RUSSELL ON RELIGION Russell on Religion contains a selection of writings designed to give the reader representative material on all aspects of his thinking on this subject. Russell contends with religion in every genre of his writing from mathematical treatises to his ventures in fiction; as a philosopher, historian, social critic and private individual. Students at all levels will find Russell on Religion a valuable presentation of the development and diversity of Bertrand Russell’s thinking about religion. Louis Greenspan is Professor Emeritus, Department of Religious Studies, McMaster University and former Director of the Bertrand Russell Editorial Project. Stefan Andersson is a research scholar at the Bertrand Russell Archives, McMaster University. RUSSELL ON… General editor’s introduction A.C.Grayling Russell achieved public fame—often enough, notoriety—because of his engagement in social and political debates, becoming known to a wide audience as a philosopher in the popular sense of the term. But his chief contributions, the ones that have made a permanent difference to the history of thought, lie in logic and philosophy; and they are such that his influence both on the matter and style of twentieth-century philosophy, principally in its Anglophone form, is pervasive. Elsewhere I have described his contribution as constituting the ‘wall-paper’ of analytic philosophy, in the sense that his successors ‘use techniques and ideas developed from his work without feeling the need—sometimes without recognizing the need—to mention his name; which is influence indeed’. Russell devoted much attention to central technical questions in philosophical logic, epistemology and metaphysics. He also wrote extensively and forcefully about moral, religious and political questions in ways not merely journalistic. Much of his work in all these areas took the form of essays. Some have of course been famously collected, constituting a fundamental part of the canon of twentieth-century analytic philosophy. But there are many more riches in his copious output, their value to some degree lost because they have not hitherto been collected and edited in such a way as to do justice to the development and weight of his thinking about these subjects. This series, in bringing together Russell’s chief writings on major subject areas in an editorial frame that locates and interprets them fully, aims to remedy that lack and thereby to make a major contribution both to Russell scholarship and to contemporary analytic philosophy. RUSSELL ON RELIGION Selections from the writings of Bertrand Russell Edited by Louis Greenspan and Stefan Andersson London and New York First published 1999 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002. © 1999 selection and editorial matter Louis Greenspan and Stefan Andersson; © 1999 Chapters 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9–13 and 16, McMaster University; © 1999 Chapters 3, 7, 14, 15, 17 and 18– 22, The Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation Ltd The right of the editors Louis Greenspan and Stefan Andersson to be identified as the Authors of this Work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data Russell, Bertrand, 1872–1970. Russell on religion: selections from the writings of Bertrand Russell/ edited by Louis Greenspan and Stefan Andersson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Religion—Philosophy. I. Greenspan, Louis I., 1934–. II. Andersson, Stefan, 1953–. III. Title. 81649.R91G74 1999 210–dc21 98–30931 ISBN 0-203-45096-5 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-75920-6 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-18091-0 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-18092-9 (pbk) CONTENTS Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 PART I Personal statements 19 1 From ‘My Mental Development’ and ‘Reply to Criticisms’ 23 2 The Free Man’s Worship 31 3 Autobiography: Mystic Illumination 39 4 What is an Agnostic? 41 PART II Religion and philosophy 51 5 The Essence of Religion 57 6 The Essence and Effect of Religion 70 7 Why I Am Not a Christian 77 8 The Existence and Nature of God 92 PART III Religion and science 107 9 Mysticism and Logic 109 10 Science and Religion 131 v CONTENTS 11 Review of Sir Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World140 12 Review of James Jeans, The Mysterious Universe 143 13 Do Science and Religion Conflict? 147 PART IV Religion and morality 151 14 Religion and the Churches 153 15 Inherent Tendencies of Industrialism 167 16 Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilization? 169 17 The Sense of Sin 186 PART V Religion and history 195 18 Introduction to History of Western Philosophy 199 19 The Religious Development of the Jews 203 20 Christianity During the First Four Centuries 219 21 Mohammedan Culture and Philosophy 229 22 The Reformation and Counter-Reformation 238 Notes 241 Selected bibliography 247 Index 249 vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The research for this volume has, in the case of Dr Andersson, been supported by The Wenner-Gren Foundation in Stockholm, The Hultengren Foundation for Philosophy in Lund and The Anders Karitz Foundation in Uppsala. For information concerning the papers published here we have relied heavily on The Bibliography of Bertrand Russell by Kenneth Blackwell and Harry Ruja, and the introductions and headnotes supplied by the editors of The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell. We are grateful to Dr John G.Slater for his help and for giving us access to Volumes 10 and 11 before they were published, to Dr Richard Rempel and Dr Andrew Brink for access to Volume 12 and to Dr Rempel and Dr Beryl Haslam for access to Volume 15 prior to its publication. In addition we would like to thank McMaster University and Dr Richard Rempel as Director of the Russell Project for their generosity in allowing us to draw on the facilities of this Project. We are especially indebted to Arlene Duncan, Office Manager of the Project, for her good cheer and hard work in putting out this volume. We are grateful to series editor Anthony Grayling for his learned counsel and unfailing support. We are also grateful to our editor at Routledge, Richard Stoneman and his assistant, Coco Stevenson, as well as Dr John Slater, Dr Kenneth Blackwell at The Bertrand Russell Archives, Dr Nicholas Griffin, Dr Richard Rempel and Dr Andrew Bone for stimulating discussions concerning Russell on religion. vii INTRODUCTION Bertrand Russell belonged to that company of freethinkers who wrote continually about religion. Religion is the subject of one of his earliest writings, the secret diary that he started to keep when he was sixteen years old, it is the theme of well-known essays such as ‘The Free Man’s Worship’, and figures prominently in the mature treatises on sociology and politics such as Prospects of Industrial Civilization. Even some of his treatises on mathematics and philosophy of science contain speculations about the reality of a spiritual realm independent of the senses. Religion is prominent in the unpublished fiction that he wrote early in the century as well as the fiction that he published at a great old age. Throughout much of his life Russell contended with religion as philosopher, as historian, as social critic and as private individual. In one of his memoirs he declared that he overcame religion when he was an adolescent during a struggle recorded in his secret diary when ‘I rejected successively, free will, immortality and belief in God’. But the record of a lifetime of writing suggests that the struggle continued for many years, and on several fronts. In this volume we have presented only a small selection from Russell’s vast corpus of writings on religion. We have chosen material from diverse genres of literature, omitting only his most technical work and his fiction. We have included his most important philosophical and literary articles, his personal statements and selections from his surveys of world history as well as his books on science and society. We have been selective, but we have endeavoured to cast as wide a net as Russell’s so that the reader will be exposed to all aspects of his work on this subject. Freethinkers and humanists cherish Russell as revealed in essays such as ‘Why I Am Not a Christian’ and ‘Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilization?’ and in passages such as ‘my own view of religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of 1 INTRODUCTION fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race.’1 Such passages remain an important part of the canon of sacrilege. Russell argued the case against religion in public debates with eminent theologians and took delight in making anti-religious jibes, such as his retort that when he made his appearance before the Heavenly Throne, he would reprimand his Maker for not providing sufficient evidence of His existence. Though, supposedly, he lived in an age of declining faith, religious authorities found the energy to pour wrath upon him and his works. His enemies spread rumours that the school he established at Beacon Hill was a nest of atheism, nudity and free love.