For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart’. 1 Corinthians 1:18–19
"Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God in The Gay Science by a parable about a madman with a lantern, looking for God, only to have his fellow citizens ridicule it:
“The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. ‘Whither is God?’ he cried; ‘I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. … God is dead. … And we have killed him.’”Nietzsche then explained that what he meant was: “the belief in the Christian god has become unbelievable”. His motive appears to have been to counteract the concept of future judgment—by announcing the death of the Judge! He wrote: “We deny God; in denying God we deny accountability.”
In The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche unleashed a torrent of abuse at God and the Genesis account of creation: “God’s first blunder: man did not find the animals entertaining—he dominated them, he did not even want to be an ‘animal’.—Consequently God created woman. And then indeed there was an end to boredom but also to something else! Woman was God’s second blunder.—‘Woman is in her essence serpent, Heva—every priest knows that, every evil comes into the world through woman’ … .”
Nietzsche writing in Thus Spake Zarathustra: “You [mankind] have made your way from worm to human, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now the human being is still more of an ape than any ape is.”
Nietzsche said Darwin was wrong in four fundamental aspects of his theory.
1. Small changes could not produce new organs.
He realized that a partly formed organ was of no survival value2. The weak outlast the strong.
“Anti-Darwin.—As regards the celebrated ‘struggle for life’, … where there is struggle it is a struggle for power … its outcome is the reverse of that desired by the school of Darwin … the weaker dominate the strong again and again—the reason being they are the great majority, and they are also cleverer. … Darwin forgot the mind.”3. Sexual selection not normal.
Nietzsche wrote of Darwin’s notion:
“Anti-Darwin … We almost always see males and females take advantage of any chance encounter, exhibiting no selectivity whatsoever.”4. Transitional forms absent.
Nietzsche wrote:
“There are no transitional forms. … Primitive creatures are said to be the ancestors of those now existing. But a look at the fauna and flora of the Tertiary merely permits us to think of an as yet unexplored country that harbors types that do not exist elsewhere, while those existing elsewhere are missing.” [“Tertiary” refers to one of the divisions of the ‘geologic column’, ‘dated’ after the dinosaur extinction, with its implied acceptance of vast ages of pre-human history.]Nietzsche, Darwin and Hitler
The supreme modern example of Nietzsche’s ‘Superhuman’, the strong man who lived by his own morality and vanquished all opposition, was Adolf Hitler. Hitler embraced both Darwinism and Nietzschean philosophy. For him, the Darwinian notion of the strong dominating the weak, was the highest good. At the same time, he considered himself to be the ‘superman’ of Nietzsche’s philosophy, and he also applied Nietzsche’s idea of superior individuals in seeking to persuade the German people that collectively they were the ‘master race’.
Hitler carried the ideas of Darwin and Nietzsche to a logical conclusion—an atheistic morality that resulted in the pillaging of Europe and the murder of over six million innocent civilians in the Holocaust.
Nietzsche shook his fist at God,
but Nietzsche is dead and God is not."
CMI
