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Unit 2: A Free Man’s Worship by Bertrand Russell

result was six months in prison (see, e.g., Hardy 1942). Russell also ran unsuccessfully for Notes
Parliament (in 1907, 1922, and 1923) and, together with his second wife, founded and operated
an experimental school during the late 1920s and early 1930s (see, e.g., Russell 1926).
Although he became the third Earl Russell upon the death of his brother in 1931, Russell’s
radicalism continued to make him a controversial figure well through middle-age. While
teaching in the United States in the late 1930s, he was offered a teaching appointment at City
College, New York. The appointment was revoked following a large number of public protests
and a 1940 judicial decision which found him morally unfit to teach at the College (see, e.g.,
Dewey and Kallen 1941).
In 1954 he delivered his famous “Man’s Peril” broadcast on the BBC, condemning the Bikini
H-bomb tests. A year later, together with Albert Einstein, he released the Russell-Einstein
Manifesto calling for the curtailment of nuclear weapons. In 1957 he was a prime organizer
of the first Pugwash Conference, which brought together a large number of scientists concerned
about the nuclear issue. He became the founding president of the Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament in 1958 and was once again imprisoned, this time in connection with anti-nuclear
protests in 1961. The media coverage surrounding his conviction only served to enhance
Russell’s reputation and to further inspire the many idealistic youths who were sympathetic
to his anti-war and anti-nuclear protests.

During these controversial years Russell also wrote many of the books that brought him to the
attention of popular audiences. These include his Principles of Social Reconstruction (1916), A
Free Man’s Worship (1923), On Education (1926), Why I Am Not a Christian (1927c), Marriage
and Morals (1929), The Conquest of Happiness (1930), The Scientific Outlook (1931), and
Power: A New Social Analysis (1938). Upon being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in
1950, Russell used his acceptance speech to emphasize, once again, themes related to his social
activism.

2.7 “A Free Man’s Worship”

Science has removed the veil of mystery from the workings of the universe, forcing Man to
accept a view in which all things are the result of cold, uncaring forces. Man must accept that
his existence is an unforeseen accident of Nature, and our understanding of the blind workings
of these same forces persuades us that Mankind will eventually perish, along with his proud
achievements.
”... Such ... is the world which Science presents for our belief. ... 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; ... 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...”
How ironic that blind forces created a creature that thinks and aspires to understand the forces
that created it, with an understanding denied the creating forces since they are blind. And
more, this creature has feelings of good and evil, which also are denied the creating forces.
And this new creature uses these insights and feelings to make judgments about the universe
that created it.
”A strange mystery it is that Nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secular
hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth at last a child, subject still to her
power, but gifted with sight, with knowledge of good and evil, with the capacity of judging
all the works of his unthinking Mother.”

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