by Tom Pratt
[72] Peter W. Wilson, The Thirty Years War: Europe’s Tragedy (Cambridge: Belknap, 2011).
[73] René Descartes, A Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, Donald Cress, trans. (New York: Hackett, 1993.
[74] Colin Brown, Christianity & Western Thought: A History of Philosophers, Ideas & Movements, vol. 1: From the Ancient World to the Age of Enlightenment (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1990), 235-58.
[75] Brown, Christianity & Western Thought, 309-29.
[76] It should be noted that Scottish Common Sense Realism offered a corrective to the Kantian “solution.” Brown, Christianity & Western Thought, 259-279.
[77] Sylvia Nasar, Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011), 11-47.
[78] Nasar, Grand Pursuit, 33-38.
[79] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, Michael Tanner, ed., Shaun Whiteside, trans. (New York: Harmondsworth, 1993). We are indebted to Kirsti Mensaas, “Ayn Rand’s recasting of Ancient Myths,” in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, 133, for this citation.
[80] There is no evidence in her writings and journals that she ever considered the Pauline discussion of this dilemma in Romans 6-8.
[81] Burns, Goddess, 29. This despite the fact she saw The Fountainhead as “a defense of egoism in its real meaning, egoism as a new faith,” Burns, 41.
[82] Ibid., 43.
[83] Ibid., 29.
[84] Not that man is capable of exhaustive knowledge, but that he is capable of accurate knowledge.
[85] We use the Bible in our references throughout this section not as the coercive tool Rand saw it to be but as the narrative presented as a “revelation” of the reality behind the phenomena of our sensory observations. The rational question is whether this text(s) presents a better formulation of reality than the non-theistic formulation of objectivism. In any case both Rand and the Bible claim that failure to live up to the constructive picture of reality they paint has life and death consequences. Only in this sense are they both coercive.
[86] A term coined by Thorstein Veblen in a previous century.
[87] See Seeking the City, for a fuller exegesis of this passage and the flood narrative. We will not enter the debate on the historicity of these recorded events except that we take them to be representative of actual historical reality. For our purposes here, we are demonstrating that the biblical explanation of man’s evil is a rational construct accounting for his behavior and the death that dogs his footsteps.
[88] For the most comprehensive scholarly presentation of the rational arguments and historical data supporting the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus see N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Augsberg, 2003).
[89] Modern scholarship is in substantial agreement that there was a spectrum of Jewish belief and practice that was not monolithic except in the affirmation of the One God and Israel’s place in the scheme of history.