What is your opinion of Nietzsche?

Nietzsche was a philosopher of the late 1800s. He was what they call a nihilist: life has no meaning. But he's one of those that I would like to call an honest atheist. He's telling you up front in his writings that, look, without God, we're screwed. And here's the problem: I can't find God. But I know somehow, some way, that God affects everything. But I'm a materialist. Like all his fellow philosophers, he's a materialist who goes by what he sees, and if he doesn't see God, he doesn't believe in God. There are a lot of reasons they'll think up: here's why I don't believe in God, because people suffer. Why doesn't God show Himself? Why does He stay hidden if He wants us to know Him? Perfectly legitimate question. And Nietzsche can't let it go. He's not going to say, well, maybe I'll find the answer someday. As far as he's concerned, there is no God, because the God he hoped to believe in is not a God who would hide Himself. What God did with him, well, that's up to God. But he was an honest philosopher. As much as he was a nihilist, he was honest and said, here's what we need, we don't have it, therefore here's my philosophy: a godless, atheistic philosophy. He's the one I quoted in my Galileo Was Wrong book, who wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and he has a section in there in which he talks about us human beings releasing the Earth from the Sun, which is what we did, according to Nietzsche, when we adopted the Copernican system. Prior to Copernicus, we believed the Earth wasn't moving, either in space or rotationally; it was stationary. Once we made it spin and move translationally, we released the Earth from the Sun, so to speak, and we made a whole new universe. Now the Earth is just a little speck of dust in a vast, vast universe that we can get lost in and lose meaning. Before, the Earth was the center and everything else went around it, so it didn't make a difference how far out you went; you knew where the center was, where the life is. And Nietzsche recognized that. There's a vast difference between what we used to believe and what we believe now that modern science, so-called, has forced down our throat. And the very reason they forced it down our throat was to get God out of the picture. That's what it's all about, if I could boil it down to one sentence. He knew he was getting nowhere with his atheism, but he didn't know where else to go, because he's a materialist that needs evidence, not faith. We need some evidence, but we don't need all of it. I see the trees; I know they can't come into existence by themselves. Somebody has to make them, and it's got to be somebody really smart. That's enough for me. I believe God exists just on that basis. So I could fault Nietzsche for not following through. Come on, Nietzsche, you know better than that: even if God hides Himself, those trees can't come into existence by themselves, and if you're going to be really honest, you're going to say, it's got to be somebody really smart, a lot smarter than me. So I have respect and disrespect for Nietzsche. He tries to follow his arguments through as best he can, but he messes up just like every other human being does. Without God, you're going to get nowhere.