Ayn Rand while producing great novels, was also by another measuring stick, simply a person. Not correct about everything. She like all of us exercised her authority to be wrong about things. This is one of them.
She probably could have been right about it, but someone needed to correct the logic flaws in her two reasons.
“Today I decided to be an atheist.” Branden then reports her as later explaining, “I had decided that the concept of God is degrading to men. Since they say that God is perfect, man can never be that perfect, then man is low and imperfect and there is something above him – which is wrong.”
A key part of her flaw is that ‘man can never be that perfect.’ If she understood anything about Christianity, she would know that God would provide a way for once-perfect, now-fallen man, to be made perfect again (Jesus Christ). Man cannot be perfect on his own, but God has provided a way when we die and believe in Christ (glorification). God completes the work He began in us here.
Rand (at 13 anyway) could not come to grips with the fact that life isn’t what she wanted it to be. It isn’t that way for anyone, I suppose. Everyone wants to be something they are not. More power. More beautiful. More rich. Taller. More popular. Smarter. How about never wrong, or better put, always right? God?
We cannot be God. We can’t be perfect on our own. Some people, because of this fact, not being able to handle the truth God exists and He is perfect and holy, and thus unfair to all these lower men and women, says there is no God. The whole idea is just unfair there could be something higher or better above man.
I would caution Rand and others like her that it is not easy being God. It is not easy being perfect - although it is God’s nature to do so. But think of having infinite power, knowledge, foreknowledge, and the ability to suspend the natural laws you made yourself, and intervene at any point in time you want. Now add to that people - people that you originally made perfect, that went against the only thing you said they could not do, and they sinned and became imperfect, sinful beings, that passed this sin problem on to their offspring.
God could have wiped everyone out there right at that moment and He would have been totally in His power and authority to do so. He could stop every one of us from doing bad things, even before we did them and He’d have every right to do so.
It takes an almost infinite amount of patience to control infinite power and let people continue to screw things up. He made us people with free wills and some amounts of power to exercise those wills within limits. For the most part He lets us use those free wills the way we want, and that includes accepting Him or rejecting Him.
the second one, no proof of God therefore He doesn’t exist. She didn’t define what would be proof to her (but at 13 I won’t quibble). But the fact is you cannot state with certainty that just because there is no proof for something (or you don’t see the proof in front of you and you just don’t recognize it) doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It could mean it hasn’t been found yet, or there hasn’t been a way to detect it found yet. To rule something out because of lack of evidence is not science. In fact this very chain of logic is what compels evolutionists to keep digging for the ‘missing link’.
In short, Rand’s premises for rejecting God are flawed just by reading them. I don’t know if anyone later in her life were able to address them with her or not. I hope someone was able to talk to her about it.
Great post! If you think about it, too, where do we get the idea that the universe has to be 'fair'? If there is no god; man is just more highly evolved and now has the capacity to reason; there is no design or order to the universe anyway, then where did the concept of fairness come from? It implies someone, something keeping score to make sure it all balances out doesn't it?
Rand decided to reject God because she didn't think it was 'fair' that something was above man (at the wise age of 13, yet!). This was and always has been called "pride".
If I may add to your comment. I think Rand was a tremendously underrated philosopher and writer. My biggest gripes with her is that she had some problems with reality.
I also think that sometimes it takes some age and maturity to see the hand of God at work. Trying to prove or disprove god at age 13 or age 25 is sometimes hopeless. But as you age, you often come to see the truth that there are just things that don’t make sense without god being behind them.
Many atheists get caught up in the judeo-christian portrait of god as this being sitting on a throne like an oriental potentate and they know that isn’t how things are. They rebel at god as this concept and are almost driven at times to do everything in their power to destroy this concept.
I think they may be doing God’s work because that is not who he is to me either, or to anyone else. Those who believe often have to experience God personally. The lucky ones can just accept the belief as children and it stays a part of them. The others, like me, have to learn and learn to trust and accept.
parsy, who believes