Friedrich Nietzsche heralds the "death of God" poetically in his Zarathustra book of 1884, and returns to it as a philosophical dictum in The Antichrist (1888). By philosophical I mean this wasn't an atheist broadside against belief and believers of the kind we've become accustomed to in our own time – or, not only. It was an attack on the tight association of reason and divinity, which had begun with Plato and carried through the Christian tradition until René Descartes in the 17th century.
In Descartes's "first philosophy" the subject must doubt any "truth" available to him in the world, unless he can prove it rationally. Descartes finessed his method with six proofs of God ensuring reason's access to truth. But his peers could see that whether or not God existed was irrelevant to the new scientific method.
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