Why I Am Not a Christian: do the standard arguments for God fail as decisively as the 1927 lecture claims?

Bertrand Russell, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

No argument for the existence of God survives examination. The first-cause argument refutes itself, the design argument is answered by evolution and embarrassed by the state of the world, and the moral argument runs onto the Euthyphro dilemma. Religion is based primarily and mainly upon fear.12345

Sources

  1. 'What has human happiness to do with morals? The object of morals is not to make people happy.' > why i am not a christian > 17 FEAR THE FOUNDATION OF RELIGION 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.
    1. Why I am Not a Christian, p. 18
  2. In this country, as you know, it ceased to be an essential item because of a decision of the Privy Council, and from that decision the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Archbishop of York dissented; but in this country our religion is settled by Act of Parliament, and therefore the Privy Council was able to override Their Graces and hell was no longer necessary to a Christian.
    1. Why I am Not a Christian, pp. 3–4
  3. You can sometimes give a causal explanation of one thing as being the effect of something else, but that is merely referring one thing to another thing and there's no—to my mind—explanation in Fr Copleston's sense of anything at all, nor is there any meaning in calling things 'contingent' because there isn't anything else the existence of god 151 they could be.
    12. The Existence of God, pp. 151–152
  4. "What has human hap- piness to do with morals? The object of mor- als is not to make people happy." FEAR THE FOUNDATION OF RELIGION 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 trou- bles and disputes.
    Why I Am Not a Christian
  5. If you say that he did it simply from his own good pleasure, and without any reason, you then find that there is something which is not subject to law, and so your train of natural law is interrupted.
    Why I Am Not a Christian

Where the argument is made

  • "Why I Am Not a Christian" (lecture to the South London Branch of the National Secular Society, 6 March 1927)
  • Religion and Science (1935)
  • "Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilisation?" (1930)
  • the BBC debate with Frederick Copleston on the existence of God (1948), reprinted in the 1957 collection
  • A History of Western Philosophy (1945) on the scholastics

How the argument was received

The most widely read unbeliever's case in English, and one whose handling of the cosmological argument is disputed even by sympathisers.