Tag Archives: Bertrand Russell

Atheism, Morality

Which Worldview Best Accounts for Morality?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt 

There are two major worldview contenders today, at least in western civilization: naturalism and theism.  As morality is central to the human experience, both worldviews owe us an account of where moral values and duties come from.

Bertrand Russell, one of the most famous naturalistic philosophers of the 20th century, described the world through naturalism’s eyes in his book Mysticism and Logic:

That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.

Cheerful words, I know.

If Russell is right, then from whence come moral values and obligations? Philosophers David Baggett and Jerry Walls, in their book Good God:The Theistic Foundations of Morality, argue that it is hard to see how moral values and moral obligation can come from mere matter:

The source of this moral obligation isn’t likely to be mere matter. An evolutionary account of feelings of or beliefs in, say, moral obligation is certainly possible, but how would naturalism explain obligation itself? How collections of atoms could generate and issue genuinely binding moral commands is altogether mysterious, if not absurd.

How might a Russellian naturalist make it less absurd?

Contemporary naturalistic ethicist Richard Boyd identifies goodness with a cluster of empirical properties, among them the satisfaction of mutually supportive social human needs. Choices are deemed moral to the extent that they satisfy such needs. Such an account might seem to make morality objective, yet it’s difficult to see how purely empirical properties could really account for binding obligation or intrinsic value.

The attempt to define morality in terms of the satisfaction of our desires tries to replace theism’s objective account of value and meaning with subjective satisfaction, but the exchange leaves us worse off. It remains a leap of blind faith to affirm that anything like objective obligation would emerge from such empirical properties. For that matter, persons themselves, especially persons with intrinsic value and dignity, seem much less likely to emerge from valueless impersonal stuff than from the intentional hand of a personal Creator.

Baggett and Walls then present C. S. Lewis’ reasoning about why a theistic universe better explains moral values and obligations:

A religious conception of reality, in contrast, holds that behind the physical world is something else, likely a mind of some sort. “That is to say,” as Lewis put it, “it is conscious, and has purposes, and prefers one thing to another. And on this view it made the universe, partly for purposes we do not know, but partly, at any rate, in order to produce creatures like itself . . . to the extent of having minds.”

. . . The Catholic thinker John Henry Newman, a century before Lewis, had similarly argued that our conscience, particularly our feelings of guilt, lead us to conclude God exists. Feelings of conscience are often directed toward fellow human beings, but sometimes our feelings of guilt or shame, which we take as evidence to suggest that we have offended someone, lack an appropriate human target. If such feelings are appropriate, they must then have a nonhuman one. Our feelings of responsibility, shame, and fear emanating from our conscience imply that “there is One to whom we are responsible, before whom we are ashamed, whose claims upon us we fear.”

In a similar vein, Lewis’s essential argument can be summarized like this: There are objective moral facts, among them guilt for wrongdoing and duties we are obliged to obey and are responsible for neglecting, and such objective facts are better explained by a religious understanding of reality than by a Russellian world.

The argumentation is not complex, but it is nonetheless compelling. Compare Russell’s world to a world where a perfect God exists. Instead of Russell’s world explaining the existence of moral values and obligations, it explains them away. Until naturalists can come up with a source of morality that has greater explanatory power than the theistic God, they will forever fail to win the battle of worldviews.

Morality, Philosophy, Truth

What Is Objectivity? Part 1

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

We’ve recently featured several blog posts centered around the idea of moral objectivity.  Objectivity is also a concept that can be applied to truth, knowledge, interpretation, and even beauty.  Although we’ve tried to carefully define objectivity versus subjectivity, it might be worth revisiting this concept to see what contemporary thinkers have to say about it.

Philosopher Tom Howe provides a brief, but insightful survey of several contemporary views on objectivity in his book Objectivity in Biblical Interpretation. Howe starts things off with a quote from the famous agnostic Bertrand Russell:

Subjectively, every philosopher appears to himself to be engaged in the pursuit of something which may be called ‘truth.’ Philosophers may differ as to the definition of ‘truth,’ but at any rate it is something objective, something which, in some sense, everybody ought to accept.

We start with the idea that something is objective if it is something that everybody ought to accept.  If we take the clear moral truth, “It is wrong to torture a child for fun,” this statement would be objectively true if it is a statement that everyone ought to accept.

Howe then describes Paul Helm’s “ontological” objectivity.  According to Howe, “This is basically the question of whether the extra-mental reality exists apart from human perception or is the construct of the human mind.  As Helm puts it, ‘Does the character of the world change with the very fact that we are interpreting it?'”

Here we see another important aspect of objectivity.  Something is objective if it exists “apart from human perception.”  Taking our example again, the moral truth,  “It is wrong to torture a child for fun,” would be objective if the statement was true regardless of whether any human being perceived it to be true.  In other words, if all human beings went extinct tomorrow, it would still be objectively true that torturing a child for fun is wrong.

Here is an interesting thought experiment.  If an intelligent alien race came to earth and began torturing human children, would we react with moral outrage and accuse them of atrocious immoral acts, or would we say to ourselves, “That’s a shame they are torturing kids, but they obviously just have a different moral code than we do.  It must be morally acceptable, under their moral system, for them to torture human children.”

I think that we would obviously be morally outraged.  In fact, this very situation, or something like it, is portrayed in dozens of science fiction movies where intelligent aliens attack and/or torture humans.  The humans in these movies are almost always portrayed as holding the aliens morally culpable, but if moral facts only exist in human perception, then it would be truly bizarre to hold aliens morally accountable.

They might have their own moral facts, or they may perceive no moral facts at all.  Why is it, at least in the movies, humans always assume that hostile aliens have the same moral sensibilities we do?  I submit that it is because the writers of these movie scripts, just like the rest of us, assume moral facts exist apart from human perception.

Attacking aliens aside, this aspect of objectivity seems to confuse many atheists, because they fail to see how something like a moral fact could exist without human minds perceiving it to be true.  For theists, of course, truth also exists in the mind of God, so we have no problem with moral facts being objective in this sense.  If you are a non-theist, you could posit that moral truths exist as brute, fundamental facts of the universe, but this answer merely leads inevitably to the question of why the universe would come furnished with moral facts.

In our next post, we will continue to look at the notion of objectivity.

Atheism, Evil, Pain, and Suffering

Do People Become Atheists for Only Intellectual Reasons?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

In Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian, Russell quotes the famed philosopher John Stuart Mill writing about his father’s road to atheism.  In the previous post, we looked at the transmission of atheism from one generation to the next.  Today we look at another insight from Mill’s quote.

My father [says John Stuart Mill], educated in the creed of Scotch Presbyterianism, had by his own studies and reflections been early led to reject not only the belief in Revelation but the foundations of what is commonly called Natural Religion.  My father’s rejection of all that is called religious belief was not, as many might suppose, primarily a matter of logic and evidence: the grounds of it were moral, still more than intellectual.

He found it impossible to believe that a world so full of evil was the work of an Author combining infinite power with perfect goodness and righteousness.  His aversion to religion, in the sense usually attached to the term, was of the same kind with that of Lucretius: he regarded it with the feelings due not to mere mental delusion but to a great moral evil.

What is interesting in this quotation is James Mill’s reason for becoming an atheist.  It wasn’t about primarily “logic and evidence,” but about a moral problem – the existence of evil.  For Mill, the existence of a morally perfect and infinitely powerful God is impossible given the evil in the world.  Here is a classical way to state this version of the problem of evil:

1. If God is all good, he would destroy evil.

2. If God is all powerful, he could destroy evil.

3. But evil is not destroyed.

4. Therefore, there is no such God.

How do theists respond to this argument?  Christian philosopher Norm Geisler offers the following solution in his Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics (I’ve greatly abbreviated his solution below for space reasons):

Theism holds that even though God could not destroy (annihilate) all evil without destroying all good, nevertheless, he can and will defeat (overcome) all evil without destroying free choice.  The argument can be summarized as follows:

1. God is all good and desires to defeat evil.

2. God is all powerful and is able to defeat evil.

3. Evil is not yet defeated.

4. Therefore, it will one day be defeated.

The infinite power and perfection of God guarantee the eventual defeat of evil.  The fact that it is not yet accomplished in no way diminishes the certainty that it will be defeated.  Even though evil cannot be destroyed without destroying free choice, nonetheless, it can be overcome. . . .

Not only can a theistic God defeat evil, but he will do it.  We know this because he is all good and would want to defeat evil.  And because he is all-powerful and is able to defeat evil.  Therefore, he will do it.  The guarantee that evil will be overcome is the nature of the theistic God.

What is fascinating to me about Mill’s rejection of God is that it is not based on logic.  Philosophers of religion are virtually unanimous in concluding that the logical problem of evil, as stated above, is solvable by theists, and therefore does not demonstrate a true logical problem.

If Mill had used logic and reason, he might have discovered this for himself.  Instead, his failure to apply logic and reason to the problem of evil moved him to atheism.  In fact, as we’ve argued here before, it is difficult to even account for the existence of evil without a perfectly good God.

None of this is to deny that the problem of evil is a question that Christians must answer.  We must take this question seriously and explain how the Christian God can exist with the evil we see in the world.  Norm Geisler and many other Christian philosophers over the last 2,000 years have offered answers to this question.

We don’t know what James Mill concluded about the origins and persistence of evil, but it does look like he failed to consider logical solutions to the problem, and instead relied only on his moral intuitions.

Atheism, Religion

Is Atheism Transmitted from One Generation to the Next?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

In Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian, Russell quotes the famed philosopher John Stuart Mill writing about his father’s road to atheism.  The quote is instructive for Christians as it gives a small glimpse into the world of a famed atheist.

My father [says John Stuart Mill], educated in the creed of Scotch Presbyterianism, had by his own studies and reflections been early led to reject not only the belief in Revelation but the foundations of what is commonly called Natural Religion.  My father’s rejection of all that is called religious belief was not, as many might suppose, primarily a matter of logic and evidence: the grounds of it were moral, still more than intellectual. . . .

It would have been wholly inconsistent with my father’s ideas of duty to allow me to acquire impressions contrary to his convictions and feelings respecting religion: and he impressed on me from the first that the manner in which the world came into existence was a subject on which nothing was known.

There is a lesson here about transmission of beliefs.  It is often claimed by atheists that religious views are merely transmitted from parent to child: we are simply born into our religion.  Atheists, on the other hand, come to their beliefs for mostly intellectual reasons, and are not born into their views.

In the case of James Mill, it appears he did buck the family religion and become an atheist against the teachings of his family.  However, if we read on we see that his son, John Stuart Mill, received his father’s atheism.  The younger Mill was clearly taught to be an atheist by his father.

What we can conclude is that in this case, one generation rejected its religious heritage, but the next did not reject its anti-religious heritage.  Mill’s experience is a great example of an atheist parent making sure that his child embraces his particular worldview.  

I’m sure some of you are wondering what the big deal is.  Of course atheist parents inculcate their beliefs into their children.  The reason I offer this quotation is because of the persistent claim that atheism is all about free thinkers bucking their family’s beliefs.  Perhaps this is true of some first-generation atheists raised in a religious family, but that first generation may choose, as James Mill did, to make sure no more free thinking happens with his children.

My guess is that atheist parents pass along their beliefs just like religious parents.  It is time to admit that Christian and atheist parents are pretty much in the same boat – we all want our children to embrace what we believe. 

If the term free thinker is to refer to people who reject their family’s heritage, then there are free thinkers from every religous and anti-religious persuasion (every group gains converts from outside their current community).  Atheists cannot lay sole claim to this moniker. 

There are more lessons to be learned from Mill’s quotation, and I will tackle those in the next post.

General Apologetics

Should Christians Borrow Ideas from Non-Christians?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

In the Book of Exodus, God commands Moses to tell the Israelites to take plunder from the Egyptians, and the Israelites did so as they were preparing to leave:

The Israelites did as Moses instructed and asked the Egyptians for articles of silver and gold and for clothing. The Lord had made the Egyptians favorably disposed toward the people, and they gave them what they asked for; so they plundered the Egyptians. (Ex. 12:35-36)

There is an interesting application of these verses to the thinking Christian. Saint Augustine noted, in his On Christian Teaching, the following:

The Egyptians not only had idols and crushing burdens which the people of Israel detested and from which they fled. They also had vessels and ornaments of gold and silver, and clothing, which the Israelites leaving Egypt secretly claimed for themselves as if for a better use. Not on their own authority did they make this appropriation, but by the command of God. Meanwhile, the Egyptians themselves, without realizing it, were supplying the things which they were not using properly. In the same way, all the teachings of the pagans have counterfeit and superstitious notions and oppressive burdens of useless labor. Any one of us, leaving the association of pagans with Christ as our leader, ought to abominate and shun them.

In other words, the Israelites took things (i.e., gold, silver, and clothing) from the Egyptians, things which the Egyptians were using to oppress, and put them to a better use. In the same way, says Augustine, just like gold, silver, and clothing, Christians may take ideas (or teachings) from non-Christians and put them to good use. However, we should shun the improper ways non-Christians use these same ideas.

Some have argued that Christians should shun all teachings by non-Christians. One example of this is the accusation sometimes heard from neotheists that the medieval church fathers borrowed illicitly from the Greek philosophers. Philosopher and theologian Norman Geisler responds to these critics:

Christian theologians of every age have been influenced to one degree or another by the prevailing philosophy of their day. But neotheists themselves are not immune from this: They reveal the influence of the prevailing process theology of our time. This in itself does not make their view of God wrong; neither does any influence by Greek philosophy make the classical view of God wrong. In the final analysis, the question is whether it was a good influence or a bad one—whether there are biblical and rational grounds for it or not. Rejecting a view because of its source is the genetic fallacy. It is not a matter of whether the reason is Greek, but whether it is good.

What is important about borrowing from non-Christians is that we take only what can be put to a proper Christian use. We leave what is intrinsically antithetical to Christian belief behind. In addition, we should avoid denigrating any idea just because of where or whom it came from. As Geisler points out, this is the genetic fallacy.

In my own education at Southern Evangelical Seminary, we frequently read books and articles written by non-Christians in order to familiarize ourselves with the most prominent thinkers of the past and present. Although much of what I read is antithetical to Christianity, some of it is not.

We are not reading these materials simply to learn how best to counter their arguments – though that is one reason to read them. We are also reading the material to gain insights on important philosophical and scientific issues.

Here is an example. One of the most famous agnostic philosophers of the 20th century was Bertrand Russell, a man who was strongly anti-Christian. Yet in reading some of his works I learned that he was a neutral monist.

What is interesting about neutral monism is that it rejects metaphysical materialism (which affirms that all that exists is matter and energy). Since materialism is the primary metaphysical opponent of Christian dualism in the 21st century, Russell’s arguments against materialism can be put to use by Christians who believe that materialism is an entirely inadequate metaphysical position.

On the other hand, an example of an idea intrinsically opposed to Christianity would be the Hindu teaching that God is all and all is God. If we tried to apply this idea directly to God, we would be in grave error. The Bible clearly teaches that God created the world, and that He exists independently from it. God can never be equated with the world, as if they are one and the same. In this case, we cannot borrow this Hindu idea and apply it to God.

Countless other examples could be given, but what is imperative is to always ground everything we learn in the biblical Christian worldview. If we stay in that framework, there are many ideas from non-Christians, and even anti-Christians, that we can rightfully borrow. Likewise, it follows that we cannot rightly discern what to borrow, or what to leave behind, unless we truly and thoroughly understand biblical Christianity.

Mind-Body Theory, Philosophy

Why Is Physicalism Self-Refuting? Part 1

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

In the previous post, we saw that physicalism seems to inevitably lead to determinism.  Determinism, if you recall, means that every event, including all of your thoughts, feelings, desires, and choices, is determined by the physical conditions antecedent to it.  The renowned atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell said it this way: 

When a man acts in ways that annoy us we wish to think him wicked, and we refuse to face the fact that his annoying behavior is a result of antecedent causes which, if you follow them long enough, will take you beyond the moment of his birth and therefore to events for which he cannot be held responsible by any stretch of imagination.

If determinism is true, then what follows?  J. P. Moreland points out that “a number of philosophers have argued that physicalism . . .  must be false because [it] impl[ies] determinism and determinism is self-refuting.”  Moreland quotes J. R. Lucas speaking of the determinist:

If what he says is true, he says it merely as the result of his heredity and environment, and of nothing else. He does not hold his determinist views because they are true, but because he has such-and-such stimuli; that is, not because the structure of the universe is such-and-such but only because the configuration of only part of the universe, together with the structure of the determinist’s brain, is such as to produce that result. . . . Determinism, therefore, cannot be true, because if it was, we should not take the determinists’ arguments as being really arguments, but as being only conditioned reflexes. Their statements should not be regarded as really claiming to be true, but only as seeking to cause us to respond in some way desired by them.

Moreland also quotes H. P. Owens:

Determinism is self-stultifying. If my mental processes are totally determined, I am totally determined either to accept or to reject determinism. But if the sole reason for my believing or not believing X is that I am causally determined to believe it, I have no ground for holding that my judgment is true or false.

Determinism, and therefore, physicalism, then appear to be self-refuting.  It might be helpful to flesh this out more.  Moreland argues that physicalism, itself, undermines rationality.  The physicalist cannot claim to know that physicalism is true, or claim to believe in physicalism for good reasons, because to know something is true for good reasons requires at least three factors be assumed.

These three factors are intentionality, an enduring I, and genuine libertarian free will.  All three of these are conditions of rationality will be discussed in part 2 of this series.

General Apologetics

Are Christians Thinking About Christianity?

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No, not many of them.  I suspect that this just mirrors the fact that most people aren’t thinking about anything.  But it shouldn’t be that way for those who call themselves followers of Christ.  He called us to love God with our mind .  Read these quotes below and see if any of them apply to you or someone you know.  If so, what are you going to do about it?  (Hint: reading this blog might be a great start!)

“We are having a revival of feelings but not of the knowledge of God.  The church today is more guided by feelings than by convictions.  We value enthusiasm more than informed commitment.” – 1980 Gallup Poll on religion

“We live in what may be the most anti-intellectual period in the history of western civilization.”  – R. C. Sproul

“Ignorance is the mother, not of devotion, but of heresy.”  – Puritan Cotton Mather

“For many, religion is identified by subjective feelings, sincere motives, personal piety, and blind faith.”  – J. P. Moreland

“I’m always encouraged to use my intellect in how I approach my vocation, select a house, or learn to use a computer.  But within the sphere of my private, spiritual life of faith, it is my heart, and my heart alone, that operates.”  – J. P. Moreland

“Most Christians would rather die than think – in fact they do.”  – Bertrand Russell