And Shooting Himself in the Foot

In chapter 29 of Greg Bahnsen’s Always Ready, he puts his apologetic approach to practice against Bertrand Russell using Russell’s famous essay Why I Am Not a Christian. Yesterday I quoted two paragraphs from this chapter in a post titled Firing an Unloaded Gun. Here’s how the chapter continues:

Bertrand Russell made no secret of the fact that he intellectually and personally disdained religion in general, and Christianity in particular. In the preface to the book of his critical essays on the subject of religion he wrote: “I am as firmly convinced that religions do harm as I am that they are untrue.” He repeatedly charges in one way or another that a free man who exercises his reasoning ability  cannot submit to religious dogma. He argued that religion was a hindrance to the advance of civilization, that it cannot cure our troubles, and that we do not survive death.

We are treated to a defiant expression of metaphysical materialism—perhaps Russell’s most notorious essay for a popular reading audience—in the article (first published in 1903) entitled “A Free Man’s Worship.” He there concluded: “Brief and powerless is man’s life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way.” In the face of this nihilism and ethical subjectivism, Russell nevertheless called men to the invigoration of the free man’s worship: “to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of chance….”

Hopefully the brazen contradiction in Russell’s philosophy of life is already apparent to the reader. He asserts that our ideals and values are not objective and supported by the nature of reality, indeed that they are fleeting and doomed to destruction. On the other hand, quite contrary to this, Russell encourages us to assert our autonomous values in the face of a valueless universe—to act as though they really amounted to something worthwhile, were rational, and not merely the result of chance. But, after all, what sense could Russell hope to make of an immaterial value (an ideal) in the face of an “omnipotent matter” which is blind to values? Russell only succeeded in shooting himself in the foot.