Nov 06, · Bertrand Russell Essay Bertrand Russell And The Greatest Philosopher. BERTRAND RUSSELL Bertrand Russell was born on May 18, into British Bertrand Russell on Analytical Philsophy Essay example. Bertrand Russell was born in in Wales, England as a member Famous Thinkers Essay Dr. King “How I Came by My Creed” The Realist 1, no.6 (Sep ), Also as “What I Believe,” The Forum 82 (Sep ), An important autobiographical essay by Russell “ The Last Survivor of a Dead Epoch ” The Listener 16 (Aug 12 ), Repr. as “Obituary” UE An “auto-obituary” written by Russell in Bertrand Russell is considered to be one of the most influential stalwarts in the field of philosophy during the early to mid s. Unpopular Essays originally printed in and published in posthumously, is a collection of some brilliantly crafted essays touching upon myriad topics, with an underlying theme of philosophical debate/5
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It bertrand russell essays be added that the author alone is responsible for the political and other opinions expressed. It is used these days in a very loose sense by a great many people. Some bertrand russell essays mean no more by it than a person who attempts to live a good life.
In that sense I suppose there would be Christians in all sects and creeds; but I do not think that that is the proper sense of the word, if only because it would imply that all the people who are not Christians—all the Buddhists, Confucians, Mohammedans, and so on—are not trying to live a good life.
I do not mean by a Christian any person who tries to live decently according to his lights. I think that you must have a certain amount of definite belief before you have a right to call yourself a Christian. The word does not have quite such a full-blooded meaning now as it had in the times of St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas.
In those days, if a man said that he was a Christian it was known what he meant. You accepted a whole collection of creeds which were set out with great precision, and every single syllable of those creeds you believed with the whole strength of your convictions.
WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN? Nowadays it is not quite that, bertrand russell essays. We have to be a little more vague in our meaning of Christianity. I think, however, that there are two different items which are quite essential to anybody calling himself a Christian.
The first is one of a bertrand russell essays nature—namely, that you must believe in God and immortality. If you do not believe in those two things, I do not think that you can properly bertrand russell essays yourself a Christian. Then, further than that, as the name implies, you must have some kind of belief about Christ. The Mohammedans, for instance, also believe in God and in immortality, and yet they would not call themselves Christians, bertrand russell essays.
I think you must have at the very lowest the belief that Christ was, if not divine, at least the best and wisest of men. If you are not going to believe that much about Christ, I do not think you have any right to call yourself a Christian.
The geography books count us all in, but that is a purely geographical sense, which I suppose we can ignore. Therefore I take it that when I tell you why I am not a Christian I have to tell you two different things; first, why I do not believe in God bertrand russell essays in immortality; and, secondly, bertrand russell essays, why I do not bertrand russell essays that Christ was the best and wisest of men, although I grant Him a very high degree of moral goodness.
But for the successful efforts of unbelievers in the past, I could not take so elastic a definition of Christianity as that. As I said before, in olden days it had a much more full-blooded sense, bertrand russell essays. For instance, it concluded the belief in hell. Belief in eternal hell fire was an essential item of Christian belief until pretty recent times. In this country, bertrand russell essays, as you know, it ceased to be an essential item because of a decision of the Privy Council, and from that decision the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Archbishop of York dissented; but bertrand russell essays this country our religion is settled by Act of Parliament, and therefore the Privy Council was able to override Their Graces and hell was no longer necessary to a Christian, bertrand russell essays.
Consequently I shall not insist that a Christian must believe in hell. THE EXISTENCE OF GOD To come to this question of the existence of God, it is a large and serious question, bertrand russell essays, and if I were to attempt to deal with it in any adequate manner I should have to keep you here until Kingdom Come, bertrand russell essays, so that you will have to excuse me if I deal with it in a somewhat summary fashion, bertrand russell essays.
You know, of course, that the Catholic Church has laid it down as a dogma that the existence of God can be proved by the unaided reason. That is a somewhat curious dogma, but it is one of their dogmas.
They had to introduce it because at one time the Freethinkers adopted the habit of saying that there were such and such arguments which mere reason might urge against the existence of God, but of course they knew as a matter of faith that God did exist. The arguments and the reasons were set out at great length, and the Catholic Church felt that they must stop it. Therefore they laid it down that the existence of God can be proved by the unaided reason, bertrand russell essays they had to set up what they considered were arguments to prove it.
There are, of course, a number of them, but I shall take only a few. THE FIRST CAUSE ARGUMENT Perhaps the simplest and easiest to understand is the argument of bertrand russell essays First Cause.
It is maintained that everything we see in this world has a cause, and as you go back in the chain of causes further and further bertrand russell essays must come to a First Cause, and to that First Cause you give the name of God, bertrand russell essays.
That argument, I suppose, does not carry very much weight nowadays, because, bertrand russell essays, in the first place, cause is not quite what it used to be. The philosophers and the men of science have got going on cause, and it has not anything like the vitality bertrand russell essays used to have; but, bertrand russell essays, apart from that, you can see that the argument that there must be a First Cause is one that cannot have any validity.
If everything must have a cause, bertrand russell essays, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, bertrand russell essays, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. There bertrand russell essays 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. Therefore, perhaps, I need not waste any more time upon the argument about the First Cause. THE NATURAL LAW ARGUMENT Then there is a very common argument from natural law. That was a favourite argument all through the eighteenth century, especially under the influence of Sir Isaac Newton and his cosmogony.
People observed the planets going round the sun according to the law of gravitation, and they thought that God had given a behest to bertrand russell essays planets to move in that particular fashion, and that was why they did so. That was, bertrand russell essays, of course, a convenient and simple explanation that saved them the trouble of looking any further for explanations of the law of gravitation.
Nowadays we explain the law of gravitation in a somewhat complicated fashion that Einstein has introduced. I do not propose to give you a lecture on the law of gravitation as interpreted by Einstein, because that again would take some time; at any rate, you no longer have the sort of natural law that you had in the Newtonian system, where, for some reason that nobody could understand, nature behaved in a uniform fashion.
We now find that a great many things we thought were natural laws are really human conventions, bertrand russell essays. You know that even in the remotest depths of stellar space there are still three feet to a yard.
That is, no doubt, a very remarkable fact, but you would hardly call it a law of nature. And a great many things that have been regarded as laws of nature are of bertrand russell essays kind. On the other hand, where you can get down to any knowledge of what atoms actually do, you will find they are much less subject to law than people thought, and that the laws at which you arrive are statistical averages of just the sort that would emerge from chance.
There is, as we all know, a law that if you throw dice you will get double sixes only about once in thirty-six times, and we do not regard that as evidence that the fall of the dice is regulated by design; on the contrary, if the double sixes came every time we should think that there was design. The laws of nature are of bertrand russell essays sort as regards a great many of them.
They are statistical averages such as would emerge from the laws of chance; and that makes this whole business of natural law much less impressive than it formerly was. Quite apart from that, which represents the bertrand russell essays state of science that may change tomorrow, the whole idea that natural laws imply a law-giver is due to a confusion between natural and human laws.
If you say, as more orthodox bertrand russell essays do, that in all the laws which God issues He had a reason for giving those laws rather than others—the reason, of course, bertrand russell essays to create the best universe, although you would never think it to look at it—if there was a reason for the laws which God gave, then God Himself was subject to law, and therefore you do not get any advantage by introducing God as an intermediary.
You have really a law outside and anterior to the divine edicts, and God does not serve your purpose, because He is not the ultimate lawgiver. In short, this whole argument about natural law no longer has anything like the strength that it used to have. I am travelling on in time in my review of the arguments.
The arguments that are used for the existence of God change their character as time goes on. They were at first hard, intellectual arguments embodying certain quite definite fallacies. As we come to modern times they become less respectable intellectually and more and more affected by a kind of moralising vagueness. THE ARGUMENT FROM DESIGN The next step in this process brings us to the argument from design.
You all know the argument from design: everything in the world is made just so that we can manage to live in the world, and if the world was ever so little different we could bertrand russell essays manage to live in it. That is the argument from design. It sometimes takes a rather curious form; for instance, it is argued that rabbits have white tails in order to be easy to shoot.
I do not know how rabbits would view that application. It is an easy argument to parody. That sort of parody has turned out to be not nearly so wide of the mark as it might have seemed in the eighteenth century, because since the time of Darwin we understand much better why living creatures are adapted to their environment.
It is not that their environment was made bertrand russell essays be suitable to them, but that they grew to be suitable to it, and that is the basis of adaptation. There is no evidence of design about it. When you come to look into this 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 has been able to produce in millions of years, bertrand russell essays.
I really cannot believe it, bertrand russell essays. Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku-Klux-Klan or the Fascists? Moreover, bertrand russell essays 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 bertrand russell essays 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, bertrand russell essays. I am told that that sort of view is depressing, and people will sometimes tell you that if they believed that they would not be able to go on living. Do not believe it; it is all nonsense. Nobody really worries much about what is going to happen millions of years hence.
Even if they think they are worrying bertrand russell essays about that, bertrand russell essays, they are really deceiving themselves. They are worried about something much more mundane, or it may merely be a bad digestion; but nobody is really seriously rendered unhappy by the thought of something that is going to happen to this world millions of years hence.
Therefore, although it is of course a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out—at least I suppose we may say so, although sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a bertrand russell essays is not such as to render life miserable. It merely makes you turn your attention to other things.
THE MORAL ARGUMENTS FOR DEITY Now we reach one stage further in what I shall call the intellectual descent that the Theists have made in their argumentations, and we bertrand russell essays to what are called the moral arguments for the existence of God.
You all know, of course, that there used to be in the old days three intellectual arguments for the existence of God, all of which were disposed bertrand russell essays by Immanuel Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason ; but no sooner had he disposed of those arguments than he invented a new one, a moral argument, bertrand russell essays, and that quite convinced him.
That illustrates what the psychoanalysts so much emphasise—the immensely stronger hold upon us that our very early associations have than those of later times. Kant, as I say, bertrand russell essays, invented a new moral argument for the existence of God, and that in varying forms was extremely popular during bertrand russell essays nineteenth century. It has all sorts of forms. One form is to say that there would be no right or wrong unless God existed.
I am not for the moment concerned with whether there is a difference between right and wrong, or whether there is not: that is another question. 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, bertrand russell essays, if you liked, say that there was a superior deity who gave orders to the God who made this world, or could take up the line that some of the gnostics took up—a line which I often thought was a very plausible one—that as a matter of fact this world that we know was made by the devil at a moment when God was not looking.
There is a good deal to be said for that, and I am not concerned to bertrand russell essays it.
The Value of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell
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Nov 06, · Bertrand Russell Essay Bertrand Russell And The Greatest Philosopher. BERTRAND RUSSELL Bertrand Russell was born on May 18, into British Bertrand Russell on Analytical Philsophy Essay example. Bertrand Russell was born in in Wales, England as a member Famous Thinkers Essay Dr. King Inspired by his discussions with this group, Russell abandoned mathematics for philosophy and won a fellowship at Trinity on the strength of a thesis entitled An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry, a revised version of which was published as his first philosophical book in “How I Came by My Creed” The Realist 1, no.6 (Sep ), Also as “What I Believe,” The Forum 82 (Sep ), An important autobiographical essay by Russell “ The Last Survivor of a Dead Epoch ” The Listener 16 (Aug 12 ), Repr. as “Obituary” UE An “auto-obituary” written by Russell in
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