Friedrich Nietzsche on Critiques

Friedrich Nietzsche

The Christian conception of God⁠—God as god of the sick, God as a spider, God as spirit⁠—is one of the most corrupt conceptions of the divine ever attained on earth. It may even represent the low-water mark in the descending development of divine types. God degenerated into a contradiction of life, instead of being its transfiguration and eternal Yes! God as the declaration of war against life, against nature, against the will to live! God⁠—the formula for every slander against ‘this world’, for every lie about the ‘beyond’! God the deification of nothingness, the will to nothingness pronounced holy!

The Portable Nietzsche, pages 585-586, Walter Kaufmann (editor/translator), New York: Viking Press, 1954

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I am not advocating some sort of narrowly scientistic way of thinking. But the very least that any honest quest for truth must have in setting out to explain such monstrosities of improbability as a rainforest, a coral reef, or a universe is a crane and not a skyhook. The crane doesn’t have to be natural selection. Admittedly, nobody has ever thought of a better one. But there could be others yet to be discovered . . . It may even be a superhuman designer—but, if so, it will almost certainly not be a designer who just popped into existence, or who always existed. If (which I don’t believe for a moment) our universe was designed, and a fortiori if the designer reads our thoughts and hands out omniscient advice, forgiveness and redemption, the designer himself must be the end product of some kind of cumulative escalator or crane, perhaps a version of Darwinism in another universe.

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I long to accomplish a great and noble task; but it is my chief duty and joy to accomplish humble tasks as though they were great and noble. . . The world is moved along, not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker.

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I’m not an atheist. I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written.