GOD God, nor can it be a component of that concept that-there-is-only-oneGod If in fact there is one and only one God, that is a property, not of God, but of the concept God Frege’s argument was taken by many later philosophers—including Bertrand Russell—as giving the death-blow to the ontological argument But the matter is not so simple Frege has not shown that it is never possible to make an inference, as the ontological argument does, from the components of a concept to its properties Frege himself infers from the components of the concept equilateral right-angled triangle that it has the property of possessing the number zero Perhaps, one may argue, there may also be cases where one can infer from the component characteristics of a concept to existence or to uniqueness Moreover, if, as some later logicians have done, one is prepared to allow into one’s ontology not only actual but also possible objects, then existence is indeed a property of objects: it is precisely what makes some of them actual and not possible The Death of God and the Survival of Religion Two years before Frege published his criticism of the ontological argument, Nietzsche had announced in The Gay Science that God was dead, that belief in the Christian God had become incredible He did so, however, in the tones not of a philosopher, but of an evangelist; he was not offering arguments against a thesis, but proclaiming the greatest of good news ‘At last the horizon lies free before us, even granted that it is not bright; at least, the sea, our sea lies open before us.’ The Christian God, with his commands and prohibitions, had been hitherto the greatest obstacle to the fullness of human life Now that he is dead we are free to express our will to live Nietzsche had no patience with those thinkers—particularly in England—who tried to preserve Christian morality while denying the Christian faith He was particularly scornful of that ‘moralizing little woman’ George Eliot, clinging on to respectability after being emancipated from theology Christianity, Nietzsche says, is a system, a coherent and complete view of things If you break off one of its principal concepts, the belief in God, then you shatter the whole thing; you have nothing essential left in your fingers Christianity presupposes that man does not—cannot—know what 309