Bertrand Arthur William Russell

Bertrand Russell

Introduction

Bertrand Arthur William Russell was born May 15th 1872 in Trelleck, Monmouthshire, Wales and he died February 2nd 1970 in Penrhyndeudraeth, Merioneth, Wales. He was a British philosopher, mathematician, writer and social critic. He was best known for his work in mathematics and philosophy. During his lifetime he made contributions to education, history, political theory, and religious studies. He had written many things relating to the sciences as well as humanities. After being dismissed from Trinity College in Cambridge and City College in New York he was awarded the Order of Merit in 1949 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950. Russell was also known for his anti-war and anti-nuclear protests. Russell remained a prominent public figure until his death at the age of ninety seven in 1970. His contributions to logic, epistemology, and the philosophy of mathematics established him as one of the foremost philosophers of the 20th century.

He had a long and productive life in which he published more than seventy books and around 2,000 articles, he was married four times and was involved in many public controversies. His childhood years were full of tragedy and bereavement. By the time he was six years old his sister his parents and his grandfather had all died. His brother Frank and him were taken care of by their grandmother. He was home schooled as a child and he regretted being isolated from other children. One of his main interests was mathematics at which he excelled in. The secure foundation of math led him to imagine that all knowledge could be based on such secure foundations. His earliest philosophical work was written during his teen years and records the skeptical doubts that led him to abandon the Christian faith in which he had been brought up by his grandmother.

In Bertrand Russels writings he sets forth to explain the reason why he is not a Christian by first of all explaining what someone would mean by the word Christian. He says it is a word that is used in a very loose sense by many people. He says the meaning of the word is used by some to mean no more than a person who attempts to live a good life. He says that the word Christian has lost a lot of meaning since the days of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. It is pointed out that in the days of these men it was known what was meant. Christian meant you accepted a whole collection of beliefs which were definite and whole and were believed without apology.

He said to be a Christian meant that you believed in God and immortality and in Christ as divine or one of the wisest men ever. He stated that to be a Christian used to mean you believed in Hell but that now through the act of government and church leaders that is no longer necessary. In Russell's own word's he says, "I do not believe in God and in immortality; and, secondly, I do not think that Christ was the best and wisest of men, although I grant him a very high degree of moral goodness." When it comes to the question of the existence of God he says the Catholic church has said it can be proved by unaided reason and that it is simply a matter of faith that God does exist.

The numerous arguments against God's existence had to be stopped and therefore they said his existence could be proved unaided by reason. He said the philosophy of belief was that everything must have a cause and that to go back to the first cause must take you back to God. He argued that the cause argument for God was invalid in light of the philosophers and the men of science's opinions. He said that as a young man he believed the causal effect until he at the age of eighteen read John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, and found this sentence: "My father taught me that the question, who made me? Can not be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question, who made God?" He said that the argument of first cause was then proved invalid in his mind because if everything must have a cause then God must have a cause.

Russell mentions the Hindu's view of the elephant and the tortoise as proof that the tortoise must rest upon something as well. He says that there is no reason why the world could not have come into being without a cause or why it should not have always existed. Russell says that the idea that things must have a beginning is only due to the poverty of our imagination. And he dismisses the first cause belief as invalid. He then talks about the argument from Natural Law that was made popular by Sir Isaac Newton. He mentions the orbit of the planets as not being ordained by God but that all of nature simply behaves in a uniform fashion. He claims that it is all just statistical averages that emerge from the laws of chance and that the whole idea that natural laws imply a law-giver is due to the confusion between natural and human laws and that a law giver must be bound by the laws he gives as well.

Russell states that which was once believable, now as the modern intellect prospers becomes less respectable intellectually and more unbelievable. His next attack is upon the argument of design. Which is the belief that everything in the world was made just so, as to make our world inhabitable. He mentions the studies of Darwin and the ability of animals to adapt to their environment. Russell claims the environment was not made for the animals but that the animals grew to suit the environment saying there is no evidence of design about it. His arrogance upon presupposing what the powers of the God head are able to produce is quite offensive and disrespectable. He says that what we are able to believe in light of what we are is astonishing. He believes we are but a "flash in the pan" and that our world will be as the moon lifeless and cold in a few hundred thousand years, and that people are wasting their lives believing in God.

Russell then speaks of the moral arguments for the existence of God. He says a man by the name of Kant invented a new moral argument for the existence of God, one of which is to say that there would be no right and wrong unless God existed. He says what he is concerned with is if there is a difference between right and wrong is that difference due to God's decree or not? And if it is due to God's decree, then for God himself there is no difference between right and wrong, and that it is no longer a significant statement to say that God is good. He says that it could be as a matter of fact that this world that we know was made by the Devil when God wasn't looking.