Bertrand Russell, was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, writer, social critic and political activist. He was an ardent anti-religious activist. Here are some of his rebuttals against some of the common Christian arguments for the existence of a Creator God.
The First-cause Argument
If everything must have a cause,
then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may
just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that
argument. There is no reason why the world could not have come into being
without a cause; nor, on the other hand, is there any reason why it should not
have always existed. There is no reason to suppose that the world had a
beginning at all. The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to
the poverty of our imagination.
The Argument from Design
It is a most astonishing thing
that people can believe that this world, with all the things that are in it,
with all its defects, should be the best that omnipotence and omniscience have
been able to produce in millions of years. Moreover, if you accept the ordinary
laws of science, you have to suppose that human life and life in general on
this planet will die out in due course: it is a stage in the decay of the solar
system; at a certain stage of decay you get the sort of conditions of
temperature and so forth which are suitable to protoplasm, and there is life
for a short time in the life of the whole solar system. You see in the moon the
sort of thing to which the earth is tending -- something dead, cold, and
lifeless.
The Moral Arguments for Deity
The point I am concerned with is
that, is a difference between right and wrong? Then you are in this situation:
Is that difference due to God's fiat or is it not? If it is due to God's fiat,
then for God himself there is no difference between right and wrong, and it is
no longer a significant statement to say that God is good. If you are going to
say, as theologians do, that God is good, you must then say that right and
wrong have some meaning which is independent of God's fiat, because God's fiats
are good and not bad independently of the mere fact that he made them. If you
are going to say that, you will then have to say that it is not only through
God that right and wrong came into being, but that they are in their essence
logically anterior to God. You could, of course, if you liked, say that there
was a superior deity who gave orders to the God that made this world.
Fear, the Foundation of Religion
Religion is based, primarily and
mainly upon fear. Fear is the basis of the whole thing -- fear of the
mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and
therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand. It is
because fear is at the basis of those two things. Science
can help us to get over this craven fear in which mankind has lived for so many
generations. Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach us, no
longer to look around for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the
sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a
better place to live in, instead of the sort of place that the religions in all
these centuries have made it.
File download: Russel's Views
File download: Russel's Views
Electronic colophon: This electronic edition was
first made available by Bruce MacLeod on his "Watchful Eye Russell Page.”
It was newly corrected (from Edwards, NY 1957) in July 1996 by John R. Lenz for
the Bertrand Russell Society.
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