Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) was a British-born analytic philosopher, logician, essayist and political activist. His primary philosophical work was in mathematical philosophy, where he argued that mathematics could be reduced to logic (logicism). Russell was also imprisoned for his opposition to the First World War, and was the founding member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

Russell wrote voluminously, including a lengthy History of Western Philosophy, essays on his attitude to religion including Sceptical Essays and Why I Am Not A Christian (a talk given in 1927 at Battersea Town Hall).

Philosophy

One of Russell's primary contributions in philosophy, mathematics and set theory is Russell's Paradox, which he discovered in 1901. The paradox is that the set of all sets which are not members of themselves is a member of itself is itself a member of that set. The significance of this is that all logical sentences are based on a contradiction.

Social activism

Russell was a pacifist, opposing both the first and second world wars. In 1954, he broadcast on BBC radio a lecture entitled Man's Peril which condemned the Bikini H-bomb tests. In 1955, he collaborated with Albert Einstein in writing the Russell-Einstein Manifesto which called for the curtailment of nuclear weapons. Russell's anti-nuclear activism led to the foundation of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

Russell organised a tribunal - the Russell Tribunal, sometimes known as the International War Crimes Tribunal - which was hosted by the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. This investigated the actions of American forces in Vietnam. This was preceded by a book entitled War Crimes in Vietnam. The tribunal had as members a variety of scientists, philosophers and other intellectuals, as well as political representatives, artists and lawyers. The tribunal concluded that the United States government had committed genocide in Vietnam. Following this, the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation organized the Citizens Commissions of Inquiry, which held similar hearings across the United States.

Views on religion

Russell's views on religion were atheistic, and anti-religious:

I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race. I cannot, however, deny that it has made some contributions to civilization. It helped in early days to fix the calendar, and it caused Egyptian priests to chronicle eclipses with such care that in time they became able to predict them.

Russell responded to many of the arguments of religious apologists, and debated with the Jesuit priest Frederick Copleston on BBC radio in 1948. In 1952, Russell wrote an article for Illustrated Magazine which was not published, in which he drew an analogy of God to a teapot, arguing that the burden of proof should be on the religious believer to prove his claims, rather than the skeptic having to disprove claims which are either wildly improbable or not falsifiable:

If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.

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