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Bertrand Russell (Biography)

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Popularity: -1 Vote:	A life without adventure is likely to be unsatisfying, but a life in which adventure is allowed to take whatever form it will is sure to be short.
Popularity: -1 Vote:	Against my will, in the course of my travels, the belief that everything worth knowing was known at Cambridge gradually wore off. In this respect my travels were very useful to me.
Popularity: -1 Vote:	All movements go too far.
Popularity: 2 Vote:	Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.
Popularity: 0 Vote:	Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives' mouths.
Popularity: 2 Vote:	Boredom is... a vital problem for the moralist, since half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.
Popularity: 0 Vote:	Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom.
Popularity: -1 Vote:	Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves.
Popularity: 1 Vote:	Democracy is the process by which people choose the man who'll get the blame.
Popularity: 1 Vote:	Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
Popularity: -1 Vote:	Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
Popularity: -1 Vote:	Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks itself secure.
Popularity: -3 Vote:	God is a reality of spirit... He cannot... be conceived as an object, not even as the very highest object. God is not to be found in the world of objects.
Popularity: -1 Vote:	I believe in using words, not fists. I believe in my outrage knowing people are living in boxes on the street. I believe in honesty. I believe in a good time. I believe in good food. I believe in sex.
Popularity: 1 Vote:	I did not know I loved you until I heard myself telling so, for one instance I thought, "Good God, what have I said?" and then I knew it was true.
Popularity: -2 Vote:	I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe - because, like Spinoza's God, it won't love us in return.
Popularity: 1 Vote:	I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn't wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine.
Popularity: -1 Vote:	I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.
Popularity: -3 Vote:	I've made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I'm convinced of the opposite.
Popularity: -1 Vote:	If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years.
Popularity: 3 Vote:	In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.
Popularity: 1 Vote:	In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards.
Popularity: 1 Vote:	It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.
Popularity: 1 Vote:	It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.
Popularity: 1 Vote:	It seems to be the fate of idealists to obtain what they have struggled for in a form which destroys their ideals.
Popularity: 4 Vote:	Italy, and the spring and first love all together should suffice to make the gloomiest person happy.
Popularity: 1 Vote:	Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse; it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives.
Popularity: 1 Vote:	Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.
Popularity: 1 Vote:	Man needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this or that, but hope and enterprise and change.
Popularity: -1 Vote:	Many people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.
Popularity: 1 Vote:	Marriage is for women the commonest mode of livelihood, and the total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in prostitution.
Popularity: -1 Vote:	Mathematics takes us into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual word, but every possible word, must conform.
Popularity: -1 Vote:	Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.
Popularity: -1 Vote:	Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.
Popularity: -2 Vote:	Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power.
Popularity: 1 Vote:	Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.
Popularity: -1 Vote:	Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power.
Popularity: 1 Vote:	No one gossips about other people's secret virtues.
Popularity: -1 Vote:	No; we have been as usual asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing. The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful?
Popularity: -2 Vote:	None but a coward dares to boast that he has never known fear.
Popularity: 1 Vote:	Obscenity is whatever happens to shock some elderly and ignorant magistrate.
Popularity: 1 Vote:	One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.
Popularity: -1 Vote:	One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.
Popularity: 0 Vote:	Order, unity, and continuity are human inventions, just as truly as catalogues and encyclopedias.
Popularity: 2 Vote:	Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.
Popularity: 1 Vote:	Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country.
Popularity: 3 Vote:	Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.
Popularity: 1 Vote:	Religions that teach brotherly love have been used as an excuse for persecution, and our profoundest scientific insight is made into a means of mass destruction.
Popularity: -1 Vote:	Right discipline consists, not in external compulsion, but in the habits of mind which lead spontaneously to desirable rather than undesirable activities.
Popularity: 0 Vote:	Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don't know.
Popularity: 1 Vote:	Sin is geographical.
Popularity: 1 Vote:	So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.
Popularity: 2 Vote:	The coward wretch whose hand and heart Can bear to torture aught below, Is ever first to quail and start From the slightest pain or equal foe.
Popularity: 1 Vote:	The degree of one's emotions varies inversely with one's knowledge of the facts.
Popularity: 3 Vote:	The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd.
Popularity: 2 Vote:	The fundamental defect of fathers, in our competitive society, is that they want their children to be a credit to them.
Popularity: 1 Vote:	The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way. Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic.
Popularity: -2 Vote:	The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.
Popularity: -1 Vote:	The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one, particularly if he plays golf.
Popularity: -1 Vote:	The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.
Popularity: 3 Vote:	The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.
Popularity: -1 Vote:	The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.
Popularity: -2 Vote:	The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.
Popularity: -3 Vote:	The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.
Popularity: -1 Vote:	The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours.
Popularity: 1 Vote:	The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.
Popularity: 1 Vote:	The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
Popularity: 0 Vote:	There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.
Popularity: -1 Vote:	Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, Thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought is great and swift and free.
Popularity: -3 Vote:	Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.
Popularity: -1 Vote:	To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.
Popularity: -1 Vote:	To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
Popularity: 1 Vote:	To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.
Popularity: 0 Vote:	To teach how to live without certainty and yet without being paralysed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can do for those who study it.
Popularity: -2 Vote:	War does not determine who is right - only who is left.
Popularity: -1 Vote:	We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.
Popularity: -1 Vote:	What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.
Popularity: -1 Vote:	Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relative to other matter; second, telling other people to do so.

Biography

Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM (18 May 1872–2 February 1970) was an influential mathematician, philosopher, and logician of the modern age, working mostly in the 20th century. A prolific writer, Russell was also a populariser of philosophy and a commentator on a large variety of topics, ranging from very serious issues to the mostly mundane. Russell's elegant prose, clarity of expression, and biting wit were widely admired. Continuing a family tradition in political affairs, he was an influential libertarian activist for most of his long life. Millions looked up to Russell as a prophet of the creative and rational life; at the same time, his stances on many topics were extremely controversial. Born at the height of Britain's economic and political ascendancy, he died of influenza nearly a century later when Britain's empire had all but vanished; her power had dissipated in two victorious, but debilitating world wars. As one of the world's most well-known intellectuals, Russell's voice carried enormous moral authority, even into his late nineties. Among his other political activities, Russell was an influential proponent of nuclear disarmament and an outspoken critic of the American war in Vietnam.

In 1950, Russell was made Nobel Laureate in Literature "in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought".

Russell's work

Analytic philosophy

Russell is generally recognized as one of the founders of analytic philosophy, indeed, even of its several branches. At the beginning of the 20th Century, alongside G. E. Moore, Russell was largely responsible for the British "revolt against Idealism", a philosophy greatly influenced by Georg Hegel and his British apostle, F. H. Bradley. This revolt was echoed thirty years later in Vienna by the logical positivists' "revolt against metaphysics". Russell was particularly appalled by the idealist doctrine of internal relations, which held that in order to know any particular thing, we must know all of its relations. Russell showed that this would make space, time, science and the concept of number unintelligible. Russell's logical work with Whitehead continued this project.

Russell and Moore strove to eliminate what they saw as meaningless and incoherent assertions in philosophy, and they sought clarity and precision in argument by the use of exact language and by breaking down philosophical propositions into their simplest components. Russell, in particular, saw logic and science as the principal tools of the philosopher. Indeed, unlike most philosophers who preceded him and his early contemporaries, Russell did not believe there was a separate method for philosophy. He believed that the main task of the philosopher was to illuminate the most general propositions about the world and to eliminate confusion. In particular, he wanted to end what he saw as the excesses of metaphysics. Russell adopted William of Occam's principle against multiplying unnecessary entities, Occam's Razor, as a central part of the method of analysis.

Epistemology

Russell's epistemology went through many phases. Once he shed Hegelianism in his early years, Russell remained a philosophical realist for the remainder of his life, believing that our direct experiences have primacy in the acquisition of knowledge. While some of his views have lost favor, his influence lingers on in the distinction between two ways in which we can be familiar with objects: "knowledge by acquaintance" and "knowledge by description." For a time, Russell thought that we could only be acquainted with our own sense data, momentary perceptions of colours, sounds, and the like, and that everything else, including the physical objects that these were sense data of, could only be reasoned to—known by description—and not known directly. This distinction has gained much wider application, though Russell eventually rejected the idea of an intermediate sense datum.

In his later philosophy, Russell subscribed to a kind of neutral monism, maintaining that the distinctions between the material and mental worlds, in the final analysis, were arbitrary, and that both can be reduced to a neutral property, a view similar to one held by the American philosopher, William James, and one that was first formulated by Baruch Spinoza, whom Russell greatly admired. Instead of James' "pure experience," however, Russell characterized the stuff of our initial states of perception as "events", a stance which is curiously akin to his old teacher Whitehead's process philosophy.

Ethics

While Russell wrote a great deal on ethical subject matters, he did not believe that the subject belonged to philosophy or that when he wrote on ethics that he did so in his capacity as a philosopher. In his earlier years, Russell was greatly influenced by G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica. Along with Moore, he then believed that moral facts were objective, but only known through intuition, and that they were simple properties of objects, not equivalent (e.g., pleasure is good) to the natural objects to which they are often ascribed (see Naturalistic fallacy), and that these simple, undefinable moral properties cannot be analyzed using the non-moral properties with which they are associated. In time, however, he came to agree with his philosophical hero, David Hume, who believed that ethical terms dealt with subjective values that cannot be verified in the same way that matters of fact are. Coupled with Russell's other doctrines, this influenced the logical positivists, who formulated the theory of emotivism, which states that ethical propositions (along with those of metaphysics) were essentially meaningless and nonsensical or, at best, little more than expressions of attitudes and preferences. Notwithstanding his influence on them, Russell himself did not construe ethical propositions as narrowly as the positivists, for he believed that ethical considerations are not only meaningful, but that they are a vital subject matter for civil discourse. Indeed, though Russell was often characterized as the patron saint of rationality, he agreed with Hume, who said that reason ought to be subordinate to ethical considerations.

Logical atomism

Perhaps Russell's most systematic, metaphysical treatment of philosophical analysis and his empiricist-centric logicism is evident in what he called Logical atomism, which is explicated in a set of lectures, "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism," which he gave in 1918. In these lectures, Russell sets forth his concept of an ideal, isomorphic language, one that would mirror the world, whereby our knowledge can be reduced to terms of atomic propositions and their truth-functional compounds. Logical atomism is a form of radical empiricism, for Russell believed the most important requirement for such an ideal language is that every meaningful proposition must consist of terms referring directly to the objects with which we are acquainted, or that they are defined by other terms referring to objects with which we are acquainted. Russell excluded certain formal, logical terms such as all, the, is, and so forth, from his isomorphic requirement, but he was never entirely satisfied about our understanding of such terms. One of the central themes of Russell's atomism is that the world consists of logically independent facts, a plurality of facts, and that our knowledge depends on the data of our direct experience of them. In his later life, Russell came to doubt aspects of logical atomism, especially his principle of isomorphism, though he continued to believe that the process of philosophy ought to consist of breaking things down into their simplest components, even though we might not ever fully arrive at an ultimate atomic fact.

Logic and mathematics

Russell was without peer in his contributions to modern mathematical logic. The American logician, Willard Quine, said Russell's work represented the greatest influence on his own work. While subsequent systems have improved upon Russell's work in several areas (though certainly not all), modern logic rests largely on Russell's foundational work in the early part of the 20th Century.

Russell's first mathematical work, An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry, was published in 1897. This work was heavily influenced by Immanuel Kant. Russell soon realized that the conception it laid out would have made Albert Einstein's schema of space-time impossible, which he understood to be superior to his own system. Thenceforth, he rejected the entire Kantian program as it related to mathematics and geometry, and he maintained that his own earliest work on the subject was nearly without value.

Interested in the definition of number, Russell studied the work of George Boole, Georg Cantor, and Augustus de Morgan, and he became convinced that the foundations of mathematics were tied to logic. In 1900 he attended a philosophical congress in Paris where he became familiar with the work of the Italian mathematician, Giuseppe Peano. He mastered Peano's new symbolism and his set of axioms for arithmetic. Peano was able to define logically all of the terms of these axioms with the exception of 0, number, successor, and the singular term, the. Russell took it upon himself to find logical definitions for each of these. He eventually discovered that Gottlob Frege had independently arrived at equivalent definitions for 0, successor, and number, and the definition of number is now usually referred to as the Frege-Russell definition. It was largely Russell who brought Frege to the attention of the English-speaking world.

In 1903, Russell published The Principles of Mathematics, in which the concept of class is inextricably tied to the definition of number. In writing Principles, Russell came across Cantor's proof that there was no greatest cardinal number, which Russell believed was mistaken. This caused him to analyze classes, for it was known that given any number of elements, the number of classes they result in is greater than their number. In turn, this led to the discovery of a very interesting class, namely, the class of all classes, which consists of two kinds of classes: classes that are members of themselves, and classes that are not members of themselves, which led him to find that the so-called principle of extensionality, taken for granted by logicians of the time, was fatally flawed, and that it resulted in a contradiction, whereby Y is a member of Y, if and only if, Y is not a member of Y. This has become known as Russell's paradox, the solution to which he outlined in an appendix to Principles, and which he later developed into a complete theory, the Theory of types. Aside from exposing a major inconsistency in naive set theory, Russell's work led directly to the creation of modern axiomatic set theory. It also crippled Frege's project of reducing arithmetic to logic. The Theory of Types and much of Russell's subsequent work have also found practical applications with computer science and information technology.

Russell continued to defend logicism, the view that mathematics is in some important sense reducible to logic, and along with his former teacher, Alfred North Whitehead, wrote the monumental Principia Mathematica, an axiomatic system on which all of mathematics can be built. The first volume of the Principia was published in 1910, which is largely ascribed to Russell. More than any other single work, it established the specialty of mathematical or symbolic logic. Two more volumes were published, but their original plan to incorporate geometry in a fourth volume was never realized, and Russell never felt up to improving the original works, though he referenced new developments and problems in his preface to the second edition. Upon completing the Principia, three volumes of extraordinarily abstract and complex reasoning, Russell was exhausted, and he never felt his intellectual faculties fully recovered from the effort. Although the Principia did not fall prey to the paradoxes in Frege's approach, it was later proven by Kurt Gödel that—for exactly that reason—neither Principia Mathematica nor any other consistent logical system could prove all mathematical truths; hence, Russell's project was necessarily incomplete.

Russell's last significant work in mathematics and logic, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, was written, actually, dictated to a secretary, while he was in jail for his anti-war activities during World War I. This was largely an explication of his previous work and its philosophical significance.

Philosophy of language

Russell was not the first philosopher to suggest that language had an important bearing on how we understand the world; however, more than anyone before him, Russell made language, or more specifically, how we use language, a central part of philosophy. Had there been no Russell, it seems unlikely that philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gilbert Ryle, J. L. Austin, and P. F. Strawson, among others, would have embarked upon the same course, for so much of what they did was to amplify or respond, sometimes critically, to what Russell had said before them, using many of the techniques that he originally developed. Russell, along with Moore, shared the idea that clarity of expression is a virtue, a notion that has been a touchstone for philosophers ever since, particularly among those who deal with the philosophy of language.

Perhaps Russell's most significant contribution to philosophy of language is his theory of descriptions, as presented in his seminal essay, On Denoting, first published in 1905, which the mathematician and philosopher Frank Ramsey described as "a paradigm of philosophy." The theory is normally illustrated using the phrase "the present King of France", as in "The present king of France is bald." What object is this proposition about, given that there is not, at present, a king of France? Alexius Meinong had suggested that we must posit a realm of "nonexistent entities" that we can suppose we are referring to when we use expressions such as this; but this would be a strange theory, to say the least. Frege seemed to think we could dismiss as nonsense any proposition whose words apparently referred to objects that didn't exist. Among other things, the problem with this solution is that some such propositions, such as "If the present king of France is bald, then the present king of France has no hair on his head," not only do not seem nonsensical but appear to be obviously true. Roughly the same problem would arise if there were two kings of France at present: which of them does "the king of France" denote?

The problem is general to what are called "definite descriptions." Normally this includes all terms beginning with "the", and sometimes includes names, like "Walter Scott." (This point is quite contentious: Russell sometimes thought that the latter terms shouldn't be called names at all, but only "disguised definite descriptions," but much subsequent work has treated them as altogether different things.) What is the "logical form" of definite descriptions: how, in Frege's terms, could we paraphrase them in order to show how the truth of the whole depends on the truths of the parts? Definite descriptions appear to be like names that by their very nature denote exactly one thing, neither more or less. What, then, are we to say about the proposition as a whole if one of its parts apparently isn't working right?

Russell's solution was, first of all, to analyze not the term alone but the entire proposition that contained a definite description. "The present king of France is bald," he then suggested, can be reworded to "There is an x such that x is a present king of France, nothing other than x is a present king of France, and x is bald." Russell claimed that each definite description in fact contains a claim of existence and a claim of uniqueness which give this appearance, but these can be broken apart and treated separately from the predication that is the obvious content of the proposition. The proposition as a whole then says three things about some object: the definite description contains two of them, and the rest of the sentence contains the other. If the object does not exist, or if it is not unique, then the whole sentence turns out to be false, not meaningless.

One of the major complaints against Russell's theory, due originally to Strawson, is that definite descriptions do not claim that their object exists, they merely presuppose that it does.

Wittgenstein, Russell's student, later achieved even greater prominence in the philosophy of language. Russell thought Wittgenstein's elevation of language as the only reality with which philosophy need be concerned was absurd, and he decried his influence and the influence of his followers, especially members of the so-called Oxford school, who he believed were promoting a kind of mysticism. Russell's belief that there is more to philosophy and knowing the world than simply understanding how we use language has regained prominence in philosophy and eclipsed Wittgenstein's language-centric views.

Philosophy of science

Russell frequently claimed that he was more convinced of his method of doing philosophy, the method of analysis, than of his philosophical conclusions. Science, of course, was one of the principal components of analysis, along with logic and mathematics. While Russell was a believer in the scientific method, knowledge derived from empirical research that is verified through repeated testing, he believed that science reaches only tentative answers, and that scientific progress is piecemeal, and attempts to find organic unities were largely futile. Indeed, he believed the same was true of philosophy. Another founder of modern philosophy of science, Ernst Mach, placed less reliance on method, per se, for he believed that any method that produced predictable results was satisfactory and that the principal role of the scientist was to make successful predictions. While Russell would doubtless agree with this as a practical matter, he believed that the ultimate objective of both science and philosophy was to understand reality, not simply to make predictions.

The fact that Russell made science a central part of his method and of philosophy was instrumental in making the philosophy of science a full-blooded, separate branch of philosophy and an area in which subsequent philosophers specialized. Much of Russell's thinking about science is exposed in his 1914 book, Our Knowledge of the External World as a Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy. Among the several schools that were influenced by Russell were the logical positivists, particularly Rudolph Carnap, who maintained that the distinguishing feature of scientific propositions was their verifiability. This contrasted with the theory of Karl Popper, also greatly influenced by Russell, who believed that their importance rested in the fact that they were potentially falsifiable.

It is worth noting that outside of his strictly philosophical pursuits, Russell was always fascinated by science, particularly physics, and he even authored several popular science books, The ABC of Atoms (1923) and The ABC of Relativity (1925).

Religion and theology

Russell's ethical outlook and his personal courage in facing controversies were certainly informed by his religious upbringing, principally by his paternal grandmother, who instructed him with the Biblical injunction, "Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil" (Exodus 23:2), something he said influenced him throughout his life.

For most of his adult life, however, Russell thought it very unlikely that there was a God, and he maintained that religion is little more than superstition and, despite any positive effects that religion might have, it is largely harmful to people. He believed religion and the religious outlook (he considered communism and other systematic ideologies to be species of religion) serve to impede knowledge, foster fear and dependency, and are responsible for much of the war, oppression, and misery that have beset the world. Technically, Russell was an agnostic, though he said that he was an atheist from a practical perspective.

As a young man, Russell had a decidedly religious bent, himself, as is evident in his early Platonism. He longed for eternal truths, as he makes clear in his famous essay, A Free Man's Worship, widely regarded as a masterpiece in prose, but one that Russell came to dislike. While he rejected the supernatural, he freely admitted that he yearned for a deeper meaning to life.

Russell's views on religion can be found in his popular book, Why I Am Not a Christian: And Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects (ISBN 0671203231), which began as a talk given March 6, 1927 at Battersea Town Hall, under the auspices of the South London Branch of the National Secular Society, England. The speech was published later that year as a pamphlet, which, along with other essays, was eventually published as a book. In the book, Russell considers a number of logical arguments for the existence of God, including the first cause argument, the natural-law argument, the argument from design, and moral arguments. He also goes into specifics about Christian theology.

His final conclusion:

Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. ... A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men.

...(more on Wikipedia)

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Bertrand Russell".

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