Justin Taylor
Dec 14, 2102
Last night at the Iron Works Church there was a moderated debate between Augustine and Bertrand Russell—more more accurately, Carl Trueman representing Augustine’s worldview of Christian orthodoxy vs. Chad Trainer (chairman of the board of the Bertrand Russell Society) representing Russell’s agnostic/atheistic worldview. . . .
During the audience Q&A, a homeschooling mom asked how she could find satisfaction though she struggles with depression. Trainer/Russell responded that the lady was doing valuable work, and that in 20 years she might well be satisfied with what she has accomplished.
But on the Reformation21 blog today, Trueman asks, “what basis had the man who said the following to claim that this mother was doing anything worthwhile at all?”
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 labours 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. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.Trueman writes:
