God is dead.

"God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?"

--Nietzsche

"God is dead" is one of the best known but least understood quotes in modern culture. What Nietzsche was lamenting was not the physical death of an imaginary being called God, but the death of an external, absolute basis for morality. This leaves us with the responsibility of coming up with our own morality, and the burden may be too great for ordinary mortals; only an übermensch has the strength to live in a godless world without falling into nihilism.

It sometimes seems to me that Christian apologists like their atheists to be like Nietzsche, Sartre or Camus - tortured souls wracked by existential angst. They can point to this intellectual suffering, contrasting with their own smug certitude, as validation of their fairy tale. What affronts them about the "new atheists" is the latter's scientific objectivity and matter-of-fact rejection of posthumous aerial pie. So what if this life is all that exists, let's make the most of it instead of cowering on our knees, say Dawkins and Hitchens. To which the apologists can only respond with incoherent outraged spluttering.

Anyway, Nietzsche was wrong, and the basis for a morality without God already existed as he wrote his words. Actually, morality is the wrong word - we need to distinguish it from ethics. Morality is something you impose on children because they aren't old enough to work out right and wrong themselves. Morality is external, imposed from above in a power relationship.

On the other hand, why do so many professions have a code of ethics, not a code of morality? Why do we have bioethics, for example, instead of biomorality? Because ethics is something you come up with by yourself or with your peers, and then commit to live up to. As adults we have a responsibility to live ethically, and that includes the onus of sorting out right from wrong depending on the situation. This is especially important as technology exposes us to new problems - stem cell research for example - which no ancient, dusty scroll has anything to say about.

To insist on absolute morality is to attempt to keep the human race infantilized and push the genie of technology back in the bottle. Moreover, absolute faith-based morality is always arbitrary and irrational, and actually stultifies rather than develops the human moral sense. Switch off your brain and blindly swallow a package deal of someone else's ideas of right and wrong, and you inevitably succumb to group-think which dehumanizes everyone outside the group. They are the spawn of Satan, they are doomed to eternal infinite torture in the Lake of Fire, so their suffering in this life is of no account.

Furthermore, adhering blindly to an ancient list of thou-shalt-nots leads to injustice more often than not. A perfect example is the condemnation of the vaccine for human papilloma virus by conservatives. Apparently it's better that women should suffer from cervical cancer than that someone should get the idea that sex is a natural and healthy part of life!

In any case, the idea of God as the one and only arbiter of what is moral leads inevitably to the Euthyphro dilemma. If God commands you to murder or rape a young girl, as he frequently did in the Old Testament, does that make it a moral act? Some Christians say yes. It seems to me that they are the ultimate moral relativists - and very scary people.

So, what is the alternative to absolute morality? How do we avoid arbitrariness? As I hinted at above, while Nietzsche was penning his anguished thoughts on the death of God, Darwin's Origin of Species had already hit the bookstores - and solved an analogous problem in biology. How can the complexity of life arise without an external designer? Who designed the designer, and how do we avoid infinite regress? Darwin swept away these problems by showing that complexity need not be imposed top-down; it can develop from the bottom up.

The same applies to the morality/ethics problem. If there were early human societies where murder was no big deal, they would surely have died out. Ethics evolved, and the ethical system that worked best is the one on which there is general consensus today - the Golden Rule, or various minor variations thereof. Basically it requires us to empathize with our fellow beings and avoid causing them unnecessary suffering. This in turn requires us to use our reason to know what causes suffering and what can alleviate it. Reason and empathy are the twin pillars of a good, solid, working system of ethics that does not depend on any gods or sacred parchments interpreted by priests and shamans.

As technology continues to develop, revealed religious morality will become increasingly irrelevant while reason and empathy become ever more important in deciding how to act ethically. For any intelligent and decent person, this should be an exciting and challenging prospect, not a cause for despair.

God is dead. Rejoice, rejoice!