Nietzsche Was Right!

Friedrich Nietzsche, the famous atheistic German philosopher, is best remembered for his declaration: “God is dead.” Now, just because he was an atheist and came to some wrong conclusions, that doesn’t mean that everything he said was untrue. In fact, Nietzsche understood the moral issues of his day (the latter half of the 1800s) in a way that many in our society don’t grasp today—but need to!

I was watching a TV news program just before sitting down to write this article. A representative of the group American Atheists was opposing the choice of Pastor Rick Warren by President-elect Barack Obama to give the inauguration prayer. It then hit me: many Americans are oblivious to the fact that atheists—with a fervent belief there is no God—are aggressively trying to impose that belief on the culture.

We’ve already seen Nativity displays, Ten Commandments displays, crosses, and other important Christian symbols removed from public places. And did you notice a few weeks ago that more and more people were deleting the name “Christ” from Christmas, largely turning it into a secular/pagan “holiday”?

Sadly, millions of people have been brainwashed to believe that by deleting Christian symbols from society, the culture is becoming more “neutral.” I would argue that there is no such thing as “neutrality.” Matthew 12:30 clearly states: “He who is not with Me is against Me, and he who does not gather with Me scatters abroad.”

Why did atheists protest against a Christian pastor offering the prayer at a presidential inauguration? Why did they not want the name of Jesus used in that prayer? Well, it’s because the religion of the atheists is atheism. They want all references to the God of the Bible edited out of the culture, because they want their anti-God religion to be imposed instead.

What will be the ultimate outcome if atheists are successful? Here is where I believe atheist Nietzsche was right when he wrote the following to a person more than a hundred years ago:

. . . When one gives up Christian belief one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality. . . . Christianity is a system, a consistently thought out and complete view of things. If one breaks out of it a fundamental idea, the belief in God, one thereby breaks the whole thing to pieces: one has nothing of any consequence left in one’s hands.

Christianity presupposes that man does not know, cannot know what is good for him and what (is) evil: he believes in God, who alone knows. Christian morality is a command: its origin is transcendent; it is beyond all criticism, all right to criticism; it has truth only if God is truth—it stands and falls with the belief in God . . . .”1

Nietzsche was right! Indeed, the more this culture gets rid of the Christian God, the more we will see people depriving themselves “of the right to Christian morality.”

In this month (Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday) in which Darwin’s ideas have been promoted more than ever, and as his famous book On the Origin of Species has its 150th anniversary also this year, we need to understand that these celebrations by humanists are a part of getting “rid of the Christian God” from the culture. What will be the ultimate end for a culture that does this? Here’s a warning from the Book of Judges:

In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes (Judges 21:25).

That is what is happening in America right now. That is why a ministry like Answers in Genesis and its Creation Museum are needed more urgently than ever—to call the church and culture back to the authority of the Word of God, which is the foundation for Christian morality.

So many people still want to live by Christian morality, but they can’t have Christian morality without Christianity. And they can’t have Christianity without the Bible. And they can’t have the Bible without the literal history of Genesis chapters 1–11, which provides the foundation of all biblical doctrine—plus Christian morality.