“God is dead” is usually heard as a triumphant atheist slogan, but its real history is far stranger. This episode treats the phrase as an idea with a biography, starting with Nietzsche’s parable of the madman in the marketplace from The Gay Science (1882), the lingering shadow of the Buddha on the cave wall, the old hermit in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and the concept of the Übermensch that follows from the collapse.

Then we go back over two centuries to its true origin in a 17th-century Lutheran hymn by Johann von Rist about the crucifixion, and follow it through Jean Paul’s 1797 dream sequence, Gérard de Nerval, Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, Hegel’s dialectic of loss, Max Stirner’s Enlightenment critique, and Philipp Mainländer’s shattered divine unity. Finally we look at Heidegger’s reading of the phrase as the end of metaphysics, his idea of “letting being be,” and the 1960s Death of God theology associated with Paul Tillich.

• Why Nietzsche’s madman says “I have come too early” and what the laughing crowd misses
• The skyscraper-without-foundations analogy for a culture living on borrowed moral values
• How a hymn of religious mourning became a secular cultural diagnosis
• Mainländer’s metaphysical big bang and its influence on Nietzsche’s break with Schopenhauer
• Heidegger’s critique of the Übermensch and a closing question about algorithmic gods