Faith after Nietzsche

Perhaps you should look up what "espoused" means. The above statement is blatantly false.

From what I understand, the association of Nietzsche and Nazi's largely occured because of posthumously published works that where edited by his sister (or cousin?), who had deep Nazi affliations. (the podcast "Philosophy Bites" has a great episode on this topic)

Nietzsche is dead.

No more so then God, in Nietzsche's own words.

The existence of his sentience has no affect on his views in life, which are what we referred to.

where is the best place to begin studying Nietzsche

His books, for example Beyond Good and Evil is a really quick read and gives some ideas of his philosophy. There's many of them, as well as general interpretations of his messages in books.

I like to describe Nietzsche as a radical protestant. He was definitely a man of spirit and purpose, and he wanted man to be nobler, more healthy. I think he made a cartoon if Christianity, or focused only on its decadence. But perhaps he did so in the name of some of its values. Jesus can be interpreted as a reviser of the Law, or as a transvaluer. He mocked and contrasted himself with the Pharisees as Nietzsche mocked and contrasted himself with the moralism of Kant or the anti-worldliness of Plato. Nietzsche wanted "life more abundant" and he thought that a denial of this world for an imaginary world was the wrong way to go.

I think the Jesus character can be interpreted in many ways from the various sources. But so can Nietzsche. His owns books are full of contradictions. Nietzsche talked about needing gloves to read the New Testament. Well, one needs gloves to read Nietzsche. Both bodies of text are profound but mixed with poison. That's just my opinion.

The core of Nietzsche's belief system is to be found in his comments about the ancient Greek states and the manner in which they USED their religions as compared to the manner in which Christianity is too commonly used, at least as he saw it. He viewed the one as liberating and the other as constricting.

The basic reality is this: If Nietzsche were alive today and were given six months at any major university to bring himself current with our present knowledge of cell biology, mathematics, population genetics and history, you would see him denouncing evolution and atheism in the strongest possible terms.

Hilarious! On the off chance that you're serious, how about a theory supporting this contention?

The big lie which is being promulgated by evolutionists is that there is some sort of a dialectic between evolution and religion. There isn't. In order to have a meaningful dialectic between evolution and religion, you would need a religion which operated on an intellectual level similar to that of evolution, and the only two possible candidates would be voodoo and Rastifari.

The dialectic is between evolution and mathematics. Professing belief in evolution at this juncture amounts to the same thing as claiming not to believe in modern mathematics, probability theory, and logic. It's basically ignorant.

Evolution has been so thoroughly discredited at this point that you assume nobody is defending it because they believe in it anymore, and that they are defending it because they do not like the prospects of having to defend or explain some expect of their lifestyles to God, St. Peter, or some other member of that crowd.

To these people I say, you've still got a problem. The problem is that evolution, as a doctrine, is so overwhelmingly STUPID that, faced with a choice of wearing a sweatshirt with a scarlet letter A for Adulteror, F for Fornicator or some such traditional design, or or a big scarlet letter I for IDIOT, you'd actually be better off sticking with one of the traditional choices because, as Clint Eastwood noted in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly:

God Hates IDIOTS Too...

The best illustration of how stupid evolutionism really is involves trying to become some totally new animal with new organs, a new basic plan for existence, and new requirements for integration between both old and new organs.

Take flying birds for example; suppose you aren't one, and you want to become one. You'll need a baker's dozen highly specialized systems, including wings, flight feathers, a specialized light bone structure, specialized flow-through design heart and lungs, specialized tail, specialized general balance parameters etc.

For starters, every one of these things would be antifunctional until the day on which the whole thing came together, so that the chances of evolving any of these things by any process resembling evolution (mutations plus selection) would amount to an infinitessimal, i.e. one divided by some gigantic number.

In probability theory, to compute the probability of two things happening at once, you multiply the probabilities together. That says that the likelihood of all these things ever happening, best case, is ten or twelve such infinitessimals multiplied together, i.e. a tenth or twelth-order infinitessimal. The whole history of the universe isn't long enough for that to happen once.

All of that was the best case. In real life, it's even worse than that. In real life, natural selection could not plausibly select for hoped-for functionality, which is what would be required in order to evolve flight feathers on something which could not fly apriori. In real life, all you'd ever get would some sort of a random walk around some starting point, rather than the unidircetional march towards a future requirement which evolution requires.

And the real killer, i.e. the thing which simply kills evolutionism dead, is the following consideration: In real life, assuming you were to somehow miraculously evolve the first feature you'd need to become a flying bird, then by the time another 10,000 generations rolled around and you evolved the second such reature, the first, having been disfunctional/antifunctional all the while, would have DE-EVOLVED and either disappeared altogether or become vestigial.

Now, it would be miraculous if, given all the above, some new kind of complex creature with new organs and a new basic plan for life had ever evolved ONCE.

Evolutionism, however (the Theory of Evolution) requires that this has happened countless billions of times, i.e. an essentially infinite number of absolutely zero probability events.

And, if you were starting to think that nothing could possibly be any stupider than believing in evolution despite all of the above (i.e. that the basic stupidity of evolutionism starting from 1980 or thereabouts could not possibly be improved upon), think again. Because there is zero evidence in the fossil record (despite the BS claims of talk.origins "crew" and others of their ilk) to support any sort of a theory involving macroevolution, and because the original conceptions of evolution are flatly refuted by developments in population genetics since the 1950's, the latest incarnation of this theory, Steve Gould and Niles Eldredge's "Punctuated Equilibrium or punc-eek" attempts to claim that these wholesale violations of probabilistic laws all occurred so suddenly as to never leave evidence in the fossil record, and that they all occurred amongst tiny groups of animals living in "peripheral" areas. That says that some velocirapter who wanted to be a bird got together with fifty of his friends and said:



You could devise a new religion by taking the single stupidest doctrine from each of the existing religions, and it would not be as stupid as THAT.

But it gets even stupider.

Again, the original Darwinian vision of gradualistic evolution is flatly refuted by the fossil record (Darwinian evolution demanded that the vast bulk of ALL fossils be intermediates) and by the findings of population genetics, particularly the Haldane dilemma and the impossible time requirements for spreading genetic changes through any sizeable herd of animals.

Consider what Gould and other punk-eekers are saying. Punc-eek amounts to a claim that all meaningful evolutionary change takes place in peripheral areas, amongst tiny groups of animals which develop some genetic advantage, and then move out and overwhelm, outcompete, and replace the larger herds. They are claiming that this eliminates the need to spread genetic change through any sizeable herd of animals and, at the same time, is why we never find intermediate fossils (since there are never enough of these CHANGELINGS to leave fossil evidence).

Obvious problems with punctuated equilibria include, minimally:

• It is a pure pseudoscience seeking to explain and actually be proved by a lack of evidence rather than by evidence (all the missing intermediate fossils). In other words, the clowns promoting this BS are claiming that the very lack of intermediate fossils supports the theory. Similarly, Cotton Mather claimed that the fact that nobody had ever seen or heard a witch was proof they were there (if you could SEE them, they wouldn't BE witches...) This kind of logic is less inhibiting than the logic they used to teach in American schools. For instance, I could as easily claim that the fact that I'd never been seen with Tina Turner was all the proof anybody should need that I was sleeping with her. In other words, it might not work terribly well for science, but it's great for fantasies...
  
  
  
  
• PE amounts to a claim that inbreeding is the most major source of genetic advancement in the world. Apparently Steve Gould never saw Deliverance...
  
  
• PE requires these tiny peripheral groups to conquer vastly larger groups of animals millions if not billions of times, which is like requiring Custer to win at the little Big Horn every day, for millions of years.
  
  
• PE requires an eternal victory of animals specifically adapted to localized and parochial conditions over animals which are globally adapted, which never happens in real life.
  
  
• For any number of reasons, you need a minimal population of any animal to be viable. This is before the tiny group even gets started in overwhelming the vast herds. A number of American species such as the heath hen became non-viable when their numbers were reduced to a few thousand; at that point, any stroke of bad luck at all, a hard winter, a skewed sex ratio in one generation, a disease of some sort, and it's all over. The heath hen was fine as long as it was spread out over the East coast of the U.S. The point at which it got penned into one of these "peripheral" areas which Gould and Eldredge see as the salvation for evolutionism, it was all over.
  

The sort of things noted in items 3 and 5 are generally referred to as the "gambler's problem", in this case, the problem facing the tiny group of "peripheral" animals being similar to that facing a gambler trying to beat the house in blackjack or roulette; the house could lose many hands of cards or rolls of the dice without flinching, and the globally-adapted species spread out over a continent could withstand just about anything short of a continental-scale catastrophe without going extinct, while two or three bad rolls of the dice will bankrupt the gambler, and any combination of two or three strokes of bad luck will wipe out the "peripheral" species. Gould's basic method of handling this problem is to ignore it.

And there's one other thing which should be obvious to anybody attempting to read through Gould and Eldridge's BS:



They don't even bother to try to provide a mechanism or technical explaination of any sort for this "punk-eek"


They are claiming that at certain times, amongst tiny groups of animals living in peripheral areas, a "speciation event(TM)" happens, and THEN the rest of it takes place. In other words, they are saying:



Again, Gould and Eldridge require that the Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happen not just once, but countless billions of times, i.e. at least once for every kind of complex creature which has ever walked the Earth. They do not specify whether this amounts to the same Abracadabra-Shazaam each time, or a different kind of Abracadabra-Shazaam for each creature.

I ask you: How could anything be stupider or worse than that? What could possibly be worse than professing to believe in such a thing?

I have to ask you, gungasnake, do you have any references for these assertions? Dissident biologists? Competing theories? Evolution is a crock, the real theory is (insert real theory here). Are there any schools of thought on the right track?

There is no distinction of micro and macro evolution.
By the way, do you have any theory to support your contention that Nietzsche would be a vocal denier of evolution and atheism? Your post makes no mention of him at all. No evidence that he was in the habit of denying established facts, or even that he was a wanton controversialist.

"Punk Eek", as I noted, is motivated by two things. One is the fact that the fossil record flatly refutes Darwinian gradualism. Darwinian evolution demands that the vast bulk of all fossils be unambiguous intermediates and the first such has yet to ever be found. Darwin himself knew this was a problem but assumed that advances in earth-moving equipment would fix it; today, twenty generations of bulldozers and backhoes later, the problem has not been fixed.

The second problem which Punk Eek claims to remedy is the Haldane dilemma from population genetics and that amounts to higher arithmetic more than higher math and likewise has never been fixed. In simplest possible form, it goes like this:

Assume there actually were such a thing as a "beneficial mutation(TM)" (in real life, there isn't), and assume that you had a population of about 100,000 of our "ape-like ancestors(TM)" living about 10M years ago, that their average generation time was 20 years as per now, and that they were magically able to substitute one such beneficial mutation entirely through the population every generation. Any MORE than one such swap at one time would destroy the species since the vast bulk of all mutations are harmful or fatal of course.

That means that every generation one pair of these guys was going to get the good mutation and all others would immediately die of jealousy, and then the one pair would immediately have 100,000 children to replenish the herd. That of course is fabulously beyond any possible real-world rate of replacement.

How many times does 20 go into 10,000,000? Five hundred thousand point mutations or changes you say? I mean, that just isn't going to cut it for getting from anything apelike to us. What that means is that the best you could hope for with the most fabulous rate of substitution which is even imaginable in the 10M years which supposedly separate us from apes would be an ape with a slightly shorter tail.

With realistic rates of substitution, people who have tried to do the extrapolations involved talk about quadrillions of years.

Do you have any theory to support your contention that Nietzsche would be a vocal denier of evolution and atheism?

There are just too many sources on this one to make such a claim.

How many cells is a fertilised human ovum? Does that qualify it as micro?

Nietzsche was honest and highly intelligent and would not be found amongst people professing a theory because it supported their lifestyles.

So, you're not claiming that he would deny the fact of evolution, only one or more theories of evolution?
Why do you think that he'd be anti-atheist? That's not a stance noticeably associated with honest and highly intelligent 21st century Germans.

Are you channeling Nietzsche now? If Darwin were knew what we know today, do you predict that he would deny his own theories as well?

Almost certainly.

"Übermensch" (Greek: „hyperanthropos“) was first used - as far as I know - by Dionysios of Halikarnassos (1st century BC).

Nietsche used the concept of Claude Adrien Helvétius' „homme supérieur“.


You should read Also sprach Zarathustra (and some of of early writings, where he used the term as well) and not only quotes and summaries.

The „Herrenmenschen-Ideologie“ ('master race ideology') of the Nazis used parts of Nietsches 'Übermensch theory, namely of the chapters related biology as well as of immorality.