Brilliant fellow....
Nietzsche did not believe in God.
In fact he wrote in one of his books Gay Science
"After Buddha was dead, people showed his shadow for centuries afterwards in a cave,—an immense frightful shadow. God is dead: but as the human race is constituted, there will perhaps be caves for millenniums yet, in which people will show his shadow.—And we—we have still to overcome his shadow!"
He suggests that we are pre-programed beings with no free will.
He said that morality had no function other than to distract us and that we should each adhere to our own inner laws.
He was the original hippie liberal fruit cake not what I would call brilliant.
I believe his "mental break down" started way before many realized.
The mental break down was actually dementia brought on by the late stages of syphilis.
It's been a while since I had to study this crap in school. I did the study we had several discussions but refused to do the paper on the grounds that I found his literature lacking a positive function. The DF earned me a failure for the course. I told the Prof. he shouldn't have failed me after all it was not my fault I was pre-hardwired and had no free will. Funny how the liberal jerk wanted me to learn the garbage but had no sense of humor for the irony of me using it on him.
Pat