I’m always happy to hear of someone thinking about such an issue some more.
My previous statement was a response to a recurring claim by Christians that without God we can’t identify an objective reality. AFAIK, religions like Christianity had a monopoly on objectivity in their doctrine before Objectivism. Perhaps there were exceptions in works by people like Aristotle or Locke, but nothing as integrated and complete as what Ayn Rand assembled. The long held argument by Christians was that their morals were passed down by God, and therefore uniquely immune to being twisted to (and corrupted by) individual desires.
Ayn Rand changed that, assembling a philosophy derived from observation of and reasoning through our shared environment and basic human condition. She advocated independent thought, but insisted that her conclusions were the only correct ones. That’s what makes Objectivism “objective”, being derived from an objective reality and not bendable to personal preference. Nevertheless, a few diehard evangelical Christians refuse to surrender their exclusive objectivity claim to her 50 year old philosophy, and take the same tired shots at it with claims that subjectivity is impossible.
From what I see, their arguments are based on either the claim that we’re possibly experiencing reality differently, similar to your color of red predicament, or the more obvious effect that we value experience differently.
Regarding the former, they ignore the fact that the same improbable scenario that we’re viewing different worlds would mean that we’re viewing different Bibles. So that infinitesimally small chance should be factored out of both Christianity and Objectivism. The same goes for the latter, the different value people place on reading the same book at different times that you referred to. It’s universal, and needs to be accounted for by both theistic and atheistic doctrine.
Objectivism may be fundamentally flawed, but not because it’s subjective. IMO, it’s at least as objective as Christianity.
(CatoRenasci, I’ve cc’ed you because of some thought provoking comments of yours above.)