Why the God Debate Is a Non-Debate

By Neel Burton | August 9, 2026

First, Tell Me What You Mean by God

William Blake, The Ancient of Days (1794). — William Blake, *The Ancient of Days* (1794). Is Urizen what Blake meant by God?

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

In February 2012, three of the world’s most distinguished intellectuals gathered in Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre to discuss the origins of human beings and, tied with that, the existence of God. There was Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist and celebrated atheist; Rowan Williams, then Archbishop of Canterbury; and the philosopher Sir Anthony Kenny, a former Catholic priest who professed to be ‘ignorant’—that is, an agnostic. Kenny, who died in August 2026 at the age of 95, was a philosopher of exceptional range and clarity, and perhaps the ideal person to sit between the other two.

Here, apparently, were the three great positions in the God debate: belief, disbelief, and quiet uncertainty. But there was a problem. What did each man mean by ‘God’?

This is no minor philosophical quibble. Before asking whether something exists, we need, surely, to establish what that something is. Yet people routinely declare themselves theists, atheists, or agnostics without first defining the object of their belief, disbelief, or doubt. You cannot meaningfully ask whether something exists until you have some idea of what you are looking for. And ‘God’ can mean radically different things to different people.

Which God?

At one end of the spectrum is the God that Dawkins principally attacks: a supernatural intelligence who created the universe, designed living things, listens to prayers, judges our actions, performs miracles, and otherwise intervenes in human affairs. Millions of people believe in some version of this God, so it is perfectly reasonable for Dawkins to argue that such a being does not exist.

But it is far from the only conception of God. Aristotle’s God, for example, is the unmoved mover: the ultimate cause of change in the universe, itself unchanging. Aristotle’s God did not create the universe, which Aristotle believed to be eternal, and certainly does not sit in heaven listening to our prayers. Instead, he is the ultimate introvert, described by Aristotle as noesis noeseos, ‘thought thinking itself’.

Spinoza went even further in collapsing God. For him, God and Nature are one and the same: Deus sive Natura, ‘God or Nature’. Everything that exists is in God, because God is the single infinite substance of which everything else is a mode—a recognised position also in Indian philosophy.

Now ask the atheist: ‘Do you believe in Spinoza’s God?’ What would it mean to say no? That he does not believe in the rock that he is kicking? Unless the atheist wishes to deny the existence of Nature, the disagreement is no longer about whether something exists. It is about whether we ought to call that something ‘God’.

What Does an Atheist Not Believe In

When someone says, ‘I don’t believe in God’, what they really mean is, ‘I don’t believe in a particular idea of God.’

This becomes increasingly apparent as soon as we begin stripping attributes from God. Suppose we start with a personal creator who designed the universe, answers prayers, performs miracles, rewards virtue, punishes sin, and promises an afterlife. There is plenty here to believe or disbelieve. Now progressively remove the afterlife, divine intervention, answered prayers, God’s personality, and even the act of creation. With each subtraction, there is less for the atheist to reject. Eventually, we might arrive at God as the order of nature, the ground of being, Nature itself, or some such.

The less we say about God, the harder God becomes to disbelieve in.

At the limit, the atheist and the believer may agree completely about what exists. The disagreement is only about whether to call it ‘God’. Indeed, the atheist who tells Spinoza, ‘I don’t believe in your God’, may really be saying, ‘I believe in exactly the same thing as you, but I don’t think you should call it God.’ More commonly, Spinoza was himself accused of atheism, on the grounds that identifying God with everything amounted to believing in nothing.

The Problem with Agnosticism

The same problem applies to agnosticism. An agnostic typically says, ‘I don’t know whether God exists.’ But again: which God?

It makes perfect sense to be agnostic about a supernatural creator. Perhaps such a being exists; perhaps not; perhaps we cannot know. But what would it mean to be agnostic about Spinoza’s God? ‘I don’t know whether Nature exists’ is hardly a coherent position.

Like atheism and theism, agnosticism depends upon some prior conception of God. Until that conception has been supplied, saying, ‘I am an agnostic’ tells us surprisingly little. The familiar spectrum—theist, agnostic, atheist—is not really a spectrum of attitudes towards God. It is a spectrum of attitudes towards a particular—some might say quasi-mythological—conception of God. Change the conception and you may change your position without having altered a single belief about reality.

Is Dawkins Attacking a Straw Man?

This helps explain something peculiar about the modern God debate. Dawkins is not attacking a straw man when he attacks the supernatural, interventionist God. Millions of people believe in precisely such a God.

But difficulties arise when an argument against that concept of God is treated as an argument against God tout court.

The God of philosophy and theology can be much more elusive. God may be described not as a being but as Being itself; not as one cause among others but as the ground of causation; not as something within the universe but as that upon which the universe ultimately depends. Dawkins’s arguments against a supernatural designer may have considerable force without touching these concepts at all.

The atheist can reasonably reply, ‘You have defined God into existence.’ The theologian can equally reasonably reply, ‘You have been attacking a God I don’t believe in.’ And there, in miniature, lies the problem.

The more concrete and anthropomorphic God becomes, the easier God is to attack. But the more abstract and deflationary God becomes, the less obvious it is what atheism could mean—and, eventually, why we need the word ‘God’ at all.

Why Does the God Debate Persist?

If the problem is so simple, why do some of our most distinguished intellectuals sit there arguing about God without first agreeing what they mean by the word?

One reason may be that belief and disbelief are about far more, and far less, than metaphysics. For many people, religion is bound up with family, community, culture, morality, and personal identity. When someone starts questioning their idea of God, they are also questioning their idea of who they are.

Atheism can function in much the same way. For some, especially since the rise of the New Atheism, it can signify reason, science, intellectual independence, or emancipation from religious tradition. People on both sides may therefore be defending not merely propositions, but identities and the ego defences that buttress them. This may account for the extraordinary heat surrounding the debate. Once people start agitating, it is no longer simply about the facts.

Another reason is that the God debate has acquired the status of the ultimate intellectual question. It seems to encompass the origins of the universe, the meaning of life, morality, death, and our place in the cosmos. To call oneself a theist, atheist, or agnostic is not only to take a position in the debate but to take a position on reality itself—even if said position happens to be incoherent.

The ambiguity that makes the question philosophically troublesome may be precisely what makes it so attractive. Everyone thinks they understand the question, and even ‘I have no clue’ counts as a valid answer. All in all, the God debate makes for excellent theatre—hence the Sheldonian for the venue, while virtue ethics is for the basement.

A more rigorous debating approach would begin by defining God, fragment into more precise questions, and attract smaller audiences.

Three Clever Men in the Sheldonian

Which brings us back to Dawkins, Williams, and Kenny. Perhaps the most striking thing about their discussion is not that three exceptionally intelligent men could disagree about God, but they could appear to disagree before establishing whether they were talking about the same thing.

Dawkins was principally rejecting a supernatural creator. Williams resisted treating God as another object or explanatory cause within the universe. Kenny, sitting between them, professed uncertainty. All three positions are perfectly intelligible in themselves. The difficulty arises when we treat them as answers to the same under-defined question—as though Dawkins were saying no, Williams yes, and Kenny maybe.

Perhaps, then, there is no single God debate. There are only debates about particular conceptions of God, some more substantial than others. Once those conceptions are made explicit, apparent disagreements may sharpen into real ones—or disappear altogether. As things stand, everyone can leave feeling that they have won. In a properly defined debate, some people might have to accept that they are wrong.

Of course, none of this says whether God exists, or does not exist. It makes a simpler point: neither statement means very much until we know what ‘God’ means.

So before you tell me that you are a believer, an atheist, or an agnostic—or worse, ask me whether I am one of those—there is something else I need to know.

What do you mean by God? —And, do you know your Aristotle and your Advaita Vedanta?

What I mean is that the familiar God debate is culturally provincial. It tends to assume a conception of God shaped by Christianity: a personal creator, separate from the world, who takes an interest in human affairs. But Aristotle’s unmoved mover already unsettles that picture, while Advaita Vedanta can dissolve the distinction between God, ultimate reality, and the deepest self.

Once we step outside the familiar Christian frame, the apparently simple opposition between belief and disbelief begins to break down.

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A Life in Ideas: Baruch Spinoza

By Neel Burton | July 24, 2026

His Life, Character, and Philosophy

An attempt on the life of Baruch Spinoza — A religious fanatic slashes Spinoza’s cloak outside Amsterdam’s Portuguese Synagogue. Spinoza kept the torn cloak for the remainder of his life.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Baruch Spinoza transformed Western philosophy with his radical ideas on God, freedom, and the nature of reality, inspiring thinkers from Goethe and Hegel to Einstein. Yet the man who identified God with nature was denounced as a heretic, excommunicated by his own community, and earned his living grinding lenses in rented rooms. Few philosophers have lived so quietly while thinking so dangerously.

Steeped in Descartes

When Descartes died, Baruch Spinoza (also known, after his excommunication, as Benedict, or Benedictus, de Spinoza) was seventeen years old.

Growing up in Amsterdam, he became familiar with the philosophy of Descartes—to the extent that, until 1660, he supported himself by giving private lessons in Cartesianism.

In fact, he became, as far as method is concerned, more thoroughly Cartesian even than Descartes. His Principles of Cartesian Philosophy, published in 1663, is a reconstruction of Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy in the formal deductive format of Euclid’s geometry, complete with definitions, axioms, and theorems. It succeeded not only in recasting Descartes’s system, but also in clarifying, refining, and, finally, undermining it.

Given its merits, Spinoza held on to the geometric method for his magnum opus, the Ethics [Ethica, ordine geometrico demonstrata]. Its geometric method provided Spinozism with added curiosity and credibility, and, to an extent, still does.

Freedom in the Dutch Republic

Like Descartes before him, Spinoza enjoyed relative freedom in what has retrospectively been called the Dutch Republic (formally, the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands; informally, the United Provinces), then in its golden age and the most liberal, and richest, place in Europe.

In the preface to his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (TTP, 1670), Spinoza eulogises his country and its constitution:

Now since we have the rare good fortune to live in a commonwealth where freedom of judgement is fully granted to the individual citizen and he may worship God as he pleases, and where nothing is esteemed dearer and more precious than freedom, I am undertaking no ungrateful or unprofitable task in demonstrating that not only can this freedom be granted without endangering piety and the peace of the commonwealth, but also the peace of the commonwealth and piety depend on this freedom.

In the TTP, Spinoza critically analyses the Bible and argues for the establishment of a secular state founded on toleration. His purpose in critiquing the Bible is to undermine the repressive theological and political order of the era. ‘The purpose of the state’ he concludes, ‘is freedom’—a maxim far ahead of its time, and inscribed on the pedestal of his monument in Amsterdam.

Merchant or Philosopher?

For all its freedoms, life in Amsterdam had not been a bed of tulips. Spinoza’s paternal grandfather Isaac, a Portuguese Jew, had fled the Iberian Inquisition. In the early 1630s, his father Miguel and uncle Abraham moved the family business from Rotterdam to Amsterdam, where Baruch was born. Had the firm not been bankrupted, essentially, by the First Anglo-Dutch War, Spinoza might have continued as an importer of fruits, nuts, and wine.

Attempted Assassination and Excommunication

In April 1655, on the steps of Amsterdam’s Portuguese synagogue, a knife-wielding fanatic attempted to assassinate Baruch, shouting, ‘Heretic!’ Fortunately, the assassin succeeded only in slashing his cloak, which he kept as a memento of the dangers of fanaticism.

A year later, on 27 July 1656, in his twenty-fourth year, his Jewish community expelled him for his freedom of mind. His excommunication order decried his ‘abominable heresies’ and ‘monstrous deeds’: ‘By the decree of the angels, and by the command of the holy men, we excommunicate, expel, curse and damn Baruch de Espinoza…’

Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down, and cursed be he when he rises up; cursed be he when he goes out, and cursed be he when he comes in. The Lord will not spare him; the anger and wrath of the Lord will rage against this man, and bring upon him all the curses which are written in this book, and the Lord will blot out his name from under heaven, and the Lord will separate him to his injury from all the tribes of Israel with all the curses of the covenant, which are written in the Book of the Law.

The sting, however, came in the tail, banning all members of his community, including close family, from engaging with him: ‘We order that no one should communicate with him orally or in writing, or show him any favour, or stay with him under the same roof, or within four ells [around four metres] of him, or read anything composed or written by him.’

In a tradition going back to Socrates and Plato, he wrote (but did not publish) an ‘apology’, or defence. Although the work has been lost, he incorporated its contents into later works, especially the TTP—which a viral pamphlet described as, ‘forged in Hell by a renegade Jew and the Devil…’

Some time after his excommunication, he adopted the motto Caute [Take care] and had it engraved on his signet ring along with a thorny rose (‘Spinoza’ derives from the Latin spinosus, ‘thorny’).

Life as a Castaway

After his excommunication, Spinoza boarded in rented rooms in other people’s houses, in Amsterdam, in Rijnsburg near Leiden, in Voorburg, and finally in The Hague.

Those who knew him were struck by his simplicity, courtesy, and quiet contentment. He lived so frugally that his daily meals often consisted of little more than bread, milk, raisins, and a little butter. In his spare moments, he watched spiders weave their webs and observed flies under his microscope.

In Rijnsburg, under the influence of Descartes, he wrote the unfinished Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, on knowledge and method and the purification (or ‘emendation’) of the intellect.

This work on ‘thinking skills’ opens with a sentence that could have been written by Seneca or some other Stoic:

After experience had taught me the hollowness and futility of everything that is ordinarily encountered in daily life, and I realised that all the things which were the source and object of my anxiety held nothing of good or evil in themselves save insofar as the mind was influenced by them, I resolved at length to enquire whether there existed a true good, one which was capable of communicating itself and could alone affect the mind to the exclusion of all else—whether, in fact, there was something whose discovery and acquisition would afford me a continuous and supreme joy to all eternity.

For fear of compromising his freedom, Spinoza rejected a stipend from a patron and a professorship at Heidelberg, to eke out a living by grinding lenses—including for Huygens, who, in 1667, wrote to his brother, ‘The [lenses] that the Jew of Voorburg has in his microscopes have an admirable polish.’

He should have taken the stipend: the inhalation of glass dust led to his death in 1677, at the age of forty-four, from silicosis.

In the months preceding his death, the thirty-year-old Leibniz, as if acting on a premonition, travelled to The Hague and spent several days in conversation with him—in arguably the greatest meeting of minds since Plato and Aristotle.

The God of the Ethics

Spinoza’s masterpiece, The Ethics, completed in 1675 and published posthumously in 1677, consists of five parts.

The first part, Concerning God, contains an ontological proof, founded on his necessary perfection, for the existence of God, not dissimilar to the one deployed by Descartes.

Departing from Descartes, Spinoza argues that God is not beyond the world but at one with it. Propositions 14 and 15 state, ‘No substance apart from God can exist or be conceived,’ and, ‘Whatever exists, exists in God, and nothing can exist or be conceived without God.’ This lack of a distinction between the Creator and his creation is encapsulated in the slogan, Deus sive natura, ‘God, or nature.’

Many contemporaries understood Spinoza to be an atheist, although later Romantics interpreted him rather as a pantheist. The Romantic poet Novalis (1772-1801) famously referred to him as ein Gottbetrunkener Mensch, ‘a God-intoxicated man.’

The Mind-Body Problem

Whereas, starting from an ontological argument, Descartes had argued that at least one thing exists, and that that one thing would not deceive us, Spinoza had argued that at most one thing exists, and that that one thing is everything, including us.

For Spinoza, you and I have no independent existence outside of God; we are not substances, but modes of God, who is the one and only substance.

God has infinitely many attributes, but we can only know two of them, namely, thought and extension. Spinoza’s answer to the mind-body problem is thus to deny that there is a problem: thought and extension, that is, mind and body, are two ways of apprehending the same reality.

Mind and body do not interact, or even correlate, but simply correspond, like the two sides of a same coin.

Freedom

God being eternally and necessarily as he is, things could not be otherwise. Everything follows from God’s essence and prior causes. This being so, nothing is intrinsically good or evil; ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are simply subjective judgements as to what may be helpful or harmful to our survival.

Freedom, too, is a construct of the human mind. People think that they have free will because they cannot grasp the complex concatenation of infinite causes that determines their every thought and action. Freedom is not the ability to do otherwise, but the capacity to comprehend reality as if outside of time and subjectivity, sub specie aeternitatis, under the aspect of eternity, in the manner of a geometrical proof.

Freedom, in other words, is knowledge, which leads to tranquillity and virtue, is blessedness, and can only be achieved in the secular state.

Immortality

There is no afterlife or personal immortality, because there is no person. But the human mind is capable of grasping eternal truths and, in so doing, participates in something that transcends the individual. If we can bring ourselves to see the world sub specie aeternitatis and share in the eternal mind of God, we achieve a kind of immortality.

Appraisal

As I said, Spinoza has been read by some as an atheist and by others as a pantheist. I see in his Ethics many parallels with Stoicism, Paganism, and, above all, Hindu Vedanta. As per the Chandogya Upanishad, ‘When a man knows the best and the greatest, he becomes the best and the greatest.’

Both ancient and remarkably modern, Spinoza stood completely outside, or beyond, his time. While we may debate the nature of his God, we cannot doubt what he, or it, is not, namely, the God of the Bible—and wonder whether Spinoza’s metaphysics derives, in fact, from his politics.

When asked whether he believed in God, Einstein replied, ‘I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, but not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.’

Whereas Descartes, with his vain attempts at resolving the mind-body problem, had struggled to salvage received religion from the trainwreck of the Scientific Revolution, Spinoza did his utmost to overturn it.

The metaphysics of Leibniz, who almost literally picked up the torch from the dying Spinoza, may be read as an attempt to solve the mind-body problem while preserving, rather than overturning, the status quo ante.

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God Is Dead. Now What?

By Neel Burton | May 23, 2026

How Would You Respond to Nietzsche’s Madman?

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 15 August 2026.

The Scientific Revolution disrupted the centuries-old Aristotelian system of the Church and universities. It all began in 1543, when the Pole Nicolaus Copernicus published On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres. This work challenged the geocentric system of Aristotle and Ptolemy in which the Earth—and, more importantly, man—stood proud and unmoving at the centre of the universe. The Aristotelian system had provided not only a scientific model but also a moral and metaphysical order, with everything in its proper place. To overthrow it was to overthrow everything.

It is arguably Newton who completed the Copernican Revolution, and put the nail in the coffin of the Aristotelian system, with the publication, in 1687, of his Principia mathematica. In this work, which is deemed impenetrable, he introduced his three laws of motion along with the Law of Universal Gravitation. These laws applied to the celestial spheres as much as to a falling apple—with the implication that the heavens were not some separate, higher realm, but of one piece with your backyard.

In the mid-1660s, Newton kept a notebook with the title, Certain Philosophical Questions. Above this title, he inscribed the motto (which is a paraphrase of Aristotle): Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but truth is a greater friend still.

The More Radical Revolution

Also undermining the Aristotelian worldview were William Harvey’s demonstration of the circulation of blood, published in his De motu cordis of 1628, and Galileo’s discovery that falling objects undergo uniform acceleration irrespective of their mass, published in his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (i.e. the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic and the Copernican) of 1632. Old Aristotle had held that heavier objects fall faster, and that blood is constantly produced in the liver and consumed in the body’s periphery.

More radically, both Harvey and Galileo privileged experiment and observation over the authority of Aristotle, Ptolemy, Galen, and the Bible. Only a decade earlier, in 1620, Francis Bacon had formalised the modern scientific method in his Novum organum, which sought to undermine and replace Aristotle’s canonical treatise on logic, the Organon (hence the title, Novum organum, or New Organon). Galileo even had the gall to publish in Italian rather than the de rigueur Latin.

The revolution was not merely in what people believed, but in how they came to believe it—and who they should believe.

In Search of a Hero

The demise of the Aristotelian system, for all its promises, left a void that needed filling, ideally by some all-encompassing metaphysical system on the scale of the old, Aristotelian one. If the Earth no longer stood at the centre of the cosmos, was man not the glory of creation, as affirmed in the Bible (1 Corinthians 11:7)? In this new mechanistic, atomistic world of matter in motion, where might God and the immaterial soul fit in? Where freedom and justice? And where, therefore, heaven and hell?

Consider the scale of the imaginative shift required. In 1588, as a young mathematician, Galileo had been invited to address the Florentine Academy on the location, size, and arrangement of hell as described in Dante’s Inferno. The Scientific Revolution had begun to dismantle the circles of hell, and everything else, while remaining silent on what might replace them.

The three men who rose to the almost impossible challenge of weaving a new metaphysics that could accommodate the Scientific Revolution and make sense of man’s place within it were René Descartes (1596–1650), Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716).

Each offered a radically different solution. Descartes preserved God and the immortal soul by splitting reality into mind and matter. But in so doing, he created the problem of how such radically different substances might interact. Spinoza went in the opposite direction, collapsing mind and matter by identifying God with Nature. Leibniz sought another way out of the mind-body problem: his universe consisted not of interacting minds and bodies but of immaterial ‘monads’, co-ordinated by God in a ‘pre-established harmony’. Whereas Descartes and Leibniz sought to salvage what they could, and reaffirm man’s position in the order of things, the ‘heretic’ Spinoza provided no such comforts.

In November 1676, Leibniz travelled to The Hague to meet the dying Spinoza. He had been troubled by Spinoza’s still-secret metaphysics, and spent hours in discussion with him. If God and Nature were one and the same, and everything followed necessarily from the nature of God, what became of freedom, providence, and man’s special place in creation? Leibniz’s own metaphysics—the monadology—can be read as an attempt to solve Descartes’s mind-body problem without falling into Spinozism.

Nietzsche’s Break

By Nietzsche’s time, the great metaphysical systems had begun to look like what they were: elaborate attempts to salvage God and the soul of man from the assaults of science.

In The Gay Science (1882), Nietzsche calls time on the projects of his predecessors. Nietzsche could not have been more categorical about this: God, he declares, is dead.

Nietzsche was not simply announcing his atheism. By the late nineteenth century, there would have been nothing new in that. Instead, he was pointing to the consequences of unbelief: if our highest values—human dignity, moral obligation, justice—are founded in God, what happens to them if we can no longer believe in this God? Do we just go around pretending as if nothing had changed? Or do we invent ourselves anew?

The Gay Science is especially remembered for Aphorism 125, the so-called Parable of the Madman. In it, a madman lights a lantern in the bright morning hours, runs into the marketplace, and cries incessantly, ‘I seek God! I seek God!’ When the people laugh and jeer at him, he jumps into their midst and pierces them with his eyes: ‘Whither is God? … I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the seas? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?’

What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the din of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. [Gott ist tot! Gott bleibt tot! Und wir haben ihn getötet!]

Later that same day, the madman forces his way into several churches to strike up a requiem for God. When dragged out and called to account, he always replies, ‘What after all are these churches now if not the tombs and sepulchres of God?’ [Was sind denn diese Kirchen noch, wenn sie nicht die Gräber und Grabmäler Gottes sind?]

The townspeople are not scandalised by the Madman’s atheism. They are themselves unbelievers, which is why they laugh at him. The joke, however, is on them. They have abandoned God without thinking it through. The Madman has arrived, then as today, ‘too early’.

Instead of facing up to this crisis, we linger in a state of denial and false hope, like Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon, who lend their lives structure and meaning by waiting for Godot.

In response to the death of God, Nietzsche advocates a so-called ‘gay science’: a sceptical, light-hearted, artistic approach to life. Nietzsche’s response to the collapse of certainty is not despair, as is often thought, but freedom, creation, and experimentation: the courage to live without assurances and treat life as something to be interpreted, repurposed, and affirmed.

Not simply hanging around, unsure whether to stay or leave.