Nietzsche saw it more clearly than his cheerful heirs. To announce the death of God is not to lose one belief among many; it is to unhook the horizon, so that the whole earth drifts, and there is no longer any up or down. The honest atheist thinkers who followed, the absurdists, the existentialists, did not flinch from the logic: if the universe is only matter and time, then love is chemistry, justice is preference, cruelty and kindness weigh the same on a cold scale, and the eventual heat death of the cosmos will erase every human story with perfect impartiality. Nihilism is not stupidity. It is consistency.
The strange thing is that almost no one can actually live there. The same person who says nothing matters still weeps at a funeral, still burns at an injustice done to them, still loves their child as though it were the most meaningful thing in the world. We are built, stubbornly, as if meaning were real, even when our philosophy insists it is not. That mismatch is itself a clue worth sitting with. A purely meaningless creature would not be haunted by meaning's absence.
A truly meaningless creature would not lie awake grieving the absence of meaning. The ache is evidence.
Christianity does not answer nihilism by pretending the void is not there. It agrees: without God, the abyss is exactly as dark as the nihilist says, and it is dishonest to whistle past it. But it makes a wilder claim, that the void is not the final fact, because Meaning itself has a face and chose to descend into the dark. Christ went down into death, the deepest nothing there is, and did not stay. 'The light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.' The Christian is not someone who never felt the abyss. It is someone who believes the abyss has already been entered, and beaten, from the inside.