Eagleton on Nietzsche

This is why we would fail as God:

There is a sense in which replacing a transcendent God with an omnipotent humanity alters surprisingly little, as Nietzsche scornfully pointed out. There is still a stable metaphysical center to the world; it is just that it is now us, rather than a deity. And since we are sovereign, bound by no constraints which we do not legislate for ourselves, we can exercise our newfound divinity by indulging among other things in that form of ecstatically creative jouissance known as destruction. In Nietzsche's view, the death of God must also spell the death of Man - that is to say, the end of a certain lordly, overweening humanism - if absolute power is not simply to be transplanted from the one to the other. Otherwise humanism will always be secretly theological. It will be a continuation of God by other means. God will simply live a shadowy afterlife in the form of respectable suburban morality, as indeed he does today. The infinity of Man would simply end up doing service for the eternity of God. In Faustian spirit, Man would fall in love with his own apparently boundless powers, forgetful that God in the doctrine of the Incarnation is shown to be in love with the fleshly, frail, and finite. Besotted by his own infinity, Man would find himself in perpetual danger of developing too fast, overreaching himself and bringing himself to nothing, as in the myth of the Fall.

Reason, Faith, and Revolution, pp. 15-16