Friedrich Nietzsche as A Freewill Advocate: Logical Derivations from the Concept of the “Death of God”

The paper is a response to the growing level of docility, laziness, despondency and superstition that arise from the religious determinist’s belief in a divinely pre-programmed, pre-destined and God foreknown world. The problem associated with this belief system is that it does not allow human beings to see the need to rise in free human-saving actions in the face of difficulties, because it is held that the future and the end of every entity has been pre-destined by God. Hence, every human purport for freedom is a vacuous and an empty action already programmed by God. Although many scholars have written on the idea of the “death of God” in Nietzsche, none of them has been able to demonstrate that it was a reaction to religious determinism. The paper, therefore, demonstrates that Nietzsche’s idea of the “death of God” was Nietzsche’s way of opposing the idea of religious determinism. The paper adequately shows that the “death of God” in Nietzsche is a pragmatic instrument for the promotion of human freedom, which has been denied by the religious determinist. In place of God, Nietzsche offers the superman/overman as the goal of the evolution of human consciousness, a being with the capacity to overcome the decadence of existence. In adopting the position of Nietzsche as a solution to the limitations of religious determinism, the paper concluded that, Nietzsche did not advocate for anarchy but some sort of ‘unity of existential values’ in the attainment of the superman/overman by all as an existential objective.