The parallels and divergences are interesting. Both were intellectually gifted Jewish women, one born in a city which is now part of Poland, one in Petersburg (which I think, from what little I know of Russia, makes her pretty European). Rand disdained the very idea of God, came to America and had a successful career as a philosopher-novelist. Stein gave herself to God, became a Catholic and a Carmelite and a philosopher-mystic, and was swallowed up by the Nazi death machine.
Rand (actually Leonard Peikoff, her intellectual heir, by her own declaration, speaking in The Ayn Rand Lexicon):
“God” as traditionally defined is a systematic contradiction of every valid metaphysical principle. The point is wider than just the Judeo-Christian concept of God. No argument will get you from this world to a supernatural world. No reason will lead you to a world contradicting this one. No method of inference will enable you to leap from existence to a “super-existence.”
Stein:
…the fullness of the world we perceive with our senses holds more than what we can understand through the methods of natural science…..This world with all it discloses and all it conceals, it is just this world that also points beyond itself as a whole to him who “mysteriously reveals himself” through it. It is this world, with its referrings that lead us out beyond itself, that forms the intuitive basis for the arguments of natural theology.
Among the many interesting questions raised by this juxtaposition are these: which demands that more be accepted on blind faith? which stands in greater opposition to ordinary experience?
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