06/24/04

A Challenge from Bertrand Russell

As you know, this week's task is to listen to and respond in some way to one of the challenges that Bertrand Russell presents in his famous1927 speech, “Why I am not a Christian.” 

Below, you will find the section on which we will focus our attention.  I am including the section “The existence of God” as an intro into the argument he makes in “The First-Cause Argument.”

Here are a couple of tips in dealing with his challenge:

 #1  Suspend your judgment on the issue at large.  In other words, don't decide whether he is right or wrong just because he is set against you from the outset.

 #2  Listen to his argument.

 #3  Internalize his argument. In other words, don’t jump from hearing his argument to trying to answer it. Take some time to contemplate his question (maybe spend a couple of days just thinking about it).

 #4  Listen to his argument.

 #5  Make sure you know what he is saying.  Restate his argument to yourself.  What is the core of his argument?

 #6  Listen to his argument (seeing a pattern here?)

 #7  Now, respond.  This does not mean arrive at “the answer.”  I mean just that: respond.  Your response may be an answer.  It could also be, “Dang!  He has a good point!”  J 

 #8  Eventually, try to arrive at some conclusion regarding his challenge.  This is where we will begin Sunday.

Note:  If you internalize this issue well, you should be able to make it relevant to our current time (i.e. adapt both sides to current trends in science, philosophy, and religion).  Both sides of this issue are still battling it out in similar ways today.

Excerpts from “Why I Am Not a Christian”

 The Existence of God

To come to this question of the existence of God: it is a large and serious question, and if I were to attempt to deal with it in any adequate manner I should have to keep you here until Kingdom Come, so that you will have to excuse me if I deal with it in a somewhat summary fashion. 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.

The First-cause Argument

Perhaps the simplest and easiest to understand is the argument of the 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 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. I may say that when I was a young man and was debating these questions very seriously in my mind, I for a long time accepted the argument of the First Cause, until one day, at the age of eighteen, I read John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, and I there found this sentence: "My father taught me that the question 'Who made me?' cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question `Who made god?'" That very simple sentence showed me, as I still think, the fallacy in the argument of the First Cause. 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. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu's view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, "How about the tortoise?" the Indian said, "Suppose we change the subject." The argument is really no better than that. 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.