QuestionsDoes life have a meaning?Meaning without design: a free man's worship
Does life have a meaning?A meaning to create

Meaning without design: a free man's worship

Bertrand Russell 1872 · 1970Clarify thought with logic, doubt dogmas.
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What it claims

Life has no meaning given by the universe, but it can have one: the meaning we give it by freely serving the good and helping our fellow travellers.

Why

The world has no purpose; bowing to it is a slave's submission, whereas serving chosen ideals gives life meaning.

In short

"Meaning without design: a free man's worship" is an argument by Bertrand Russell (A Free Man's Worship, 1903) on the question "Does life have a meaning?" (answer: a meaning to create). Its claim: Life has no meaning given by the universe, but it can have one: the meaning we give it by freely serving the good and helping our fellow travellers. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P4). AskPhilosophy presents 5 objections, 4 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

A Free Man's Worship, 1903
Valid with an implicit premise

Russell is 30 when he writes this short essay. Science, he says, describes a purposeless world: man is the product of blind causes, and everything he has built will end in the death of the solar system. Should we despair? Russell argues that, on the contrary, it is from there, on "the firm foundation of unyielding despair", that a meaningful life can be built. That meaning does not come from the universe: it comes from the ideals we choose to serve.

P1The world described by science has no design: man is the product of causes that had no foresight of what they were achieving, and no life survives the grave. The universe gives us no ready-made meaning.
P2Faced with such a world, two attitudes remain: worship Force, that is, bow before the world as it is, or worship Goodness, an ideal our own conscience conceives.
P3Worshipping Force is a slave's submission, since facts are often bad. If Power is bad, we must reject it from our hearts. And man can do so: he remains free to judge, to know and to create in thought.
P4 · implicit premiseServing chosen ideals (truth, beauty, goodness, helping others) is enough to give a life meaning, even if the universe ignores it and even if everything must end.
Therefore life has no meaning given by the universe, but it can have one: the meaning we give it by freely serving the good and helping our fellow travellers.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P4, the computer finds a world where the universe has no design, where one refuses to worship force and serves the good, but where this gives life no meaning: the nihilist's world, in which, in the end, nothing matters.
Valid with P4, which Russell does not justify: he lives it more than he proves it. It is the most debated point. A believer will say that a meaning nothing guarantees, and which will disappear with us, is not really one; a nihilist will say that choosing goodness over force is worth no more than the reverse. Russell himself retreated on one point: in 1917 he writes that he is less convinced of the objectivity of good and evil, but keeps the attitude towards life the essay proposes.
Analogy. A score is not worthless because the concert hall will one day be demolished. What matters is the music played while we are here, and for whom we play it. For Russell, the universe is the hall; meaning is the music.

Objections

5

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Objection anticipated by Russell (Promethean revolt) attacks premise 2

There is a third attitude: neither bowing nor contemplating, but revolt. Defy a hostile universe like Prometheus, keep its evil always in view and hate it. (Camus would defend a revolt of this kind in 1942.)

Russell replies
Russell
Indignation is still a bondage: it compels our thoughts to stay occupied with an evil world. Revolt keeps a kind of self-assertion the wise must overcome. Freedom comes from submitting our desires, not our thoughts.
F
Father Copleston (1948 debate) 1948 · attacks premise 4

If God does not exist, human beings and history have no purpose other than the one they give themselves. In practice, that will be the purpose imposed by those with the power to impose it. A "chosen" meaning therefore offers no protection against the law of the strongest.

Russell replies
Russell
Russell grants the essential point: "roughly speaking, yes". But he specifies that he would have to limit the last part of the sentence, the one saying that the purpose will be imposed by the strongest. He does not elaborate further at this point in the debate.
F
Father Copleston (1948 debate) 1948 · attacks premise 3

Without God, without an absolute Being, there are no absolute values: it follows that all values are relative. So why serve Goodness rather than Force?

Russell replies
Russell
These are two logically distinct questions. G. E. Moore, for instance, holds that good and evil are definite concepts, without bringing in God to support that view.
The debate goes on (our summary) Copleston could answer that Russell cites Moore without adopting his view: later in the debate, Russell himself tells good from bad "by his feelings".
F
Father Copleston (1948 debate) 1948 · attacks premise 3

If good and evil are only a matter of feeling, there is no longer any objective criterion for condemning the commandant of the Belsen camp, to whom his acts were pleasant. Russell rejects Force in the name of Goodness, but his theory does not allow him to say why.

Russell replies
Russell
No more criterion than for the colour-blind person, who is in exactly the same case. Why do we judge that the colour-blind man is wrong? Isn't it because he is in the minority?
The debate goes on (our summary) Copleston answers that we judge the colour-blind man not because he is in the minority, but because he lacks something that normally belongs to human nature. If the good is only a majority feeling, disagreement with the commandant of Belsen becomes a matter of numbers, not of truth.
William Lane Craig 1994 · attacks premise 4

If everything ends in the death of the universe, nothing we do makes any difference in the end. A self-given meaning is an illusion: we act "as if" life mattered. Without God and immortality, life is absurd. Russell has the courage to say so, but nobody can live consistently on "unyielding despair": one has to borrow on the sly a meaning his worldview does not supply.

no reply
summary: their text is not yet in our corpus
No reply possible: objection raised in 1994, after the author's death (1970).