Faith & Spirit Quote by Walter Kaufmann

Kaufmann’s line is an acid test disguised as a moral rebuke: if the world “proves” God, then you haven’t really been looking at the world. The target isn’t faith in the abstract so much as a certain posture of certainty, the kind that treats “experience” and “facts of nature” as courtroom evidence for a benevolent order. Kaufmann flips that apologetic tradition on its head. Nature, he implies, is not a catechism; it’s a record of indifference, predation, accident. If you come away from it with reassurance, you’ve curated your data.

The sentence does its real work in the second clause, where “brothers’ blood” drags the debate out of armchairs and into history. It’s a loaded biblical echo (Cain and Abel) that turns metaphysics into an ethical audit. Kaufmann isn’t merely arguing that suffering complicates theism; he’s accusing the confident believer of a failure of attention and empathy. “Sheltered lives” suggests not just privilege but insulation: the ability to convert tragedy into “mystery” because it’s happening to someone else. “Closed their hearts” makes disbelief in a tidy, provable God sound less like intellectual superiority than moral seriousness.

Context matters: Kaufmann, a Jewish philosopher writing in the shadow of the Holocaust and deeply engaged with Nietzsche, was allergic to any theology that treated evil as an argumentative inconvenience. The sting of the quote is its insinuation that some certainty about God isn’t earned; it’s purchased with distance from other people’s wounds.