Bertrand Russell on The Purposelessness of Life in an Impersonal, Random-Chance Universe

Atheistic philosophers like Bertrand Russell are sometimes completely honest about the necessary implications of their basic assumptions. It is sheer folly to suggest that one can discover meaning out of  ultimate meaninglessness. Ponder the sad and terrifying implications of Russell’s atheistic materialist worldview:

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 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 all 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.

~ Bertrand Russell, quoted by Carl Becker The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers (New Haven, CT; Yale University Press, 1932), 13-14