Journal Article

The Survival of God

MORENO, MANUEL PORCEL, BATISTA, RICARDO BARROSO, PINTO, JOÃO CARLOS ONOFRE

2025

Overview

For much of the 20th century, philosophy sought to eliminate once and for all the question of God. The “death of God,” proclaimed in the parable of the madman with the lantern in Nietzsche’s famous aphorism 125 of The Gay Science, was not merely a literary gesture or a metaphor for modern nihilism. It became, rather, the epochal sign of a world aspiring to emancipate itself from all transcendence. Enlightened reason, confidence in scientific progress, and the consolidation of secular institutions shaped a cultural framework in which religion appeared as a residue of the past—an archaic echo destined to dissolve in the light of positive knowledge. The sociological theory of secularization, in its various forms, accompanied this process by affirming that modernity would inevitably bring about the disappearance of religion as a meaningful phenomenon in both public life and the self-understanding of the modern subject. Yet this prediction did not come to pass. At the threshold of the 21st century, philosophical discourse has had to acknowledge the insufficiency of that secularization narrative. Far from dissolving, the religious has re-emerged with renewed vigor in new, diffuse, and hybrid forms: postsecular spirituality, political theology, the philosophies of alterity and of the gift, the return to metaphysics and theodicy in a critical key. The supposed “death of God” has not eradicated the question of God—it has transformed it. If anything characterizes our age, it is precisely the survival of God: His resistance to being dissolved into modern immanentism and His capacity to reconfigure Himself within thought, culture, and human experience. The present special issue of the Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia, entitled The Survival of God: Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century, seeks to situate itself at the heart of this question. Its purpose is not simply to reopen a familiar debate, but to interrogate the ways in which the question of God has shifted, been rearticulated, and transformed within contemporary thought. The aim is not merely to assert the “relevance” of the problem of God, but to understand why, after its apparent eclipse, the divine continues to emerge as a site of thought—an irreducible remainder resisting any rationalist or historicist closure.

• Publisher: Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia