Russell why i am not a theist

Nevertheless, Russell did not succumb to nihilism but was animated by hope. Secondly, Russell should be commended for his method in philosophy, however much we may disagree with his philosophical conclusions. Along with G. Moore and the early Ludwig Wittgenstein, Russell developed the school of analytic philosophy in the early twentieth century.

This approach is modeled on the accuracy and clarity of good science writing, but it need not address matters of science. Analytic philosophers labor to define their terms carefully, to work on intellectual questions one at a time, have an acute concern for how language works, and to articulate explicitly the kind of argument forms they are offering. Although the early proponents of analytic philosophy were non-Christians, the method itself is neutral as to outcome.

Moreland, and Richard Swinburne. Of course, there are analytic philosophers who are atheists as well, such as Thomas Nagel and John Searle.

In his work The Problems of Philosophy , Russell rightly distinguishes what truth is and how truth can be known. If we fail to discern the meaning of truth, we never can determine what statements are true and what statements are false.

In other words, we cannot test a statement for truth unless we have defined the nature of truth. You can be sincerely wrong if your belief fails to correspond to the claim that you assert. And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead.

But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. As I said before, in olden days it had a much more full-blooded sense. 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, 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 in 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.

Consequently I shall not insist that a Christian must believe in hell. 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, and 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. 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 you must come to a First Cause, and to that First Cause you give the name of God.

That argument, I suppose, does not carry very much weight nowadays, because, 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 it used to have; but, 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, 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. Therefore, perhaps, I need not waste any more time upon the argument about the First Cause. 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 these planets to move in that particular fashion, and that was why they did so.

That was, 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. 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 that 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 that 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 momentary 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 theologians do, that in all the laws which God issues He had a reason for giving those laws rather than others—the reason, of course, being 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.

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 not 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. Find it on Scholar.

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Configure custom resolver. Tj Mawson - - Religious Studies 49 4 Note on 'What I Believe' and Reply. Antonio Malo - - Acta Philosophica 19 1 - James T. King - - Journal of Value Inquiry 5 3 All other details are disregarded, as you must first hold these two beliefs to make the rest relevant.

He points out that all of them have rather glaring flaws. This argument is simple; it maintains that since everything must have a cause, there must be a first cause to start everything else. This first cause is God and is exempted from needing a cause itself. This one centers on the idea that the laws of physics needed to be set. It then assumes that the being who determined them was God. Russell finds this one to be outdated given advances in physics since the days of Newton, particularly in quantum mechanics.

Since atomic physics is more statistical than classical, Russell contends that it seems odd to claim that an intelligence is involved in physics. This perennial favorite argues that lifeforms are so well suited to their environments that a designer must have been involved. Russell dismisses this as absurd. He not only notes that Darwin explains the observed facts better through evolutionary theory but also points out how terrible some of the design choices are if they were, in fact, choices.

He asks the audience:.