If, in the collapse of philosphy, skepticism is the last step before religion rushes in to fill the void,
Stanley Fish's column in today's NY Times is the trial baloon signaling to the religious left that they can begin their assault on the tattered remains of rationality, with all that implies in the political realm:
Belief in science could be more superstitious than belief in religion.
Tellingly, among the targets of the column are those atheists who have recently trumpeted their own skepticism, such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, but who have also admitted their own impotence to answer just the kind of questions that the religionists are now proclaiming as the historical province of faith: the ultimate nature of man and existence, and the implications for his life on earth, which are to be found in morality.
Those who claim that religion has a monopoly on morality are, of course, wrong. Morality, as well as metaphysics, were at one time the province of philosophy. The first time philosophy abdicated its resposibility to provide human beings with the means to live their lives, the result was the Dark Ages.
But, then, there was no one to answer the skeptics by standing up for Reason. Now the situation is different. Dawkins and Hitchens are not the true defenders of Reason: there is another.
Her name is Ayn Rand.
And it is not religion that will be reborn, but philosophy: the philosophy of Objectivism.
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