How Does Anyone Take These Guys Seriously?

I'm reading Rushdoony's excellent book, The One and the Many, an examination of the problem of universals and particulars in the different philosophies of unbelievers vs. its resolution in the Holy Trinity.

Reading the numerous quotations of modern philosophers, especially from Hegel onward, is brutal. Their long, boring, self-contradictory attempts to free man from God's sovereign rule are excruciating, and usually very silly at an ultimate level. For a bunch of atheists, these guys sure talk a lot about God.

I'm really left more astounded than I already was that anyone can buy into this crap. But men will do anything to cling to their illusions of autonomy, as Paul demonstrated. What's really interesting is that no one who holds to one of these philosophies--nihilism, existentialism, whatever the hell Wittgenstein-ism is--really lives his life that way. They go right along poaching on God's property, and so condemn themselves and their arguments.