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Title: Without A Prayer: Ayn Rand and the Close of Her System (Trinity Papers No. 50) by John W. Robbins ISBN: 0-940931-50-8 Publisher: Trinity Foundation Pub. Date: 10 June, 1997 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $27.95

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Average Customer Rating: 3.22 (9 reviews)

Rating: 3
Summary: Strange Brew
Comment: In 1974, John Robbins came out with Answer to Ayn Rand, a work that criticized Ayn Rand's Objectivist philosophy from a Calvinist perspective based on the philosophy of Gordon Clark. Clark was a rationalist who denied that there could be any proofs for God's existence. His philosophy was also excessively anti-empiricist.

Robbins updated and expanded that work in 1997 under the new name ,Without a Prayer. This book is certainly worth reading, but -- while it was one of the better discussions of Objectivism at the time -- it has been superseded by other works.

I must first object to the macabre cover. On the front of the work is Rand's tombstone and the back, that of her husband Frank O'Connor. What's the point?

In any event, the substance of this work isn't quite that bad. There are a couple of excellent chapters -- those dealing with her theory of concept formation and also the religious nature of Objectivism. Robbins has an eye for showing the contradictions and false assumptions of Objectivism, but at times he gives the least charitable interpretation of something Rand said to then contrast it with something else she said, in order to make Rand look silly or muddleheaded. Of course, Rand was these things at times, but not even she deserves to be unnecessarily held up to ridicule.

Some of the work is mediocre and at times borders on the scurrilous. For example, Robbins tells us that "Their [Christians] continued existence under Objectivist government has already been the subject of debate in Objectivist circles . . . ." [p. 210.] Of course, there is no citation to such a "debate." A society based on Objectivism certainly wouldn't be hospitable to the senile, the retarded, and anyone who doesn't agree with Rand. But to imply that Objectivists advocate the murder of Christians is to out-Rand Rand at her worst. While Mr. Robbins rightly protests that Leonard Peikoff wrongly equates the rise of Nazism with Christianity, he no has qualms of stooping to Peikoff's level (or worse) when he attacks Objectivism.

Robbins even gets silly when describing David Kelley as a "radio receiver channeling omnipresent energy." [p. 37 n. 25.] Rand said some foolish things in her day, but I don't recall reading anything so silly as that.

This book is to be commended on one ground, however. Mr. Robbins has no doubt introduced a great many people to the thought of Gordon Clark, one of the most influential apologists in recent history.

Rating: 1
Summary: An emarassment to _thinking_ Christians everywhere.
Comment: This books claims to engage Rand "where she wished to be engaged--at the level of philosophical argument." As a Christian who is also an admirer of Ayn Rand, I found Mr. Robbins' arguments to be grossly inadequate. I actually found this very disappointing, since I profoundly disagree with Rand on several issues and was hoping to fid a book that would provide ammunition for engaging Objectivists in a reasoned debate. I will have to keep looking.
In the foreword, Mr. Robbins wastes no time in calling Rand's philosophy "deadly poison," then he attempts to "prove" his point using out-of-context quotes and word twisting. Let's look at one glaring example from the second chapter:
Mr. Robbins quotes Rand as saying that "reason" is "the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by man's senses." He then claims that she equivocated on the meaning of "reason" when she said that "reason is the only objective means of communication and understanding among men." This claim is absolutely ridiculous. The former quote is the definition of reason; the latter is a description of one of its many uses--there is no equivocation here.
Mr. Robbins makes the claim that "Christianity and Objectivism have no presuppositions or propositions in common. They have no common ground." Thank goodness that is not the case; for if it were, then Christianity would have no foundation. Is not the most basic presupposition of Objectivism that existence exists?
By inference one might conclude that Mr. Robbins does not believe in existence. But as president of the Trinity Foundation, he believes that one God exists in three Persons. If he really believes that Christianity and Objectivism have no common ground, then he is guilty of the fallacy of the stolen concept, for the concept of existence is necessary in order to believe that God exists.
That error in itself may be a simple oversight. Unfortunately, it is only the tip of the iceberg. In the final chapter of this book, Mr. Robbins introduces us to the philosophy of Gordon H. Clark, which he calls Scripturalism. Unfortunately, Scripturalism's epistemology is only workable if you first accept Objectivism's entire epistemology as a presupposition! Mr. Robbins makes the incredible claim that the Bible is the source of all knowledge. How are we to read and understand the Bible in the first place if we cannot engage in the very process of concept formation that is central to Objectivist epistemology?
While Mr. Robbins rightly pointed out some serious errors in the conclusions Rand came to, he failed in his chief aim, which was to destroy the foundation of Objectivism. I hope that anyone, and especially any Objectivists, who are unfortunate enough to read this book will also take a look at the works of Norman Geisler before drawing any conclusions about true Christianity.

Rating: 3
Summary: A Calvinist's attempt to bury Objectivism
Comment: "The desirability of the conclusion is no substitute for argument, and those who allow themselves to be deceived by arguments because they like the conclusions are poor philosophers." - John W. Robbins

John W. Robbins is an intellectual UFO. A Christian, he discovered Ayn Rand while in college and, admiring her "uncompromising vision... of how the world might be and ought to be" and her "portrayals of rational, creative, and intransigeant individuals", he "read all that Rand published". Even today, he agrees with many of her positions, such as "her praise of purpose and productive work, her condemnation of lazinesss, her enthusiasm for private property, her advocacy of laissez-faire capitalism and limited government, her attacks on altruism, her support of egoism and her vigorous defense of logic."

However, Robbins is not an Objectivist, but a follower of evangelical Protestant philosopher Gordon H. Clark, some of whose shorter pieces are included in the appendices. Robbins defines Clark's philosophy as "scripturalism", a doctrine according to which "all our thoughts- there are no exceptions- are to be brought into conformity to Scripture, for all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are contained in Scripture." Among the corollaries of this position are the idea that evolution is "the greatest superstition of the twentieth century", and an extremely negative (Popperian) view of science, according to which "all the laws of science are false, and all have the same probability: zero" because they are "conclusions of logically fallacious arguments".

In Objectivist terms, he is a pure intrinsicist: he believes that we have access to infallible propositional truths, which are delivered to us directly from the mind of God via Scripture, and that all our knowledge either comes directly from Revelation or from logical deductions from it. A pure rationalist, too, he totally rejects empirical evidence as a possible basis for knowledge, and reduces logic to deduction, denying even the possibility of induction ("Truth cannot be derived from something non-propositional, such as 'observations'. Unless one starts with propositions, one cannot end with propositions.")

Most people - and especially most Objectivists - would be tempted to dismiss him as a wacky fundamentalist, but I personally respect Christians and even admire some Catholics, and I even share some of Robbins' ethics and politics, so I was willing to listen.

Actually, *Ayn Rand and the Close of her System* contains excellent points against Objectivism, some of which I had already arrived at by my own thinking. I particularly liked, for instance, Robbins's argument that what the "primacy of existence" actually means is "the primacy of unconsciousness"; his identification of the bias inherent in the "indestructible robot" example used to justify the concept of life as the root of value (the robot is assumed to be impassible and unchangeable); or the argument that Rand's ethics would "seem to permit, if not require, murderers to fight against their just punishment" and is "completely compatible with a pro-death, pro-suicide point of view" - among many other highly interesting points.

I am not saying that Robbins has refuted Objectivism, only that some of his points corroborated or even refined my own understanding of the problems of the philosophy and raised objections I am currently unable to answer. Of course, not every argument is of a high caliber. Robbins occasionally resorts to ad hominem, sarcasm or straw man arguments. Moreover, even though he does understand many of the points he discusses, he is prey to a certain number of false alternatives, assuming for instance that the non-intrinsicist is necessarily a Kantian subjectivist or that a volitional theory of consciousness must necessarily exclude the possibility of automatic processes at all levels, including the sub-conscious.

In fact, if true, Robbins' critique would be devastating not only for Objectivism, but for modern science (including psychology and psychiatry, which he rejects as "pseudo-science" and "witchdoctory") and the whole empiricist tradition in philosophy. He is particularly virulent against Aristotle, whom, contrary to Rand who saw in him "the first of our Founding Fathers", he calls an "explicit totalitarian" and a "fascist". But Rand's interpretation is vindicated in such Objectivist works as Robert Mayhew's *Aristotle's Criticism of Plato's Republic* or F. D. Miller's *Nature, Justice and Rights in Aristotle's Politics*. As for Robbins' attacks on the Objectivist politics, it seems to focus on rather careless statements of the theory, and might not be as effective against the more scholarly derivation of the Objectivist position in Tara Smith's *Moral Rights and Political Freedom*.

Even though Robbins' own point of view is untenable and he is not always a very nice person, I think his book is worthy of close scrutiny and deserves a systematic Objectivist answer.