The Moral Emptiness of Naturalism (Pt. II)

Yesterday I discussed an essay written by Richard Weikert on how modernity, which is characterized by a naturalistic metaphysics that excludes God, led to the massive bloodletting of the 20th century.

I'd like to continue looking at Weikert's column today as he focuses on one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century, Bertrand Russell.

Bertrand Russell was one of the most famous British philosophers of the twentieth century. In an essay written in 1903, Russell divulged a rather stark view of humanity:

That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins — all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.

Because he viewed humans as merely “accidental collocations of atoms” and thus as merely the product of random processes, Russell complained that Christianity and other religions were wrong to believe that the earth and its inhabitants have a special place in the cosmos.

In 1925 he underscored this point by stating: “The philosophy of nature must not be unduly terrestrial; for it, the earth, is merely one of the smaller planets of one of the smaller stars of the Milky Way. It would be ridiculous to warp the philosophy of nature in order to bring out results that are pleasing to the tiny parasites of this insignificant planet.”

If you didn’t catch it, those “tiny parasites” are you and I and all our fellow human beings.

This reminds one of the claim made by cosmologist Stephen Hawking that “The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies.”

Weikert continues:

In addition to denigrating humans as “tiny parasites,” Russell also stripped humans of any moral significance, claiming that morality was merely an expression of subjective desires or emotions. The moral command, “Thou shalt not kill,” according to Russell’s philosophy, does not really mean there is anything objectively wrong with murder. Rather, anyone making such a statement really means, “I don’t like killing.”

Moral statements are meaningless, Russell claimed, unless they are understood as merely an individual’s personal emotional preference. In his philosophy, then, Russell continually undermined any notion of objective morality or inalienable human rights.

Like most moderns, however, Russell couldn't live consistently with the entailments of his worldview. Having declared to the rest of us that there's no objective right nor wrong, Russell proceeded to live as if there is. He took a leap of faith, in other words, away from what his atheism told him was true and lived, at least to some extent, as if theism were true:

However, ironically, in his personal life he was an intense and committed moralist. In his Autobiography he stated that his whole life was animated by three passions: love, knowledge, and pity for human suffering. Indeed, in the same essay that he called humans “tiny parasites” with no cosmic significance, he also uttered the words, “The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.”

Russell’s passion for humanity also manifested itself in his opposition to nuclear arms. He even spent time in jail as a result of demonstrating for nuclear disarmament.

What was going on here? Was the arch-rational philosopher letting his emotions get the best of him? Whatever the explanation for this tension between his moral philosophy and his personal life, I am not the only one to notice the contradiction. In her memoirs about her life with her father, Russell’s daughter, Katherine Tait, called him a “passionate moralist” and an “absolutist” who would have been a saint in a more religious age in the past.

Ideas have consequences. If the consequences of our ideas, in Russell's case his atheism, are unlivable then there's doubtless something wrong with the ideas. Russell was not unaware of the tension:

Interestingly, now that we have access to some of Russell’s private correspondence, we also know that Russell was troubled by these inconsistencies in his life. In a private letter to a woman he loved he poured out his soul, explaining:

I am strangely unhappy because the pattern of my life is complicated, because my nature is hopelessly complicated; a mass of contradictory impulses; and out of all this, to my intense sorrow, pain to you must grow.

The centre of me is always and eternally a terrible pain — a curious wild pain — a searching for something beyond what the world contains, something transfigured and infinite — the beatific vision — God — I do not find it, I do not think it is to be found — but the love of it is my life — it’s like passionate love for a ghost.

At times it fills me with rage, at times with wild despair, it is the source of gentleness and cruelty and work, it fills every passion that I have — it is the actual spring of life within me. I can’t explain it or make it seem anything but foolishness — but whether foolish or not, it is the source of whatever is any good in me....At most times, now, I am not conscious of it, only when I am strongly stirred, either happily or unhappily.

I seek escape from it, though I don’t believe I ought to.

Russell's letter reveals the predicament of modern man. He recognizes his emptiness. He recognizes the contradiction between what his heart tells him is true and what his philosophy tells him he must believe. He has a profound inner yearning for God, but, despite being painfully conflicted, he simply will not yield himself to that which deep down he realizes has to be true.

Filled with angst from the tension between the emptiness within and the inability of his naturalistic worldview to satisfy it, he nevertheless refuses to conclude that his worldview is in error.

Russell's mistake, perhaps, was that he was looking for God to reveal Himself in some sort of supernal ecstacy or Pascalian emotional experience. But Russell, a man of reason and logic, had at his disposal all the intellectual and philosophical resources needed to justify a belief that God was real.

He didn't need the intense emotional revelation that Blaise Pascal experienced in order to jettison his atheism. All he needed was the willingness to submit to what his heart told him must be true, and that, for whatever reason, he was unable to do.

Monday we'll look at two contemporary figures whose thinking Weikert discusses in his essay.