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I recently finished Atlas Shrugged. I didn’t even mean to bring it home, I went to the library looking for an atlas, and the book looked the right size. I kid, I kid.

But it is a long book. Seriously.

It’s a book with a purpose though… Ayn Rand is putting together a defense or maybe an explanation.of her philosophy in fictional form.

Let me get the easy part out of the way. I think she’s wrong. Not all wrong, but wrong in some pretty important ways.

But, where she’s right, she has some important things to say to the world we live in today. Where’s she right?

Well… first, there are things that are true absolutely. It was funny to read her “Bad guys” who insisted that there were no absolutes. They come off as totally ridiculous (Because they are)… and yet, I know that there are people in our world who hold the same views and are taken quite seriously.

Second, for a man to know anything, he must use reason. He must think for himself. The apathy that leads people to simply adopt the views of others as their own is as problematic in the real world as it is in her book.

Third, she’s right that a man’s actions ought to be governed by what makes him happy.

For essentially the last 200 pages of Atlas Shrugged, I thought…. hmm, so close, but so far away. As the characters in the book remind each other, if something doesn’t seem to add up, you have to check your premises. I wanted to shout, “Check your premises” when a main character railed against spirituality because God was inherently unknowable and therefore irrational and dangerous.

While I concur that God is unknowable (and dangerous), there’s a fatal flaw in their assumption. They presume that because God is unknowable (that is, we cannot know Him perfectly because He is eternal and we are finite), we cannot know what He’d have of us.

This, then, is the Christian response: We agree that man needs a rational, absolute basis to his morality. We also agree that man should be governed by that which makes him happiest.

However, God has revealed Himself to man. In revealing Himself to man, God also gave man the information needed to understand what God would have of him. And, the Christian affirms that man ought to be governed by happiness… but not a short-term, earth-oriented happiness. The first answer in the Westminster Shorter Catechism reads “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him for ever.”

If Ayn Rand or her characters were standing here today, I’d tell them how right they were and how wrong they were. I’d hope that they’d see the light. And even if they didn’t immediately, I’d probably be encouraged by them, because their worldview, at the very least, hinges on rationality. That means that at least we’re starting from the same place and we might get there eventually.

I’ve confessed in the past a tendency to read things because people say they’re great. Sometimes this results in grave disappointment (Hello there Toni Morrison, I’m looking at you), sometimes in indifference (Yeah, the three times I’ve read the first 100 pages of the Grapes of Wrath come to mind), and sometimes in abject delight.

Which, in reality, doesn’t prove anything at all except that enjoying a book is tied more to personality than to the book itself.

I’m reading Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. I started it because, well, it’s a classic. I realized 20 pages in that “it’s a classic” is a dumb reason to read a book. I gave her 30 more pages to make me care about the story. She did that, by proving the environment to be interesting, the characters to be interesting — not in a human sense, but in an archetypal sense.

So, I’ll let you know how it goes, but I’m glad to say that I’m reading it for the story, not for the “classic.” Here’s hoping the story delivers.