Bertrand Russell (known as “Bertie” to his friends) was arguably the leading academic atheist in the early twentieth century. He wrote a book called, Why I am Not a Christian. Sadly, Russell fell into the trap (later developed into a fine art by Richard Dawkins) of building grotesque caricatures of Christianity – which he found easy to destroy. His daughter, Katherine (who became a Christian) wrote about this habit of his, saying: “When [father] wanted to attack religion, he sought out its most egregious errors and held them up to ridicule, while avoiding serious discussion of the basic message.”[1]
Russell was determined to hold on to his atheism in defiance of his strict Protestant upbringing. His passion for doing so may have been partly fuelled by his sexual appetite, for he found the moral boundaries of Christianity inconvenient to his quest for sexual happiness. However, his atheism came at some cost to his peace of mind. His daughter, Katherine, wrote:
“I believe myself that his whole life was a search for God…. Indeed, he had first taken up philosophy in hope of finding proof of the evidence of the existence of God … Somewhere at the back of my father’s mind, at the bottom of his heart, in the depths of his soul [which he did not believe he had] there was an empty space that had once been filled by God, and he never found anything else to put in it”[2]
Russell’s lack of peace was well expressed in a poem he wrote to Edith, his fourth wife. The first stanza of the poem says:
Through the long years
I have sought peace,
I found ecstasy,
I found anguish,
I found madness,
I found loneliness.
I found the solitary pain
that gnaws the heart,
But peace I did not find.[3]
This is such a terribly sad epitaph.
Atheism is not kind to those who dare to think.
Jesus said he had come to seek and save those who were lost (Luke 19:10). So if you are feeling lost and without meaning, do seek Jesus out.
[1] Katharine Tait, My Father Bertrand Russell(South Bend, IN:St. Augustine’s Press, 75th edition, 1996), 188.
[2] Ibid, 185.
[3] Bertrand Russell, in: Ray Monk, Bertrand Russell, The Spirit of Solitude, 1872-1921, (Free Press, 2016), xix. Russell wrote this in the preface of his Autobiography.
