To start with, if you look back a ways in the blog I brought up Nietzsche, and how he is so misunderstood. He was an atheist, and he was wrong in the big picture, but there were a lot correctly insightful things in his ideas. He is a complicated character.
But for the moment let me get back to the idea of objectivity. I recently heard someone say that if something is objectively true, that means I can show it to you. If something is subjectively true it is based on my personal opinions and feelings, and I can't necessarily demonstrate it to you. Now, that is probably close to what the dictionary would say. But my point is that is a decidedly modern definition, not a Judeo-Christian definition. Up until the Enlightenment objectivity had to do with something coming from outside of ourselves, verses coming from our own tastes, desires, feelings, and opinions. Take, for example, the Ten Commandments. Are those truths objective or subjective? The Judeo-Christian perspective is that they are objective. They don't change based on our personal preferences, and they are imposed on us from outside us. They aren't a creation of our own.
The modern definition of objectivity is a little different. Things are objective only if they can be demonstrated through the senses. If you can see it, touch it, hear it, smell it, or taste it then it can be shown to be objective (another name for that is empiricism). This presents a problem for anything of a moral or religious nature. This is why at the end of modernity some people have been trying so hard to marginalize Judeo-Christian ideas which put so much stake in objective morality.
But there was a transition period in the early modern period. People like David Hume and Immanuel Kant believed in a 6th sense. It was not the same as the 6th sense in the Bruce Willis movie, but it was more or less the conscience. The conscience was a moral sense of knowing right and wrong, and it was objective in their view.
But here is where Nietzsche comes in with some profound insight. One of the goals of the Enlightenment was to establish good without God (Hume was an atheist, Kant was probably a practical atheist although a practicing Lutheran). If the Enlightenment was to throw off religious superstition they would have to show that they could prove things through reason and/or empiricism alone, without direct reference to God. The problem exposed by Nietzsche was that this 6th sense, or conscience, that was claimed to sense what was right and wrong, was really just a collection of personal tastes and opinions. The reason that people could generally agree early on in the Enlightenment about what the conscience said was because they were still recovering Christians, holding on to the old morality.
He was right. They said they wanted to prove what was 'good' without reference to God, but their ideas of 'good' were really ideas they inherited from their ancestors, who got them from God. Nietzsche realized that if God didn't exist some 'uberman' or 'higher man' would have to come along to show what was really right and wrong, and enforce it. It wasn't that he believed that whatever anyone powerful enough to enforce what he believed was ok. He believed, like the ancient Greco-Romans who he had a lot of respect for, that there was a certain way that lead to a vibrant and flourishing human life. There was some design or purpose, if you will. But it had to lead to a really powerful human life. His quote 'will to power' was kind of a mocking of Schleiermacher's (I think) quote 'will to live'. The 'will to live' was weak and pathetic in itself. Just a desire to live, to get by, was nothing. The 'will to power', to a vibrant and healthy and robust life was what was really needed. (Incidentally, that's partly why Nietzsche didn't like Darwin. 'Survival of the fittest' meant nothing to him. Mere survival, like the 'will to live' was weak.) But Nietzsche himself could not see exactly where to turn to find this Uberman. That's why he ended up speaking of an abyss.
That's about enough about Nietzsche. I just want to add that part of the reason he rejected Christianity was that to him, dying to yourself is weak and could not lead to that robust, vibrant life. Overall, I think Nietzsche was a confused and conflicted man. He knew the Enlightenment had failed, but he was left without anything to really turn to. To back up what I said a little, here's a quote from Dinesh D'Souza, a Christian writer. http://finchesandsparrows.blogspot.com/2009/04/nietzsches-abyss.html
I have more to say about the failure of the Enlightenment and Modernism, but I'll close this post for now. But before I digressed, part of my initial point was that all too often we Christians don't think with a Judeo-Christian mindset, but a modern one. This is dramatically evident in the difference between the Judeo-Christian and Modern definitions of objectivity. When discussing morality and justice, for instance, with non-Christians we don't have to assume the modern view of objectivity and we have every right to claim God's morality as objective and true.
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