God Is Dead

Nietzsche's expression 'God is dead' has sometimes, when taken literally, bred an angry response. However, the notion of an eternally entity ceasing to exist is more laughable than inflammatory. Regardless, Nietzsche often makes it clear that the referent of the expression is the decline of efficacy in Europe of Medieval Theology. So, insofar as the latter is primarily constituted by attempts to apply Platonist and Aristotelian resources to Biblical and Koranic texts, one 'autopsy' that Nietzsche does perform exposes the unraveling of that application. For example, while Medieval Theologians use Aristotelian logical techniques to prove the existence of God, Kant uses those same techniques to undermine those proofs. However, there is another 'cause of death' that Nietzsche seems to ignore--the Copernican refutation of Ptolemaic astronomy--one consequence of which is the eviction of God from the Cosmos, i. e. the 'heavens' are no longer divine. In other words, while Biblical religions clearly persist a century after Nietzsche's own death, they no longer rely on the intellectual resources that Medieval Theology entails.