Saturday, November 25, 2006

There He Goes Again (VI)

Peikoff continues his attack on Christianity in lecture 13 of DIM. He argues that the early Christians opposed science because it was the "lust of the eyes." Peikoff makes a similar attack on Augustine in OPAR saying that Augustine would have opposed blood tests as the "lust of the eyes." He doesn't given any citations or sources for these statements.

It doesn't appear that Augustine was a huge fan of science. At the same time, he didn't oppose it either. In fact, he believed that a literal reading of Genesis might have to be corrected based on the findings of astronomy.

Fred Seddon has an interesting discussion of Augustine in his Ayn Rand, Objectivists, and the History of Philosophy. He points out that Augustine developed the "stolen concept fallacy" long before Rand (or Branden).

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