Say who everyone is as you go along - Faculty of Philosophy ...

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'Whatever standpoint of philosophy we may adopt today: from every point of view
the erroneousness of the world in which we believe we live is the surest and firmest
thing we can get our eyes on' (BGE para 34 p. 64) (cf also 48 ff.)
What does this mean? The passage bears several mutually consistent interpretations,
but one of them concerns Christianity and another philosophical idealism.
Nietzsche's atheistic perspectivism is partly a sustained philosophical and
historical critique of Christianity. Nietzsche maintains that although the metaphysical
and ethical outlook of the West is essentially Christian, by the mid-nineteenth
century this outlook is in profound crisis. His claim that God is dead is that fewer and
fewer people believe in God. In so far as Christian faith is fundamentally shaken, all
moral values that rely on Christian theological premises are undermined. They lack
justification. It is not so much his own philosophical project to establish a new set of
non-Christian values as to predict and urge the emergence of a new kind of human
being who will freely create non-Christian values of his own: the Übermensch. The
Übermensch will be beyond good and evil: beyond conventional, western, Christian,
good and evil.
Read this way, the world in which we think we live is the Christian world, a world
not only of other people and physical objects but also the existence of God, the
divinity of Christ, the truth of the resurrection, the fall, purgatory, hell and heaven,
the possibility of eternal salvation or eternal damnation. Nietzsche is saying that on
any kind of philosophy contemporary with his own, atheism is true, or, to put it
another way, this entire theistic world picture is false.
It is indeed possible to view nineteenth century European philosophy as
increasingly atheistic. Although the Danish Lutheran philosophical theologian Søren
Kierkegaard is a strongly committed theist, his bleak and pessimistic existentialism
leaves logical and emotional room for doubting the existence of God. If the leap of
faith can be taken it can be not taken. Although there can be no genuine Christian
faith without the logical possibility of doubt, and if God's existence could be proven
using logic there would be no need for faith, Kierkegaard's theism contrasts with that
of his theistic predecessors. Not only the medieval scholastics, Anselm, Aquinas and
Scotus but also the continental 'rationalists' Descartes, Leibniz and, in a way,
Spinoza, thought the existence of God could be proven. They made strenuous efforts
to prove the existence of God by philosophical argument. The arguments against
arguments deployed by Hume in The Treatise of Human Nature and by Kant in The
Critique of Pure Reason seemed to cast doubt on the possibility of proving the
existence of God, and thereby contributed to the nineteenth century atheism
Nietzsche draws our attention to. Nevertheless Kant attempted an 'ethical' proof of
God's existence in his moral philosophy. Kierkegaard does not even attempt that.
Was Hegel a theist? Although in his private life the early nineteenth century
German idealist espoused an orthodox protestantism, it is far from clear that this is
logically consistent with the dialectical progress of Spirit as depicted in his The
Phenomenology of Spirit. It is his considered philosophical view that Spirit, or Geist,