As the purpose of human life became uncertain outside the purposeful structure of monotheistic thought and the meaningful world it proposed, we would experience an existentially devastating rise in nihilism, Nietzsche believed. Alternatively, he suggested, people would turn to identification with rigid, totalitarian ideology: the substitute of human ideas for the transcendent Father of All Creation. The doubt that undermines and the certainty that crushes: Nietzsche’s prognostication for the two alternatives that would arise in the aftermath of the death of God.
