We’ve all heard Nietzsche’s quote: “God is dead.” A realization that God, the Divine, and organized religion were no longer the structuring force behind humanity’s sense of purpose.
One could be tempted to ask, when did God die? Was it when Copernicus showed that the Sun did not revolve around the Earth? Was it when Newton gave a deterministic and universal description of matter and motion that did not require any supernatural force to explain the world we observe? Was it when Darwin explained how extremely complex living beings could emerge from an optimization process that only requires trait inheritance, random variation, and selective pressure?
Instead, the more relevant question is, where do we go from here? If we can’t rely upon God anymore, and if meaning and purpose are nowhere to be found in our naturalistic scientific explanations of how the world works, how are we to fill in the void that is left?