“God is dead”: What Nietzsche really meant
The death of God didn’t strike Nietzsche as an entirely good thing. Without a God, the basic belief system of Western Europe was in jeopardy.
Scotty Hendricks at Big Think website
Even if there was [a God], the Western world now knew that he hadn’t placed us at the center of the universe, and it was learning of the lowly origin from which man had evolved. We finally saw the true world. The universe wasn’t made solely for human existence anymore.
Indeed, consider the fact there was once a time when Christians thought 1] the Sun and everything "up there" revolved around the Earth and that 2] the entire universe was easily imagined as here on Earth, up there in Heaven and down somewhere in Hell.
And now science has revealed to us a universe comprised of "200 billion trillion stars" across an expanse of "94 Billion Light Years".
And that's before we get to the multiverse.
I and thou then?
Nietzsche feared that this understanding of the world would lead to pessimism — “a will to nothingness” that was antithetical to the life-affirming philosophy Nietzsche promoted.
Of course it can. For some. But Nietzsche himself was just one of hundreds and hundreds of others down through the ages who were able to "think up" a philosophy or a political ideology or a spiritual track or an assessment on nature that allowed them to anchor their Self comfortably into the next best thing: objectivism.
His fear of nihilism and our reaction to it was shown in The Will to Power, in which he wrote: “What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism… For some time now our whole European culture has been moving as toward a catastrophe.”
Fortunately, however, for a select few, they could at least weather the catastrophe as one of the masters and not one of the slaves. God may be dead but this only allows for the Übermensch to "sort of" take His place down here. And, with any luck, you would continue live on through an eternal recurrence that at least guaranteed your master class rank through all eternity.
https://ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=186929