significance.

“God is dead!” said he. “And we have killed him.”

In his famous short story, "The Madman," German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God. He insisted that the enlightenment, with its relentless skepticism and scientific rigor, had made faith in God impossible and that society would inevitably come to the same conclusion. Despite being an atheist himself, Nietzsche recognized the moral catastrophe that was sure to follow.

He predicted that as ever-increasing numbers of people denied the existence of a Supreme Being, society would be forced to grapple with ideas about the good life and social progress under the shadow of moral relativism. The concept of an objective morality—a morality which exists independent of culture and opinion—would become unjustifiable, and, consequently, good and evil would cease to have universal meaning.

And he was right. As the West has proceeded to abandon God, notions of a universal and unchanging morality have fallen prey to political ideologies that deify man or state and relativistic philosophies that portray truth as nothing but a subjective interpretation of a meaningless reality.

Though in this secular age some claim that a transcendent ethic can be derived from science and philosophy alone, making faith in God superfluous, our recent history and reason’s sound deduction would suggest that objective morality must be grounded in God. For it is His existence that provides life with ultimate purpose, placing our experience within a transcendent context and imbuing our actions with meaning and moral significance.

To understand why God’s existence is essential to objective morality one must consider the connection between purpose, meaning, and morality.

Purpose, Meaning & Morality

Every day we are confronted with an infinite array of facts and choices. However, these do not come preloaded with meaning. Facts and choices become meaningful, or implicative of action, only when perceived in relation to an end, goal, or purpose. No purpose, no meaning.

Purpose creates context, which then serves as an interpretive framework or narrative structure through which the overwhelming universe of facts can be comprehended. This context allows the countless decisions we face to be apportioned value and the life we are living to manifest itself as meaningful. And a meaningful world is necessarily a moral one.

The world of meaning created by a particular purpose is inevitably accompanied by morality—principles and rules that describe a life properly lived. Once actions are seen as meaningful in relation to a purpose, they can then be determined as being right or wrong, moral or immoral, depending on whether they advance you forwards, towards your destination, aim, or ideal, or cause you to retreat backwards, further away from the same.

For example, if your ultimate goal or purpose is to survive, then it becomes moral to secure yourself food no matter what it takes, even if that involves stealing or killing. However, if the purpose of your earthly experience amounts to something more, something that transcends physical needs and biological instincts, then your actions will manifest different moral significance and you will be obligated by conscience to make a different decision. Thus, purpose determines morality.

The fact that meaning and morality are contextual, or contingent on purpose, rather than being inherent or self-evident, forces us to accept either that there is no objective meaning or morality, “only interpretations,” as Nietzsche put it, because purpose is relative, or, that there is objective meaning and morality because a single, underlying, and universal purpose exists.

The status of morality as constructed and relative or objective and absolute depends on whether life’s purpose is arbitrary, such as evolution’s mindless march towards greater environmental suitability, or transcendent, such as mankind’s quest to know and become like the divine. If morality is to be objective, life itself must have a transcendent, objective purpose.

The Need for the Transcendent

God’s existence and His purposeful creation of the universe provide the absolute contextual framework needed for objective morality. If God exists and has brought us into being for an objective, real, and eternal purpose—to know Him and become like Him—then every millisecond of our difficult, confusing, and often cruel lives becomes saturated with infinite meaning and moral consequence.

If God exists, morality becomes a fundamental component of existence, and our decisions gain the power not only to alter our present worldly circumstances but to determine future eternal outcomes. If He exists, we can find hope in life’s powerful and glorious meaning, knowing that through our moral actions we can draw closer to Him and, someday, reach that divine end, that supernal goal, that celestial purpose.

This magnificent sense of meaning and morality, which so characterizes human flourishing, quickly evaporates, however, in God’s absence. Without a transcendent purpose to provide universal context for existence, concepts such as meaning, morality, good, evil—and even truth—must be defined by subjective or arbitrary contexts, making them relative.

The honest atheist must concede, as did Nietzsche, that without God “there are no such things as moral facts;” that without God morality can exist only as an illusion—an evolutionary or cultural construct. If one is to reject the existence of God, he or she must also reject the existence of objective morality.

Ultimately, though his predictions were correct, Nietzsche's diagnoses was wrong. God is not dead due to modern intellect. Science and philosophy never had the power to kill God, let alone replace Him. Belief or disbelief in God has always been a moral, not a rational, decision. Our belief in Him comes down to choice, not evidence or argument.

If we choose to believe in God, we are choosing to believe that life is intrinsically purposeful, truly meaningful, and objectively moral. If, on the other hand, we choose not to believe in God, we are simultaneously choosing to believe that life’s purpose is arbitrary, its meaning baseless, and its morality absurd.

If God is dead, it is only because we have chosen to kill the idea of Him, and if we are to avoid the moral catastrophe of unrestrained relativism and nihilism that Nietzsche foresaw, we must humble ourselves and choose to believe in meaning, morality, and the need for the transcendent.

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