THE GAY SCIENCE is the book by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche containing Nietzsche’s infamous declaration that “God is dead.” This is bad enough, but it is actually much worse than it seems. For Nietzsche, the death of God was merely an afterthought. What Nietzsche portends in The Gay Science, and in much of his work overall, is the obliteration of all distinction between right and wrong. God’s death follows from this—for Nietzsche—much bigger and more important transgression. Nietzsche didn’t believe in God, so His “death” was anticlimactic. It was the ruination of morals that Nietzsche was really after.