Rereading Russell --- The First-cause Argument

by hamilcarr 3 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

  • hamilcarr
    hamilcarr

    No, not CT but Bertie. While rereading some of his well-known works, I think his astute logical thinking remains relevant today:

    The First-cause Argument

    Perhaps the simplest and easiest to understand is the argument of the First Cause. (It is maintained that everything we see in this world has a cause, and as you go back in the chain of causes further and further you must come to a First Cause, and to that First Cause you give the name of God.) That argument, I suppose, does not carry very much weight nowadays, because, in the first place, cause is not quite what it used to be. The philosophers and the men of science have got going on cause, and it has not anything like the vitality it used to have; but, apart from that, you can see that the argument that there must be a First Cause is one that cannot have any validity. I may say that when I was a young man and was debating these questions very seriously in my mind, I for a long time accepted the argument of the First Cause, until one day, at the age of eighteen, I read John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, and I there found this sentence: "My father taught me that the question 'Who made me?' cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question `Who made god?'" That very simple sentence showed me, as I still think, the fallacy in the argument of the First Cause. If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu's view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, "How about the tortoise?" the Indian said, "Suppose we change the subject." The argument is really no better than that. 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. The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination. Therefore, perhaps, I need not waste any more time upon the argument about the First Cause.

  • cameo-d
    cameo-d

    According to Russell's definitions...it looks like we are on the cusp of hell.....

    At this point it is important to note the striking parallel between the Christian hope and the Marxist hope as set out by Bertrand Russell in his History of Western Philosophy (1946). 10 'To understand Marx psychologically', Russell says, 'one should use the following dictionary:

    Yahweh = Dialectical Materialism
    The Messiah = Marx
    The Elect = The Proletariat
    The Church = The Communist Party
    The Second Coming = The Revolution
    Hell = Punishment of the Capitalists
    The Millennium = The Communist Commonwealth.'

  • quietlyleaving
    quietlyleaving

    Russell didn't like religious type comprehensive visions of the world. For him communism for example and any kind of all embracing ideology was just like religion.

    hamilcarr, Bertie Russell was put in prison in 1916 for being a pacifist.

  • hamilcarr
    hamilcarr

    cameo-d. Indeed, the sovjet experiment was a secular continuation of the Gospel, showing its ideals were unattainable in the real world.

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