Russell offers a brief treatment of a number of traditional arguments for God's existence. For the most part, our discussion will be brief as well.

The first argument Russell considers, appropriately enough, is the First Cause argument. And his objection to it is very simple: if we ask abut the cause of the Universe, there seems to be no no reason not to ask about the cause of God. And if we insist that God needs no cause, then we might as well say that the Universe needs no cause. In Russell's words:

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 this argument.

Here the reply might ne that the world is manifestly not a necessary being. It is perfectly possible to imagine it having begun to exist -- indeed, we believe it did. But if it began to exist, then (following Anselm) it is perfectly possible to imagine that it might never have existed at all. Hence, it is not a necessary being.

We can come at this another way. Surely there are various ways the world might have been, many of them vastly different from this world. It is possible that this world might not have existed at all. In that case, it is not a necessary being. But perhaps it is necessary some some world or other must exist.

Here the reply might be that for each alternative way the world might have been -- each "possible world" -- it is possible that that world might not have existed. Therefore, it is possible that none of them might have existed. But this reasoning is suspect. To say that no single alternative is necessary is not to say that all of the alternatives could fail. either I have a brother or I do not have a brother. Neither is a necessary truth. But necessarily one of them must be true nonetheless.

The difficulty here is that there is no clear way to get past our bald and, alas, labile intuitions. Russell seems right: there is no real reason we can give for insisting that the world must have had a cause.

The next argument that Russell considers is the one he labels the Natural Law argument. Unfortunately for the reader, he does not ever really set the argument forth directly. However, there seem to be two issues: (1) why are there any natural laws at all? and (2) why are the laws the way they are?

Russell begins with a bit of throat-clearing. He points out that some things we might take for natural laws are really disguised definitions or conventions. For example: three feet is one yard, even in the center of the sun. But this is not remarkable. It is a matter of definition.

He also points out that some "laws" are the results of accumulated bits of chance behavior. A coin flipped many times will tend to come up heads about half the time; a pair of dice thrown many times will only show double sixs about one time in thirty-six. But these facts are just the result of the accumulated chance behavior of the individual coin tosses and dice throws; no real explanation is necessary.

Russell may be right about these sorts of cases, though the issues about the matter of chance and law are trickier than he suggests. But the fact is that many genuine laws of nature are neither definitions nor accumulated chance. What does Russell say about the other cases?

Two things, in effect. The first is to suggest that the issue is the result of a confusion of natural law with legal dictates -- with "law" as we understand it in the sense of the law of the land. But this objection is weak. What strikes the theist is that things could have been merely chaotic. Instead, the world is orderly. The theist asks why this should be.

Russell's second point is that we can ask why God made these laws rather than others? And here he offers us a dilemma. Either God had a reason or he didn't. If he didn't, says Russell, "you then find that there is something that is not subject to law, and so your train of natural law is interrupted."

One wonders what Russell had for lunch before he wrote that sentence. Of course the train of "natural law" is interrupted, the theist would say. God is the maker of nature and its laws. God is not subject to law.

Still, this seems to go along with the idea that the laws are arbitrary, and that might be troublesome in itself. So suppose God had a reason for creating the natural laws that he did -- to make the best of all possible universes, for example. In that case, says Russell, "God himself was subject to law, and so you do not get any advantage by introducing an intermediary."

This seems to me equally as bad an argument as the previous one. To say that I did something for a reason is very different from saying that I did it as a result of law. In fact, our concept of free choice embodies that idea that we have the freedom to do things for reasons Perhaps there is an incoherence here. But to show that there was would require an argument. And Russell doesn't offer one.

Still, we might add, to say that God gave the laws leaves it an utter mystery how God did this. And to the extent that it is a mystery, it isn't clear that anything has actually been explained.

The next argument in Russell's sights is the Argument from Design. Russell offers two objections. The first is that much of what the design argument was intended to deal with is dealt with by evolution. We are adapted to our environment, roughly, because if our ancestors had not adapted thus, they would not have survived. And the mechanisms of adaptation involve a healthy dose of random genetic mixing and mutation.

I have already expressed the view that if religion doesn't accomadate itself to evolution, then religion will make itself look silly. And most of the mainstream religions do not reject evolution. All the same, there is much else about the universe that strikes some minds as evidence of design -- features at the cosmic level. And here we can't invoke Darwin. The main issue is the one raised above: whether invoking God actually provides an explanation for what puzzles us. And, as Hume noted, we can wonder why God's own inner complexity doesn't stand in need of explanation.

In any case, Russell's further objection is that the world is too bleak a place for it to be plausible that it was designed. This is a sort of version of the argument from evil, and we won't take it up here; that topic will be discussed in detail later in the course.

We come to the Moral Argument. In fact, Russell considers two such, The first is that we need God to explain why there are any moral principles at all -- to explain how there comes to be a difference between right and wrong. Russell's objection is one that others have made and that seems to me absolutely correct: if the difference between right and wrong is merely a result of God's arbitrary fiat, then it is meaningless to say that God is good. Indeed, we could add, it is meaningless to say that there really is a difference. Nobody's commands could make something morally right or wrong. In any case, if it makes sense to say that God is good, there must be a different basis for the rightness and wrongness of things than God's will. Appeal to God's will can't explain why there is a difference between right and wrong. And if God has reasons for God's commandments, then those reasons provide the basis for the difference between good and evil; it is not a matter of God's will.

The second version of the moral argument is that without God, there is no justice; we need to posit God to vouchsafe cosmic justice. Kant offered an argument of this sort, and Russell dismisses it quickly. If the universe seems unjust, then the evidence seems to say that the world is not just after all. To say that there must be a God who rights wrongs is to fly in the face of the evidence.

I will confess that this evaluation seems correct as far as the argument under consideration itself is concerned. Unless one had other reasons for believing in God, the existence of evil in the world would seem to count against God's existence rather than for it. To be fair, Kant's argument is not anywhere near as simple as Russell makes it out to be. It depends on an analysis of what Kant calls Practical Reason, and is concerned with the presuppositions of Practical Reason. But that said, I think there are very few commentators, believers or not, who have found Kant's argument persuasive.

© Copyright Allen Stairs, 1998. All Rights Reserved.
stairs@glue.umd.edu