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"God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him," illuminates the essence of the dramatic challenge from German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche to the very foundations of traditional morality and Christianity. For Nietzsche man had, for too long, rested on the maxims of Christian morality, and thus, championed the proposition that it was time to be disburdened of the constraints of Christianity's ethical principles and endeavoured to redefine mankind's moral values. As Nietzsche himself poignantly questions "To admit a belief merely because it is a custom - but that means to be dishonest, cowardly, lazy! And so could dishonesty, cowardice and laziness be the preconditions for morality?" And thus, it was Nietzsche's desire to rid mankind of the plague of intellectual stagnation. For Nietzsche, what was fundamental to one's existence was health, creativity and the realities of the physical world, as opposed to the ideals that, heretofore, had been dictated from a world beyond. It is the investigation of Nietzsche's "God is dead" challenge that will form the basis for this examination and will provide the stimulus for ascertaining the validity, ramifications and effectiveness of this seemingly daunting proclamation.

Nietzsche's striking challenge was aimed directly at the established traditions of morality, and at its heart was the idea that if one was to remove the metaphysical foundation for the Christian belief system, namely the existence of God, then little else preserved significance. As Nietzsche presupposes that God is dead, he consequently calls into question the principal rationale for the Christian ideology and subsequently challenges the meaning of Christian lives. Human beings, through the belief and acceptance of God, had been afforded meaning in their lives and in the universe they inhabited and for Nietzsche this meaning was based on torpid idolatry. For Nietzsche, the worship of God only superficially satisfied the fundamental human need for the transcendence of one's own finite, corporeal state, as he thought the logic behind the belief in God was fundamentally insubstantial. Nietzsche's claim was that the death of God is a way of saying that humans will no longer be able to believe in any such cosmic order since Christians themselves can longer identify it. Nietzsche believed that the non-existence, or the death of god, will engender not only the refutation of a belief in a cosmic or physical order but also to a rejection of

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