In 1901, he experienced what he explained “was not unlike what religious people call a ‘conversion.’”[1] Russell had embraced atheism and suggested that people could avoid the miseries of the world by escaping into their thoughts and aspirations for a better world.

 

We must submit perpetually to the tyranny of outside forces; but in thought, in aspiration, we are free, free from our fellow men, freed from the petty planet on which our bodies impotently crawl, free even, while we live, from the tyranny of death. Let us learn, then, that energy of faith which enables us to live constantly in the vision of the good; and let us descend, in action, into the world of fact, with that vision always before us.[2]

 

While there are numerous problems with Russell’s arguments presented in Why I Am Not a Christian, this review will focus on just three of them: (1) Russell’s failure to recognize the impotence of science in addressing metaphysical issues, (2) his inconsistency on ethical standards, and (3) his distortion of Christianity and its impact upon the world.

 

In the early twentieth century, at the height of the Progressive movement, Bertrand Russell emerged as a passionate advocate for not only atheism, but anti-theism. Though few shared his irreligious beliefs, he cleverly wrapped his unpopular atheism inside of the prevailing sentiments of the Progressive era. This era was plagued by man’s dangerously naïve dreams of a utopian society. In the mid-1920s, it became evident that Russell had latched onto the prospects of scientific advancement as a means of realizing his aforementioned “vision of the good.” Not only had science rendered religion unnecessary, Russell theorized that unbridled scientific advancement coupled with reason would eventually perfect the world and humanity. He suggested, “There is probably no limit to what science can do in the way of increasing positive excellence.”[3]

 

Some of Russell’s speculations read more like a science-fiction novel than a philosophic treatise. For example, he believed that science would eventually overcome man’s corrupt nature. He predicted, “Nature, even human nature, will cease more and more to be an absolute datum; more and more it will become what scientific manipulation has made it. Science can, if it chooses, enable our grandchildren to live the good life…”[4]

 

In his writings, science assumes the role as the omnipotent savior of mankind, which can pour out its blessings upon you if it chooses. According to Russell, man no longer needed the gods to explain the great mysteries of the universe. Instead, science was seen as the deliverer who had liberated man from religious fears of hell and judgment.

 

Science can help us to get over this craven fear in which mankind has lived for so many generations. Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a fit place to live in, instead of the sort of place that the churches in all these centuries have made it.[5]

 

Forty-five years after penning these words, Russell died having never witnessed the scientific utopia of his dreams. Ironically, he spent much of his life battling the evils born by mankind’s scientific advances. In 1955, he was the lead sponsor of the “Russell-Einstein Manifesto,” which pleaded with western nations to abandon nuclear proliferation.[6]

 

Though Russell lived an atheistic life crippled by both fear and pity, he often criticized religion for engendering a fear of God and final judgment. By his own admission, Russell felt that the God of the Bible would have to be terribly cruel if He were to force mankind to face judgment or eternal punishment.

 

Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear…. Fear is the basis of the whole thing—fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand.”[7]

 

Russell believed that science could free people from these religion-induced fears. However, he failed to address the fears born of the greater metaphysical questions in life. What scientific advancement could possibly quell the desperate longings expressed by the author of Ecclesiastes? I would contend that the failure to answer the deeper questions involving existence, justice, purpose, suffering, and death would only lead people into even greater fear and desperate suffering. Science cannot answer these questions. Consequently, Russell could only urge his fellow man to escape into imaginative dreams of a better world. As an agnostic admirer of Russell’s works, even Albert Einstein ultimately recognized that “science without religion is lame.”[8] It cannot answer the weightier issues of life.

 

Though Russell considered himself a humanitarian devoted to love and knowledge, he considered any idea of ultimate accountability unacceptable. This arrogant refusal to answer to his Creator led him to “suppress the truth.” As Plato once taught, atheism is a disease of the soul before it becomes an error of the understanding.[9]

 

The Scriptures paint a dark picture of atheists. Paul’s letter to the Romans makes it abundantly clear that the truth of God is made plain to all men, but unbelievers “suppress the truth by their wickedness” (Rom 1:18-19 niv). Paul warns that while an unbeliever may claim to be wise, he is actually a fool (Rom 1:22 niv). Likewise, the Psalms tells us that only a fool attempts to convince himself that “there is no god” (Ps 14:1 niv). Indeed, many of Bertrand Russell’s arguments are tragically foolish.

 

With no thoughts of eternal consequences, Russell viewed the present life as the sum of all things. All that remained was to “take life easy; eat, drink and be merry” (Luke 12:19). For Russell, enjoyment and personal desires were the definitive factors in shaping his ideas in the realm of ethics. “Outside human desires there is no moral standard,” he wrote. “Thus, what distinguishes ethics from science is not any special kind of knowledge but merely desire.”[10]

 

Using “human desires” as the plumb line for moral standards, Russell berated Christianity, because its ethical standards supposedly impeded maximum human pleasures. “It is not only intellectually but also morally that religion is pernicious,” he wrote. “I mean by this that it teaches ethical codes which are not conducive to human happiness.”[11]

 

However, by professing that all moral standards are determined solely by human desires, Russell forfeited any warrant to universally denounce any other system. He argues that “human desires” are the foundation for moral standards, yet he repeatedly makes moral judgments about the desires of others. If human desires are the foundation for all moral standards, by what authority does Russell denounce another’s desires? Unless there is a higher law to judge between “human desires,” Russell would be groundless to condemn another’s person’s desired behavior — whether it includes worshipping God or raping a child. Nevertheless, he builds numerous such cases berating the Christian faith.

 

If ethics are left for men to decide, then there can be no absolute standards, because power and cultural norms are always shifting. Russell’s attempt to use atheistic reasoning in developing moral standards is like a madman warning ships about underwater rocks by planting a caution flag atop a wayward buoy. If the buoy is left to shift and drift with the waves and currents, then such a marker is worthless to all others navigating the waters. Only if the flag is anchored to an unmovable object can it be of any real value to others.

 

In his classic How Shall We Then Live?, Francis Schaeffer explained:

 

There must be an absolute if there are to be morals, and there must be an absolute if there are to be real values. If there is no absolute beyond man’s ideas, then there is no final appeal to judge between individuals and groups whose moral judgments conflict. We are merely left with conflicting opinions.[12]

 

Though Russell freely acknowledges that there is a need for an ethical framework for society, he is unable to determine how society may identify right and wrong. He believed that there must be a social contract to restrain evil and allow for prosperity in a civil society, but he failed to explain the process of determining whose “desires” ultimately become moral standards. Instead, he only claims that citizens must surrender personal desires for the sake of societal prosperity. He explained, “It is a method of enabling men to live together in a community in spite of the possibility that their desires may conflict.”[13]

 

Another disappointment in reading Russell’s analysis of the Christian faith was his willingness to build up and tear down straw men. Though he justifiably points to many great travesties in the history of the church, his writings are littered with instances in which he cheats both Scripture and history just to paint Christianity in the worst possible light.

 

For example, Russell rejects the apologetic argument of design by stating:

 

When you come to look into this argument from design, it is a most astonishing thing that people can believe that this world, with all the things that are in it, with all its defects, should be the best that omnipotence and omniscience have been able to produce in millions of years. I really cannot believe it.[14]

 

Quite frankly, no orthodox Christian would believe that statement either. The Scripture tells us that the creation was created “good,” but it was cursed when man rebelled (Gen 3:17). Scripture plainly teaches us that “the whole creation groans,” but it will eventually “be set free from its slavery to corruption” (Rom 8:21-22). Never does Scripture claim that the modern universe is the very best possible production of an omnipotent God. Though the world might be fallen, Russell goes too far in claiming that the natural laws governing the universe can be reduced to “just the sort that would emerge from chance.”[15]

 

He also stretched and distorted biblical texts to make Jesus appear like a cruel master. For example, he insinuated that Jesus demonstrated a childish temper — condemning “people who did not like His preaching.”[16] After criticizing Jesus for speaking of the unforgivable sin, Russell said, “I really do not think that a person with a proper degree of kindliness in his nature would have put fears and terrors of that sort into the world.” Russell referred to the doctrine of hell as “a doctrine of cruelty.” Perhaps most offensive of all, Russell suggested that Jesus repeatedly spoke of hell and the torturous scenarios (i.e., “wailing and gnashing of teeth”) as if He took “a certain pleasure” in masochistic fantasies.[17] He even criticized Jesus for casting demons into swine.[18]

 

Despite all of Russell’s descriptions of Jesus as the tyrannical judge who delights in the eternal torment of his enemies, he actually opened his address conceding that Jesus held “a very high degree of moral goodness.”[19] Yet as C.S. Lewis noted, it is illogical to ascribe moral goodness to Jesus unless He truly was the Christ.

 

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse.[20]

 

Russell not only mocked our Lord; he consistently failed to mention any of the positive historical accomplishments of the church — like advancing science, education, abolitionist causes, hospitals, and charity. In fact, he went so far as to declare that Christianity has been the “principal enemy of moral progress in the world.”[21]

 

Speaking of the behaviors of individual Christians, Russell states, “One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it.”[22] Russell said these words in 1927. Tragically, the subsequent decades unveiled the depths of depravity to which man can fall apart from the restraining grace of God expressed through His church. The twentieth century witnessed more deaths at the hands of secular regimes (e.g., Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot) than all other deaths in all other wars throughout all of human history combined.[23]

 

Not only did Russell fail to see his utopian speculations come to fruition, but he later admitted that his personal life was plagued by anguish and despair. In the preface of his autobiography What I Have Lived For, Russell summarized his life:

 

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.[24]

 

Science was unable to address the metaphysical issues that plagued Russell’s heart. He mistakenly believed that abolishing a societal belief in God and unleashing the creative powers of science would alleviate man’s fears and sufferings rather than compounding them. He placed his greatest hopes in mankind and scientific advancement, yet — as an elderly man — Bertrand Russell ultimately recognized that his saviors had failed him. Consider the haunting desperation expressed in his twilight years:

 

But now all this has shrunk to be no more than my own reflection in the windows of the soul through which I look out upon the night of nothingness…. No dungeon was ever constructed so dark and narrow as that in which the shadow physics of our time imprisons us, for every prisoner has believed that outside his walls a free world existed; but now the prison has become the whole universe. There is darkness without, and when I die there will be darkness within. There is no splendor, no vastness anywhere, only triviality for a moment and then nothing. Why live in such a world? Why even die?[25]

 

It is no surprise that Russell’s worldview ultimately collapsed into despair. Apart from Christ, all attempts to find purpose in this world come to the same conclusion — vanity. In his essay “The Abolition of Man,” C.S. Lewis pointed out that philosophers and scientists are usually at odds over how to best achieve the good life. The philosopher seeks for ways to conform the soul to fit reality, while scientists search for ways to bend reality to fit the soul.[26] The former stresses virtue and wisdom, while the latter stresses techniques and breakthroughs. Yet in the thousands of years of recorded history, neither philosopher nor scientist has ever been able to successfully reconcile the broken souls of men to the fallen nature of this world. While both fields of study are helpful to man, neither field can solve man’s deepest longings. Christ alone is the answer to this dilemma. He alone can turn both marred souls and a groaning world into incorruptible new creations.

 

Sadly, Russell went to the grave mourning his own weaknesses rather than boasting in the strength of Christ to overcome this broken and tragic world.

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