[Serious] Absolutes and Atheism

[Belacqua]

Does that mean Nietzsche was some sort of Idealist? 

Depends what you mean by Idealist, I guess. Platonic idealists are the opposite of Nietzsche, holding that there is an eternal realm of ideas. German Idealist -- maybe so, in a kind of extreme way. 

But I'm not clear on how we should use "Idealist" here.

Seems a pretty extreme position to hold. 

Probably safe to say that any sentence beginning "Nietzsche believed __________," could end with "which was a pretty extreme position." 

We wouldn't be here if there wasn't at least some reliable causal structure to the universe.

I think so too. So, as the OP is asking, we'd want to inquire as to what those unchanging and reliable causal structures are exactly. 

There's no doubt that his ideas have been way more influential in the social sciences than in physics. As Rev. Rye said, the Ubermensch is reinventing values. Not laws of mechanics. The sorts of causal structures we tend to question today are more societal, traditional, and cultural -- or thanks to Nietzsche we see that what used to be called science is now seen as culture, and therefore may be questioned. 

So post-Nietzscheans have made careers on the challenging and reinterpretation of things that were once taken as objective science, but which they showed to be definitions or values that might in fact change. Foucault, famously, attempted to demonstrate that human sexuality and mental illness are far less physical/scientific fields and more related to power dynamics and tradition.

The whole trans debate that's going on now is a descendant of Nietzsche's provocations. For a long time people thought that maleness or femaleness were objectively determined by anatomy or, later, chromosomes -- hard science. But now people have declared that this objective science has no value, and that a person can overrule anatomy through feeling. Basically, will overcomes anatomy.