Here is an excellent article by John Piper reviewing Atlas Shrugged on it's 50 year anniversary.
If you haven't read Atlas Shrugged you should, I had a very similar reaction to is as Piper describes in his article.
In his perfect Piper style he very eloquently explains the truths and the major flaw in Ayn Rands philosophy, mainly that it rejected that God was real.
I can perfectly relate to Piper's reaction to the book:
I was attracted and repulsed. I admired and cried. I was blown away with powerful statements of what I believed, and angered that she shut herself up in what Jonathan Edwards called the infinite provincialism of atheism. Her brand of hedonism was so close to my Christian Hedonism and yet so far—like a satellite that comes close to the gravitational pull of truth and then flings off into the darkness of outer space.
Rand particularly impressed upon me the reality of Justice in the universe, yet she rejected God. Ultimately her definition of Justice was subjectively based, although she didn't see it that way because her premise for reality was wrong. Ayn Rand said in Atlas Shrugged:
Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.
I wish she would have taken her own advise and checked her premises on her description of reality and realized that without a sovereign God to set the standard for Justice and righteousness then pure capitalism is as idealistic as pure communism. The ultimate stumbling stone in coming to this conclusion is that the only way for the justice of a sovereign God to be satisfied would be through the execution of an infinite punishment for sin. Since it would be impossible for us to bear this punishment and live, most simply reject the idea of a just God, or the idea of humans being fallen beings, instead of embracing the truth of the work of Christ on the Cross.
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