The World Inside My Head: Larry Witham’s ‘Proof of God’

One day in 1894, when he was only 22 and in his final year at Cambridge, Bertrand Russell went out to buy tobacco and had a surprising flash of insight. It was one of those privileged moments that comes to philosophers and mathematicians, especially when they are young. Strolling along Trinity Lane, he tossed his packet of tobacco high into the air and exclaimed, “Great Scott! The ontological argument is sound.” Even in turn-of-the-century Cambridge, a place with more than its share of dotty philosophers, Russell’s exclamation must have sounded eccentric. The “Principia Mathematica,” the great work which he would co-author with Alfred North Whitehead, still lay 16 years in the future, but by that time Russell had changed his mind. He now thought the argument unsound and yet the moment when its truth seemed to burst upon him remained in his memory until old age. This may have something to do with the nature of the ontological argument. It, too, was born, more than 800 years earlier, out of just such a moment of illumination.