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Bertrand Russell in his “Why I’m Not a Christian” essay, speeches and books states that the Christian Churches hinder rather than improve the social condition.

You can read his lecture delivered on March 6, 1927 to the National Secular Society, South London Branch, at Battersea Town Hall at http://users.drew.edu/~jlenz/whynot.html

Russell’s biography and a list of his writings can be read at http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/1950/russell-bio.html

Bertrand Russell’s life was not always a happy journey.

He was born at Trelleck on 18th May, 1872. His parents were Viscount Amberley and Katherine, daughter of 2nd Baron Stanley of Alderley. At age three he was orphaned, got into trouble with the military during World War II because of his pacifism, was criticized for his views because he spent some time in the Soviet Union, was divorced more than once, and went from pillar to post lecturing in various universities.

His moral views were challenged by critics that resulted in legal action to stop him from lecturing at City College in New York.

Russell received prestigious rewards for his writings including being elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1908, and re-elected a fellow of Trinity College in 1944, the Sylvester medal of the Royal Society in 1934, the de Morgan medal of the London Mathematical Society in the same year, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950.

The British philosopher, logician, and mathematician died 2 February 2, 1970.

Some Reasons Russell Was Not a Christian

1. He did not believe that the existence of God was provable by “Unaided Reason, First Cause, Natural Law, Design, Moral Arguments, or Remedy Injustice Arguments.”

2. He was doubtful that Christ ever existed, said some of Christ’s philosophy is not original, he was not the greatest and wisest of all men, and his best philosophy is not followed by Christians because it is too difficult to live.

3. Christ didn’t come when he said he would. Early Christians assumed that Christ would come very soon and lived accordingly from day to day. He never came.

4. Christ taught there was hell and judgment which is too negative for man’s proper development.

5. I quote the great writer: You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.

6. I quote again: 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 have gone hand in hand.

7. My last quote: 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. It needs a fearless outlook and a free intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not looking back all the time toward a past that is dead, which we trust will be far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create.

My Amazingly Brilliant Responses to Russell’s Reasons for Not Being Christian

I chose a dead philosopher to argue with instead of a living philosopher. He can’t reply.

I’m an engineer, not a philosopher. I call myself the hack writer. No one will take me seriously here but I’m going to give you my two bits anyway.

The usual Christian response to a critic is to call him names and downgrade him by attacking his character. Let’s avoid that approach. I didn’t know the man but I’m sure that I would have no reason to dislike him. I think that his lecture in 1927 was not polished but he made his points. I’ll take them one by one:

1. No one can prove or disprove that God exists. Trying to prove that God exist by mental exercise is silly. God has to reveal himself. When he does, you must still decide if it was God or not.

2. It’s silly to say that Christ never lived. We generally accept historical records of stating the truth on such matters. There are plenty of accounts of Christ’s life by people who lived and traveled with him. Christ never said that all his thoughts were stated by him for the first time. Nobody else did either. Who was the wisest of all men is a value judgment. Russell never said who was the greatest or who even came close. He said that he had to go with Christ on some subjects. So, who was greater?

3. It’s true that the early Christians thought that Christ was coming very soon. This is very evident by Christ’s words and early Christian writings. But Christ said that only his Father knew when the second coming would occur. He said that not even the angels in heaven knew the answer to that question.

4. There are two sides to the argument that teachings about hell are detrimental to the advancement of mankind. Punishment and reward can change human behavior. If hell exists then it exists. I’ll take Christ’s word for it.

5. It’s true the church has fought science and social norms. That will not change. The church can be very intolerant. But the church has to progress in this areas as in all other areas. WE must not allow this to happen in our churches. I heard a Catholic priest in Japan say as he quoted from the New Testament that when we criticize other churches we stop “much good.” If you tell a Baptist that his church is wrong so he doesn’t go to church anymore, then the work he was doing in his church stops. I’ve visited different churches and I have heard Baptist blast the Catholics for playing bingo to raise money. I say that we should mind our own business.

6. Russell says that fear is the parent of cruelty. I don’t think that is always true. It’s one of those generalities that have little meaning. Greed and hate and envy are more aptly the parents of cruelty. If a crook mugs you on the street, he wants your money. If he rapes you, he envies your body. If he beats you to death with a club, he hates the sight of you. It’s true that a man might fight back because of fear or he might kill a rattlesnake because of fear, but he is more apt to run for his life.

7. I have no argument here. Russell prefers science to religion, or a fact-based philosophy. Today’s science will not be the science of the future. Scientific “truths” wither under new investigation. It is the nature of the beast. But science changes for the better, always pursuing the truth. It should be the same for religion. Past religious persecution needs to be analyzed and not repeated. The obviously false must not be retained because of tradition or the writings of the ancients. I like the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. If we all obeyed that rule we would not have to worry about the future.

Do your children know the Golden Rule?

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As a thought experiment, let us ask: What did God have to do to make the universe? In the broadest possible sense, the question of emergence is how the radically nonclassical world of quantum mechanics or quantum gravity gave rise to the world of classical physics, which in turn gave rise to complex biological systems, which in turn gave rise to conscious beings like us.

“Strong emergence” is the view that rejects both reductionism and dualism and claims to occupy a middle ground. It says that under the right physical conditions, new properties, entities or laws with novel causal powers come into existence.

Many on both the reductionism and dualism side doubt the very idea of such a middle ground, and they are even more suspicious of the idea that strong emergence could be of any real scientific value. Opponents of strong emergence claim that either it is supposed to be a brute fact that these new features come into existence or such emergence can be explained by science. These critics say that if the former is true, then strong emergence is just mystery-mongering and scientific defeatism.

But on the other hand, says the critic, if so-called strong emergence can be explained by science then it whatever “it” is is not anathema to reductionism. To explain is to reduce what else could scientific explanation be if not reduction? On the contrary, the kind of strong emergence that I have defended claims that strongly emergent phenomena can be explained by science, but the explanation in question is not a reductive one.

Thus, strong emergence has to provide nonreductive scientific explanations for emergent phenomema and not merely assert explanatory gaps as explanation. Defending such a view requires rejecting the Platonic idea of transcendent fundamental physical laws that govern all phenomena in favor of an explanation of natural processes that is more contextual and relational.

Current scientific attempts to work out this contextual and relational understanding of natural processes include some embodied and embedded accounts of mind in cognitive science and accounts of biological complexity specifically dynamics systems theory that argue for the equal importance of genes, environment and organism in biological development. Strong emergence will ultimately stand or fall on such scientific grounds.

But does strong emergence, if it can be proven, have any theological significance? If one defines strong emergence as being about brute features of reality forever beyond natural scientific explanation, then a theist can try and use such an explanatory gap to argue for the existence of God. For example, if consciousness is a feature of reality beyond scientific explanation, then perhaps the existence of God is the best explanation for its existence.

Notice that if defined in this way, intelligent design proponents are paradigmatic purveyors of strong emergence about living processes. However, if we define strong emergence as I have advocated for above, then there are no in-principle explanatory gaps that need to be filled in by supernatural causes. Strong emergence so defined is no friend to the “God of the gaps” strategy.

Strong emergence does not preclude theism. Furthermore, some process-oriented theologians, or theologians who view the universe as a divinely inspired creative process manifested in evolutionary terms, might find strong emergence lends comfort to their conception of the Godhead.

Michael Silberstein is an associate professor of philosophy at Elizabethtown College and an adjunct at the University of Maryland. This article was written for Science & Theology News.

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I previously cited the eye as an example of an organ that demonstrates irreducible complexity. It’s an old argument in the creation-evolution debate but has never been properly defeated. That is not to say materialists don’t give it a shot.

They will say it came about as the result of a “long and complex pathway.” We are supposed to never mind that nobody knows how “long” and nobody has ever attempted to detail the “complex pathway” in other than storybook fashion.

The evolutionary eye tale goes something like this: light sensitive pigment evolved to light sensitive cells, then to a primitive eyespot, to a deep recessed eyespot, to a pinhole lens eye and finally to the complex eye. The “proof” is that there are creatures alive today that have each of these things. But doesn’t that very fact contain the disproof that any of these sight organs evolved from one to the other? If “precursor” eye organs are fully functional for the creatures that have them, there is no need for them to evolve further.

Let’s get to the nitty gritty of what real proof should be. How did the first light sensitive pigment come into being? By what mechanism, what physical laws, what chemistry? How, by what mechanism (details please) did the complex assemblage required for light sensitive cells and fully functioning eyes, complete with lids, lacrimal (tear) apparatus, mucosal membranes, eye ball, cornea, aqueous humor, iris, lens, a complex array of focusing muscles, automatic neural control (we don’t have to think to focus or to adjust the iris for the amount of light), vitreous humor, retina (rods, cones, etc.), optic nerve and brain to translate the images, come into being?

Look at the simplified graphic here of the eye and some of the biochemistry associated with it. Nobody can imagine, much less describe in detail, how such an array of complexity could come into being by steps. Neither can they fathom a detailed mechanism for creating any single part.

None of this skepticism or questioning holds back evolution-to-the-death believers. When faced with the irreducible complexity argument one evolutionary apologist basically solved the problem by proclaiming that an eye is really not very perfect at all, and by implication not complex! If it is not complex, then reducing it to simple components is no problem.

Referring to the layered configuration of the retina and its connection to the neurons feeding signals to the brain, he remarked: “The world is simply not always so intelligently designed! For optimal vision why would an intelligent designer have built an eye backwards and upside down?” (Why people believe, p XXI http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0716733870/103-4950061-5008665?v=glance&n=283155) He is here referring to the layered configuration of the retina and its connection to the neurons feeding signals to the brain.

I hardly know what to say to a comment like that. But I will. The first thing that comes to mind is, let’s see you do better Mr. Smarty Pants. He won’t and he can’t. Nowhere in the anatomical or physiological literature is there even one article by any researcher or scientist describing this flawed design and a proposal as to how the eye’s “backwards and upside down” mistake should be fixed. Nowhere in the hundreds of thousands of medical articles on optometry and ophthalmology is there any mention that the eye is defective in this way. (I have only reviewed the medical literature for about the past 35 years but I’ll bet there is nowhere my upside down eyes haven’t looked either.)

Incredible. Humans with all of their smarts, science and technology (not to mention 20-20 eyesight) can’t even create one light sensitive pigment, but this one knows how to make a better complex eye! It’s like not being able to add 2 +2 but then cockily pronouncing how differential equations performed by a Nobel Prize laureate are “backwards and upside down.”

John Ciardi summed it up so well:
“Who could believe an ant in theory?
A giraffe in blueprint?
Ten thousand doctors of what’s possible
Could reason half the jungle out of being.” (7:27)

Dr. Wysong is a former veterinary clinician and surgeon, college instructor in human anatomy, physiology and the origin of life, inventor of numerous medical, surgical, nutritional, athletic and fitness products and devices, research director for the present company by his name and founder of the philanthropic Wysong Institute. He is author of The Creation-Evolution Controversy now in its eleventh printing, a new two volume set on philosophy for living entitled Thinking Matters: 1-Living Life… As If Thinking Matters; 2-The Big Questions…As If Thinking Matters, several books on nutrition, prevention and health for people and animals and over 18 years of monthly health newsletters. He may be contacted at Wysong@Wysong.net and a free subscription to his e-Health Letter is available at http://www.wysong.net. Also check out http://www.cerealwysong.com

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