reviewing Nietzsche's The Antichrist

As I have suggested, there is a lot of which to be extremely wary when it comes to Nietzsche's polemic, The Antichrist.

The crude idea he had of using Darwinism as a kind of intellectual dynamite to blast away religious edifices was always going to be fraught with a hit or miss dimension, since as Nietzsche himself knew, science itself, in its objectivity that stands apart from human subjective mores, cannot give us a system of values. Rather, it is the necessary for philosophers to interpret science in a way that makes it relate somehow to human subjective values -- or in more exact Nietzschean terms, science needs philosophy to give it its purpose.

Darwinism, depending on its interpretation, could mean a great deal socially speaking, or nothing, in terms of its bolstering the atheist's position. There are creationists who consider that human biological evolution could have been a guided one, under the auspices of a superior power. This notion of some of the more sophisticated religionists is, at least, on no worse an epistemological footing than conventional social darwinism -- which also goes way beyond the evidence that is materially available to us, in proposing hidden mechanisms that drive things (which we are expected to accept without the evidence to back it up.) Both positions are ideological, and entail an element of explanation that is occult (hidden) from scientific investigation. Social darwinistic thinking, with its conceptualisations of natural superiority and might makes right, is far from proven as a theory that supports the facts of human existence and the nature of social formation beyond any reasonable doubt. As a sytem of faith, like religion, it shares to much in common with some of the crudest and most anti-humanistic forms of religion (such as fundamentalism) in order to really be in a position to oppose this kind of religion as such. "Many are called but few are chosen" articulates the position of social darwinistic posturers exceedingly well. However, it is the principle that is beloved of the Calvinists -- one of the most punitive and joyless strands of Christianity, which asserted that by your success in the world or not, you would come to know retrospectively, whether you had been chosen by the Lord to be forgiven and blessed. Social darwinists obtain their kudos on the same basis of whether they just happen to receive more material blessings, and to experience more affluence than their brothers and sisters in the third world who work just as hard as they do, if not more so. Such are the mystifications of social darwinism, which reflect its religious origins and nature.