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The article quotes Bertrand Russell: “The first dogma which I came to disbelieve was that of free will.…” If there’s no free will, then no one can be held accountable for anything. Of course, it is absurd to believe that a mere concatenation of atoms assembled deterministically through blind natural processes can evolve itself into an existential state of freedom, and therefore become morally culpable. Therefore, it is unreasonable to hold a human being (who supposedly evolved in this way) responsible for his acts, even those acts which cause injury to others, because in a deterministic universe the human being simply couldn’t have done anything different. Man’s morality is qualitatively no different than the “morality” of the beasts of the field (i.e., instinctual nature). So man is “free” to be bestial. Ironically, Lord Russell’s nugatory freedom ends up being smuggled in, willy-nilly through the backdoor, as the real thing with no rational basis whatsoever.
One imagines that Bertrand Russell did not really live in a way that was thoroughly consistent with his worldview. Certainly his sexual promiscuity was well enough explained or “justified” by it: He just couldn’t help himself, and anyway, there was no reason to. But how does Russell’s vision of human (non)freedom square with the Principia Mathematica? Is this magisterial work the result of a random natural process, or was human freedom — specifically, creative freedom — somehow involved in its production?
Russell has elaborated his worldview as it specifically pertains to man. He says
That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his hopes, his fears, his loves and 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 the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins … only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built. — Why I Am Not a Christian, 1957Again, one wonders: If Russell really believed this, how would he explain himself? He acknowledges the existence of “truths.” That is to say, of absolutes; but his worldview would appear to preclude such. Ditto for soul, which he also mentions. There is nothing in this belief that can account for the fact that Lord Russell was a world-class mathematician, logician, analytic philosopher, and historian. None of these fields can be reduced to the materialist/naturalist explanation his stated worldview would seem to demand. Yet instead of dismissing them as irrelevant as his theory would seem to demand, he chose to trouble himself over them. And was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature (1950) “in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought.” In short, instead of living consistently with his stated beliefs, his life work testifies that he consistently did exactly otherwise. I have a suspicion that Lord Russell was completely aware of all this, and was just “funning us,” or “pulling our leg,” with such histrionics as showcased above.
Whatever the case, it’s here that the problem of “second realities” — of which Russell’s stated worldview is a prime example — becomes evident: They cannot be consistently lived even by their own articulators. That is, they are ultimately self-contradictory.
The materialist worldview at the heart of Darwinism claims that the physical universe is causally closed, that life emerged spontaneously from “dumb matter” in a purely naturalistic process, then further speciated by means of a process of pure, blind chance (“random variation”) plus natural selection that has no particular end or purpose in view beyond the pragmatic issue of species fitness for self-replication and thus survival. Individuals mean nothing; and it seems especially human individuals mean nothing: there is no way Darwinism can shed any light whatsoever on the issue of personality. And, notwithstanding Russell alluded to the “soul” in the above quote, such things are ruled out in principle by the relentless presupposition of materialism/naturalism.
In short, on this theory we have a perfectly “depersonalized” universe. And the theory seems well calculated to obviate any idea of a personal beginning of the universe — for this would not be a “natural” phenomenon. Indeed, this seems to be the main charm of the theory for many people nowadays. And yet, with an impersonal beginning, we have no way of accounting for the universal facts of human experience and existence.
In an ultimately impersonal universe, there is no such thing as true morality, yet humans cannot rid themselves of the nagging notion that some things are truly right and others are truly wrong. In other words, this position reduces humanity to a freak of nature. Personality in general and moral sensibilities in particular have been coughed up by chance, kicking us “out of line” with an intrinsically impersonal, amoral world. In such a context, moral motions are entirely abnormal, thoroughly absurd and finally futile. … this is the “ultimate cosmic alienation, the dilemma of our generation.” …These passages address something this author often writes about — the various species of “gnostic revolts,” a/k/a “second realities” that have cropped up in human history, and in particularly severe form in the twentieth century forward. Their common factor seems to be the inordinate desire to abolish all absolutes moral and rational so to enable the construction of a field for magical operations that will abolish reality as we know it and transform it into something more compatible with our human wishes and desires. Without absolutes, reality can be only chaotic and relativistic, an ataxia, an utter formlessness, just begging for an ordering principle that the magician du jour tells us he will impose, thereby to recreate reality in more pleasing form.What we find … are two basic options for the person who embraces impersonal presuppositions. Either one can rationally follow the inescapable logic of an all-inclusive determinism to a position of “unyielding despair,” or one can ignore the logical implications of this position and opt for an irrational, optimistic leap into the realm of mystical meaning. The former option preserves intellectual integrity but leads to physical suicide, while the latter preserves physical integrity but leads to intellectual suicide. Neither option, however, can offer a fully integrated, holistic solution. Physical death or intellectual death: these are the only two options available to our woefully divided world. (Burson & Walls, C. S. Lewis & Francis Schaeffer, 1998)
As if this were remotely possible. It should be clear to any reasonable person that it is not. And reasonable people know that absent an absolute standard, reason itself would be powerless.
Ms. Kimball in other writings has pointed out that all such systems take the form of doctrinal “monism.” I think she is right about this; for such “gnostic revolts” ultimately are projections of a distinct, monadic Ego — “monadic” in that it has chosen to act “autonomously” by separating itself from the constraints of human reason and experience in order to generate a new and better creation than the one humans beings have been living in for countless millennia. And if history tells us anything, it is that typically such an Ego does so for self-serving purposes.
Plato understood the basic problem as follows: In the area of knowledge, as in the area of morals, there must be more than particulars if there is to be meaning. “Knowledge” without meaning is simply undigested data and, therefore, not true knowledge. In short, “we need universal categories and standards to make sense of and give meaning to all the diverse particulars in our world…. Such classification increases our comprehension, unifies our knowledge and sets the necessary epistemological parameters to make sense of the world.” [ibid.]
But of course, "universal categories and standards" are not "natural objects." And therein lies the rub for materialists and naturalists....
I’ve run on so long, I’m obliged to close here before getting into any speculation as to why human beings construct systems that deny the reason, experience, and common sense of universal humanity. To me, this is a deeply mysterious phenomenon and seemingly widespread today. Henri Bergson suggested a fertile way to engage this problem: his concepts of l’ame overt and l’ame close — the “open soul” and the “closed soul” — which might lead in turn to the consideration of a “disease” widely recognized in former times, but which present-day humanity seems to have forgotten all about. Maybe we could revisit this issue some time later on.
Thank you ever so much, spirited irish, for posting this outstanding article, “Creation vs Darwinism: God and Liberty vs Man and Tyranny.”