Kirkegaard, Russell and Magic Feathers
By Kevin C. Neece

	If you haven’t seen Dumbo, I’m about to really ruin it for you. The Magic Feather was just a gag. Dumbo the elephant really could fly all along. It was only believing that the feather had the power to make him fly that gave him the self-confidence to do what he had really been able to do all along. It was a trick, but a well-intentioned one. Dumbo’s mouse buddy had given him the feather and explained its supernatural abilities having no idea that the Great Grey One ever actually would spread his ears and soar. Inadvertently, the pair had discovered the power of the placebo. A falsehood had been sold off as a reality. Dumbo had believed a lie. Now were this story a factual event rather than a movie, had Dumbo been human and had Burtrand Russell sincerely meant his statement that it would be better that “the world should perish than I or any other human being believe a lie,” the world may just as well have folded up upon itself and vanished rather than see a pachyderm discover his innate aeronautic abilities. 

	The truth is, every single person everywhere in the world at one time or another or possibly every single day without their knowledge spends some amount of time under the influence of a dubious, erroneous or intentionally falsified statement or appearance. In other words, we all believe lies. There’s no way to avoid it. Every day in some way or another, falsehoods are taken at face value, assumed to be true and assimilated into daily life without a moment’s thought or even awareness. Some of them, like Dumbo’s Magic Feather, are actually beneficial. Russell’s statement is a very broad one and when viewed in this light, it seems glaringly obvious that his “Better the world should perish,” is intended as hyperbole. If Russell were honest with himself about the frequency of believed lies in the human experience and still held the belief that even one of those was worth the price of all human existence, he would have to have a very gloomy perspective on reality. Indeed every day, Russell would be confronted with the fact of millions of miniscule reasons for our planet’s untimely demise. At the time of this writing, I have no evidence that he was not so despaired. I am hoping, however, that we are dealing here with a profound overstatement.

	However, is Russell speaking here of every lie ever able to be believed? What if someone to believes that their spouse has actually had an automobile accident and is in need of their assistance at a certain location immediately, but the truth is that they are in fact being duped by their spouse in order that they may be lured to a surprise birthday party? Is it as detrimental to believe that falsehood as it is to believe that God is a giant dog who eats us all at the moment of our death? Knowing that Russell was, of course, a radically committed atheist, I can only assume that this statement was intended to illustrate his abhorrence for clinging to such an irrational and improbable notion as the idea of God for fear that it might be a mass deception. In passionate defense of his position on ultimate reality, Russell uses this brash exaggeration to illustrate his belief in the importance of the objective truth of ultimate reality and the ability to give thorough empirical evidence for such reality before one would ever claim to have knowledge of truth. Coming from one so set against the existence of God, it is peculiar indeed that this position should so closely echo that of modern Christians.
	
Equally odd must indeed also be the emphatic insistence of one of the world’s most famous and well-respected Christian thinkers of the importance of subjective truth at a level even superceding that of objective truth. To Soren Kirkegaard, “An objective uncertainty held fast in an appropriation-process of the most passionate inwardness is the truth, the highest truth attainable for an existing human being.” In other words, it would appear that Kirkegaard favors the passion of belief in what cannot be (or at least has not been) objectively proven above the objective veracity of the claims themselves. Seemingly, if I may borrow a contemporary catchphrase of some popular repute, it doesn’t matter what you believe as long as you believe it with all your heart.

To place these words in Kirkegaard’s mouth, however, is to neglect his belief in the existence of objective truth simultaneously with subjective truth. Indeed many (including, apparently, Robert C. Solomon, author of The Big Questions) would read Kirkegaard’s above statement and conclude that he means to say that all truth is defined only by the individual, that every person creates and defines their own truth. Thus they would conclude that subjective truth is really no truth at all since truth must be universal. On the other hand, perhaps this merely means that some truth, being outside the realm of objectivity, must find life in individuals. In other words, truth to be true at all must be embodied. Kirkegaard’s emphasis on subjective truth may not be so much because he doesn’t care what someone believes about ultimate reality, but rather because he realizes that mental acknowledgement of a set of facts is not truly faith.

This idea is similar to the argument that Christian apologists often are so busy looking for scientific evidence for their faith that they forget the Scriptural admonition that faith itself is both evidence and substance of those things on the edges of empirical perception, things hoped for and things unseen. Perhaps Kirkegaard values a person’s journey toward the ability to have true faith above the simple acknowledgement of objective “fact-truth” and trusts Divine Providence to bring faith and fact together so that faith in objective truth claims may be a truly inward experience. In other words, turning the heart toward God may be more important than simply “getting the facts straight” in that it makes the human person a more ready conduit for the act of true faith rather than a faithless repeater of dogma who must struggle to find real trust in an invisible God. Just as Dumbo’s faith moved rightly from the feather to himself, perhaps human beings might move their faith from the lie of a Godless reality (ironically, a lie with truly Russellian consequences) to a truth of who God is both as a being beyond comprehension and as a Lord only accessible through subjective faith in realities beyond objective understanding.