https://aeon.co/essays/how-to-fulfil-the-need-for-transcendence-after-the-death-of-god
Even Darwin would write that the 'view now held by most physicists, namely, that the Sun with all the planets will in time grow too cold for life ... is an intolerable thought.' Such an impasse was a difficulty for those convinced by science but unable to find meaning in its theories. For many, purpose wasn't an attribute of the physical world, but rather something that humanity could construct.
In Germany, the Reformed theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher rejected both Enlightenment rationalism and orthodox Christianity, positing that an aesthetic sense defined faith, while still concluding in a 1799 address that 'belief in God, and in personal immortality, are not necessarily a part of religion.' Like Arnold, Schleiermacher saw 'God' as an allegorical device for introspection, understanding worship as being 'pure contemplation of the Universe'. Such a position was influential throughout the 19th century, particularly among American Transcendentalists such as Henry Ward Beecher and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Those who practise apophatic theology - 2nd-century Clement of Alexandria, 4th-century Gregory of Nyssa, and 6th-century Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite - promulgated a method that has come to be known as the via negativa. According to this approach, nothing positive can be said about God that is true, not even that He exists. 'We do not know what God is,' the 9th-century Irish theologian John Scotus Eriugena wrote. 'God Himself does not know what He is because He is not anything. Literally God is not.'
How these apophatic theologians approached the transcendent in the centuries before Nietzsche's infamous theocide was to understand that God is found not in descriptions, dogmas, creeds, theologies or anything else. Even belief in God tells us nothing about God, this abyss, this void, this being beyond all comprehension. Far from being simple atheists, the apophatic theologians had God at the forefront of their thoughts, in a place closer than their hearts even if unutterable. This is the answer of how to pray to a 'dead God': by understanding that neither the word 'dead' nor 'God' means anything at all.
