[Serious] Absolutes and Atheism

[Belacqua]

Also, god is dead doesn't equate to nihilism.

It does for Nietzsche.

He doesn't think of God as the Sunday School old-man-in-the-sky version of the popular imagination. He is a philosopher, so he thinks of God as the philosopher's version.

For philosophers, God is the ordering principle of the universe. The Logos. Nietzsche believes that at its deepest level the universe has no order, no laws of nature, no principles which we can discover through science. This is what he means by God being dead -- we can no longer believe in an order which exists independently of people. You'll see that this is pretty much just an extreme version of Kantian epistemology -- not only are mental phenomena constructed by the mind (as Kant said), but the noumena -- the things in themselves -- do not have true existences which we imperfectly discern.

All order, for Nietzsche, is made up by people, either through art or through science. It is useful. It is an illusion we need to keep from going mad. 

If I'm understanding him right, Neo's question here could be rephrased as "Why is Nietzsche wrong? What absolute ordering principles can we believe in absent God?"