The Moral Problem Russell alleged that “a very serious defect” in “Christ’s moral character” was that “He believed in hell” (Ibid., 17). The professor declared that “any person who is really profoundly humane” could not believe in everlasting punishment.
Full Answer
He tended to call it subjectivism or “the subjectivity of moral values” though it is nowadays known as non-cognitivism, expressivism or emotivism.
Russell’s Moral Philosophy. Russell remains famous as a logician, a metaphysician, and as a philosopher of mathematics , but in his own day he was also notorious for his social and political opinions.
A we have seen, Russell’s meta-ethic was closely connected to his program of moral reform. The idea was to advocate a set of humane and egalitarian ends, using non-rational methods of persuasion, and then to argue on the basis of psychology, social science, history and common sense that that these ends would be best achieved if, on the whole, people obeyed a reformed moral code. Judgments that this or that is good or bad were to be construed as disguised optatives (“Would that everyone desired X !” and “Would that everyone desired not Y !” respectively). “Ought” and “right” were to be given a consequentialist reading and indexed to the ends that Russell hoped his audience could be persuaded to share. Thus Russell combined an emotivist analysis of “good” and “bad” with a consequentialist/relativist reading of “ought” and “right”. But was he right to do so?
Accordingly, the rejection of this idea “would tend to render people more truly social”, specifically , more tolerant. “Moral warfare would continue”, he writes, “but not with poisoned arrows.” Russell came to agree, especially after the outbreak of World War I.
The Open Question Argument and its Aftermath: Moore’s Influence on Russell. Russell’s destiny as an ethical thinker was dominated by one book—G.E. Moore’s Principia Ethica (1903). Before 1903, Russell devoted some of the energy that he could spare from German Social Democracy, the foundations of mathematics and the philosophy ...
It was Russell’s mission as a practical moralist, a social reformer and a popular sage to promote a humane and non-superstitious ethic. This was partly a matter of preaching and partly a matter of argument: preaching as regards ends and argument as regards means.
Although Russell became a convert to the doctrines of Principia Ethica, he disagreed with Moore on two important points. Russell, like Moore was what is nowadays known as a consequentialist. He believed that the rightness or otherwise of an act is “in some way, dependent on consequences”. But for the young Moore, it is “demonstrably certain” (!) that “I am morally bound to perform this action” is identical [that is synonymous] with the assertion “This action will produce the greatest amount of possible good in the Universe” ( PE : ch. 5, §89). Thus it is analytic that the right thing to do is the action that will, actually produce the best consequences. But in Russell’s view this claim is neither analytic nor true. Moore ’s own Open Question Argument can be deployed to prove that it is not analytic, and a little critical reflection reveals that it is not true.
Russell then explains his understanding that most people follow a religion not because they determined that it was the logical thing to do but because of an emotional attachment to it . This motivation wasn’t enough for Russell, nor is it enough for many people today. Given the failures of the above proofs and moral arguments to convince him, he sees no reason to hold on to these beliefs and instead sought to find what could persuade him. He settled on a scientific, humanistic worldview.
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:
The magician was asked to leave his Christian youth group by a pastor who told his parents: "He's no longer learning about the Bible from me. He is now converting everyone in the class to atheism."
While fully understanding people who are very different from ourselves might be impossible, even the attempt can help make the world a more harmonious place. In the end, isn’t that a goal we can all agree on?
Russell gave his opinion about the sense of human moral obligation, but he posed no objective basis for actual moral obligation. He ended the debate by saying, “I cannot attribute a Divine origin to this sense of moral obligation, which I think is quite easily accounted for in... other ways."
The apostle Paul was one of the greatest minds of the first century. He said, in contrast to Russell's words, “I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far” ( Philippians 1:21 ).
Long before there were Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, there was Bertrand Russell. In my book Heaven, I said that Bertrand Russell has been called the greatest mind of the twentieth century. Anticipating his death he said, “There is darkness without, and when I die there will be darkness within. There is no splendor, no vastness anywhere; only triviality for a moment, and then nothing.”
On the one hand, Russell’s moral philosophy implies, “In the realm of essences, before anything exists, there are certain essences that have this remarkable property, that they ought to exist, or at least, that, if anything exists, it ought to conform to them.” Russell’s language echoes that of Moore, who was concerned to show that some things “are worth having purely for their own sakes.” In Principia Ethica, Moore had argued against Sidgwick that some values—beauty in particular—obtain even if forever unappreciated by any conscious mind. Moore’s thought experiments using his method of “absolute isolation” were designed to discern what sorts of things are of intrinsic value. Generally, things have intrinsic value just in case “if they existed by themselves, in absolute isolation, we should yet judge their existence to be good.”
Russell has divorced the realms of nature and morality and, in a way reminiscent of Mark Twain’s quip about naked people, has left morality with little or no influence in the world. He manages, with Moore’s help, to disentangle values from natural facts, but then sends morality to “fly into the abyss at a tangent,” leaving the earth in moral darkness. The result is an “impotent dogmatism on high.” Russell’s trouble, at bottom, is that he is “not a theist after the manner of Socrates; his good is not a power.”
According to Santayana, Russell and Moore erred by isolating one element of Platonic morality—the hypostasis of the Good—to the exclusion of two others that are essential to its overall cohesion: the “political” and the “theological.” By the former, Santayana has in mind a theory of human nature holding that human happiness is to be achieved only in the appropriate relation to the good. He develops this idea more fully in Platonism and the Spiritual Life.
Russell maintains that moral properties are mind-independent, and endeavors to justify his assertion by appeal to moral consensus, or something near enough. At this, Santayana complains,
Santayana’s criticisms of Russell’s “hypostatic ethics” are many. Some are specific counters to particular Russellian arguments. Two of his arguments are much grander in scale. On the one hand, Santayana argues that the requirements of moral realism per se are incoherent. In fact, he offers a number of arguments that seem to foreshadow those that would be marshaled in defense of non-cognitivism in the following decades. Space does not permit discussion of these interesting arguments. And a century of space-time is filled with discussions of similar arguments.
The trouble with Russell’s overall position is that he has latched upon one set of possible values to the exclusion of the rest, and has done so by appeal to “intuition,” but he lacks any sort of background account, in the form of a supporting metaphysic, that would warrant his taking “felt values” as any indication of moral truth. As Santayana puts the point in Platonism and the Spiritual Life,
But, according to Santayana, Russell’s vision is “monocular” where a “binocular” perspective is required.
He believes the “historical question” is difficult to answer and that Christ probably never existed.
Warren concludes the section of Jesus as a teacher by saying, “Jesus was the incomparable teacher. This fact is compelling evidence in favor of the conclusion that He is the Son of the only true God. He was so marvelously unique as a teacher that He simply could not have been merely a human being.
Jim McGuiggan has suggested three positive reasons for holding that the miracles of Jesus Christ really happened: 1) the reputation of Jesus Christ, 2) the powerful testimony of history, and 3) the subsequent miracles of the apostolic group (63-73) .
The attitude displayed by the Pharisees is quite remarkable. For some, their first reaction upon hearing about the miracle was disbelief (John 9:16, 18). They had reached agreement that anyone confessing Jesus to be the Christ would be put out of the synagogue (John 9:22).
Russell contends that Jesus taught that the Second Coming would “occur in clouds of glory before the death of all the people who were living at that time” (593). In fact, Jesus explicitly said that no one knew the time of His coming back (Matthew 24:36; Acts 1:7).
The lecture/essay by the famous skeptic is divided into two parts: first, an attack against God and second, an attack against Jesus. Russell begins by giving his own definition of a Christian.
Skeptics such as Brown and Jacobovici stand in a long line of those seeking to discredit the claims that Jesus was divine. Eighty years ago, Bertrand Russell mounted a head-on attack of the existence of God and the divinity of Jesus in his speech that was later published under the title, Why I Am Not A Christian.
Bertrand Russell was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, and social critic. He is recognized as one of the most important logicians of the 20th Century. He is also credited for showing that the naive set theory created by Georg Cantor leads to a contradiction. This is known as "Russell's paradox."
Dan Delzell is the pastor of Wellspring Lutheran Church in Papillion, Neb. He is a regular contributor to The Christian Post.
It is a revealing presentation which clearly shows the difference between the mind of natural man and the enlightened mind of a Christian believer. In this lecture, Russell accused religion of being "based primarily and mainly upon fear.".
Bertrand Russell was a walking paradox. His life was a permanent contradiction. He ended up doing the very thing he was most afraid of doing, and he trusted in something which he should have known would fail him. His pride blinded him to the contradiction that was his life. It became an infinite loop. A mathematician of Russell's caliber should have been able to recognize such a thing. This loop has continued for him beyond the grave. His worst fears have now been realized.
Russell thinks philosoph y can free us from prejudices and narrow-mindedness (T/F)
Russell believes that man is the measure of all things, and truth is manmade (T/F)
Bertrand Russell - The Problems of Philosophy (1912)6 Terms
According to Russell, while philosophy diminishes our feeling of certainty as to what things are, it also
I have known in my time quite a number of judges who were very earnest Christians, and they none of them felt that they were acting contrary to Christian principles in what they did. Then Christ says: ‘Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away.’ That is a very good principle.
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.
In the so-called ages of faith, when men really did believe the Christian religion in all its completeness, there was the Inquisition, with its tortures; there were millions of unfortunate women burnt as witches; and there was every kind of cruelty practised upon all sorts of people in the name of religion.
It is because fear is at the basis of those two things. In this world we can now begin a little to understand things, and a little to master them by help of science, which has forced its way step by step against the Christian religion, against the Churches, and against the opposition of all the old precepts.
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. 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 has gone hand-in-hand. It is because fear is at the basis of those two things. In this world we can now begin a little to understand things, and a little to master them by help of science, which has forced its way step by step against the Christian religion, against the Churches, and against the opposition of all the old precepts. 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 round 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 fit place to live in, instead of the sort of place that the churches in all these centuries have made it.
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.
That is the idea—that we should all be wicked if we did not hold to the Christian religion. It seems to me that the people who have held to it have been for the most part extremely wicked. You find this curious fact, that the more intense has been the religion of any period and the more profound has been the dogmatic belief, the greater has been the cruelty and the worse has been the state of affairs. In the so-called ages of faith, when men really did believe the Christian religion in all its completeness, there was the Inquisition, with its tortures; there were millions of unfortunate women burnt as witches; and there was every kind of cruelty practised upon all sorts of people in the name of religion.