What about the moral points? He must like Jesus! Since Russell, famously, held that the burden of proof is on the person making a claim, the failure of these proofs leaves him with no reason to assume God’s existence. “Do you think that, if you were given millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan or the Fascists?”Īfter looking at a few others, he concludes that the arguments for the existence of a God are all lacking in rigor. 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. This perennial favorite argues that lifeforms are so well suited to their environments that a designer must have been involved.

“There is, as we all know, a law that if you throw dice you will get double sixes only about once in thirty-six times, and we do not regard that as evidence that the fall of the dice is regulated by design.”Īs with dice rolls, so with reality, he argues. Since atomic physics is more statistical than classical, Russell contends that it seems odd to claim that an intelligence is involved in physics. Russell finds this one to be outdated given advances in physics since the days of Newton, particularly in quantum mechanics. It then assumes that the being who determined them was God. This one centers on the idea that the laws of physics needed to be set. Russell points out that if we can decide that one thing doesn’t need a cause, we have no reason not to say the world itself wasn’t the thing without a cause. This first cause is God and is exempted from needing a cause itself.

This argument is simple it maintains that since everything must have a cause, there must be a first cause to start everything else. He points out that all of them have rather glaring flaws. He deals first with several arguments for God’s existence, some of them very famous.

What i believe by bertrand russell