The Second God

God is not a being. This is your beginning point. If this is so, then atheism rather than the opposite of theism, would be its highest expression. Or perhaps we need to speak of two kinds of atheism. One is an ontological atheism that is repeated in an age when God is dead. But the God that dies here is the God of being, a God that is no longer required by science and philosophy, and whose death, therefore, is only the end of a certain way of doing science and philosophy that famously no longer requires this hypothesis (a God that died in the pages of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and certainly did not need Dawkins et al. to kill it off). What would the other atheism be? It would be a moral atheism, atheism redoubled and intensified. It would be more than the assertion that we do not need God for science and philosophy, but that we do not need God for our values either. It is this God that is murdered for the second time by Nietzsche, and this murder is far more frightening and unsettling than the rather tame euthanasia of the God of science and philosophy. What happens when the second God dies? Do we know what this means?

Atheism

Atheism and theism are not opposed to one another but belong together. Each theism has its own atheism, and every atheism its own theism.

Atheism of the Word

There are three ways I can see of speaking about God: as a being, an idea or a word. That there are very important distinctions and differences within and not just between these ways of speaking goes without saying. Think of what Aquinas does with Aristotle's proofs of the existence of God, for example, where he speaks of God in terms of existence rather than essence, even though He is still a being.  Moreover, there are always minor writers within them  (all the mystical traditions within the religions, to name but one type of minor writing)  that cut across these traditions both conceptually and historically. What I am particularly interested in is the third way of speaking about God, because it is closest to my problem. What if God were only a word and neither a being nor an idea? In one sense one would say that this is the sign of the disappearance of God, but in an other,  perhaps not. Hasn't religious belief, or a least a certain kind, only every related to God as a word (a mysterious magical one), and not as a being or an idea? It is only philosophy that has entertained the latter definitions and its atheism has been maintained by their destruction. Is there an atheism of the word? My supposition is maybe not.

The History of God

You imagine writing a history of God. Not a history of religion, nor even a mythical person (if you can speak like that), but of a philosophical concept. You see this history as the story of a disappearance. The more philosophical, the more rational, the concept of God becomes, the more God actually vanishes to become finally nothing more than a thin vapour and then nothing. The truth of the philosophical concept of God is atheism. You think then that Nietzsche's famous 'Death of God' is not outside this history but its proper culmination. And yet, after all this, when this history comes to an end, something remains. It is this remainder that interests you. Nonetheless, it still seems absurd that anyone would write about this now. What possible reason would there be to write a philosophy of religion today? Your only reply is that it is in the face of the question of God that you feel the most stupid and inadequate. Your own atheism is a paltry thing in comparison.