Nietzsche Is Dead Poem by Paul Hartal

When God created the universe
He placed it very carefully into a Blg Black Box.
People have always been curious to find out
the boundless mysteries of the Black Box
but all that they have found
are sporadic morsels of iffy speculations.
However, God immensely enjoys seeing
how humans keep trying to figure out
the cryptic contents enmeshed
in infinite enigmas that are hidden
in the Black Box.
 
The devout debate between believers in God
and those who deny His existence provides
for Him an amusing permanent show.
 
Criticism of religion and Atheism
have a long history. For example,
the ancient Greek poet and sophist Diagoras
of Melos 26 centuries ago was accused of impiety
in Athens and was forced to flee the city.
 
Two millennia later, the Italian Dominican friar
Giordano Bruno got into trouble by challenging
Catholic dogma.  Bruno believed in the plurality
of words and proposed that the cosmos was
Infinite, that the stars were distant suns
surrounded by their own planets and could
foster life of their own. Beginning in 1593,
the Inquisition tried Bruno with heresy,
charging him, among other things, with the denial
of the Divinity of Christ and the virginity of Mary.
In the winter of 1600, Pope Clement VIII
declared Bruno a heretic and he was burned
at the stake in the Campo de' Fiori in Rome.   
 
In the Age of Enlightenment criticism of religion
Intensified. The French Catholic priest
Jean Meslier (1664-1729) , for example, rejected
even  the concept of God, as well as of the soul,
of miracles and theology itself.
 
The philosophers of the Enlightenment,
among them Diderot, Voltaire and Rousseau,
attacked and ridiculed religious dogmas.
 
In the 19th century, Marx claimed that "religion
is an opium  of the masses";
and Nietzsche declared that "God is dead".
 
The eminent Oxford philosopher Antony Flew
must have made God laughing wholeheartedly
several times. For much of his career,
Flew advocated atheism. He wrote books,
lectured and participated in public debates
proclaiming that there is no God.
He argued that the onus
of proof for the existence of God must lie upon
the theist. However, at some point he made
an about-face and reversed his position.
 
in 2004 Flew said
that he became a deist, a believer in God,
in divine creation, but not in revelation.
Three years later Flew published
"There is a God", which he co-authored
with Roy Abraham Varghese.
Flew‘s conversion from atheism to deism
was inspired by his conclusion
that inert matter, a presumably mindless
pyisical universe cannot produce
organisms with powerful intelligence,
consciousness with intrinsic ends,
or self-replicating capabilities.
 
Furthermore, argues Flew,
a reductionist science of
mechanical materialism cannot explain
abiogenesis, the origin of life.
Flew believes, that the biochemical
coding of nucleic acids,
self-replicating DNA and RNA molecules,
the irreducible complexities
inherent in the phenomenon of life
and in evolution, must involve
intelligent design and a divine creation.
God perhaps smiles at all this.
Perhaps He even laughs wholeheartedly
Following with great interest how humans
keep trying to figure out the infinite enigmas
and indecipherable mysteries that are hidden
in the Black Box.
 
I remember, once walking
on a New York street, I was amused to see
graffiti on a wall that said:
"God is dead. Nietzsche."
 
Under it there was another written statement:
"Nietzsche is dead. God."