Why Does Bertrand Russell Blame God for Evil?

Why does God allow evil?

Bertrand Russell comments below. "The world, we are told, was created by a God who is both omnibenevolent (all-loving) and omnipotent (all-powerful). Before He created the world He foresaw all the pain and misery that it would contain; He is therefore responsible for all of it. It is useless to argue that the pain in the world is due to sin. In the first place, this is not true; it is not sin that causes rivers to overflow their banks or volcanoes to erupt. But even if it were true, it would make no difference. If I were going to beget a child knowing that the child was going to be a homicidal maniac, I should be responsible for his crimes. If God knew in advance the sins of which man would be guilty, He was clearly responsible for all the consequences of those sins when He decided to create man. The usual Christian argument is that the suffering in the world is a purification for sin and is therefore a good thing. This argument is, of course, only a rationalization of sadism; but in any case it is a very poor argument. Bertrand Russell, Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilization? (1930)

Russell worked with his mentor, another famous mathematician and philosopher AN Whitehead, on a well-known work in mathematics as part of his fame. In this argument, Russell shows that he is clearly no biologist, evolutionary or otherwise. Is "pain" from "sin" due mostly to rivers? Do children randomly develop into homicidal maniacs? Should parents automatically "responsible for a child who grows into an adult homicidal maniac"? Serial killers like the German Jurgen Bartsch, and the infamous Adolf Hitler, suffered abuse. In some tyrannical contexts, cross culturally like China´s Hongwu Emperor that I´m thinking of, leaders executed the unfaithful and their whole families. One was an orphan raised in chaotic times. Yet, we have psychological and legal contexts to address specific issues of legal culpability for specific crimes and who committed them.

Faulty premises, faulty conclusions. Russell, however, was on a roll. Russell then presents the "Christian" argument about the suffering in the world as purification for sin, and therefore good. That isn´t the Christian position that motivated George Fox and the Quaker Friends to stop bowing to aristocrats in the 1600s, treat women as worthwhile human beings, protest unjust criminal sentences, and in a hundred years, agitate for the end of slavery.

OK. So, Russell was an atheist, so that this might be his kind of philosophical argumentation. The problem with the purely unempirical philosophical method is that it gets entranced by its own logic. If God is not one thing according to some attenpted logical formulation, and an entity with certain kinds of qualities doesn´t seem possible to exist, that doesn´t settle the question. That begs the question, what kind of entity DOES exist. The presuppositions of the terms are all key. Scientific and mathematical philosophy accompanied the attempts at precise reasoning of this sort, and so we reach the question, what do we observe about material reality and its implications for the Creator?

We observe that Jesus didn´t create pink juggling elephants. His simplest miracles had practical import, especially healing. His parables didn´t talk about such fantasies, either. They did get hyperbolic in invoking the moving of mountains, which we can begin to discern in Jesus´ legacy processes like Christianity gaining legitimacy with Constantine because no one less than his mother had bridged a gap by being "low-born" and still fathering a son with a Roman pagan who became a talented commander. Along with Christianity´s having spread widely amongst the low born and miltiary soldiers because of its qualities, in a Savior who identified humbly enough as the Son of God and inspired a turnaround exclamation, "He is Risen!"

Thus, distinctions of what is "logically possible" become important in assessing the meaning of God. Not merely rejecting God on the basis of one logical formulation attempt. Concepts like "Free Will" had already emerged. The question "Could God create a rock so heavy he couldn´t lift it?" is another angle showing the nature of the unempirical logical problem. And its presuppositions. First basic detail. What is God like? God created the material Universe. We could extract qualities from the Bible and metaphysics, but the First Cause Kalam argument of WL Craig is well-done. The Cause of the Universe is immaterial. His/Her/Its power, no less, is demonstrated in creating the Universe, in the Abrahamic and other spiritual-religious traditions. God doesn´t just do tricks for logical imagination. Thus, we do have to understand God´s limitations, or rather, God´s all-important role, all interfaith inputs considered, which have already been centered the Christian development of University-based philosophy itself. In that, we see the structure of spiritual-religious reality. Formal western European slavery didn´t end because God parted the Atlantic Ocean for W. Wilberforce. Quaker-Friends were agitating in the UK, that spurred a University essay contest that sparked young divinity grad T Clarkson, who hooked up with the Quaker Friends who anchored him. Quaker Friends, for their part, had had a spectacularly Gandhi-like start in George Fox et al. God´s love through Jesus in spiritual-religious intelligene and practice. Quaker-Friend sitting in silence meditating on the inner light of Christ? Well, the first part was just like Buddhism and yoga, anyway.

Philosophy, especially as developed by the full range of Christian derived University-based philosophical scholarship, has diversified into multiple disciplines, and involves concrete and abstract categories, not least of all. God´s omnipotence and omniscience, with prophecies for example, can represent worst case scenarios as warnings. Jesus clearly demonstrated a flexible kind of message in the Commandments to "love thy neighbor as thyself." "Love" is possibly not an unlimited term, but its pretty extensively flexible, in the "spirit of the letter." In modern times, we have amazing accounts of the Quaker Friends spurring the pioneering social movement to end slavery and much more through Gandhi, FD and Eleanor Roosevelt, Rev MLK, and Fannie Lou Hamer, not least of all. Sierra Club and Greenpeace, and Oxfam, no less, in interesting ways, secular as they have become. The rise of Comparative Religious Studies in the wake of Critical Bible Studies, no less, with the likes of Max Mueller in Darwin´s day, up through the 1893 Chicago Parliament of World Religions. The Buddha, no less, didn´t leave the Law of Dharma as a "nice coincidence." "Whew, lucky us!" Buddha, when asked what reality is, answered, "Perceptive mind and the sense-perceived world." "So, there are two things?" he was asked. "No," he said, "Both are spiritual. The Spirit dominates existence through the Law that changes crude nature into mind, and then guides sentient beings to enlightenment."

That´s what we find if we trace back our own philosophical roots surrounding and preceding Bertrand Russell. Just look at Newton. He had access by hook and by crook (European Christian University-based scholars, and Cambridge´s libraries networks weren´t yet that formalized! They were all immersed in Christian and church conscious networks, however. "Love thy neighbor as thyself" percolating like the French Catholic Descartes in Protestant Holland). Take a look at George Fox´s spiritual-religious experience mostly OUTSIDE the educational system, and his impact AT THAT SAME TIME as Newton et al. It´s a fascinating detail reflecting the intensity of Quaker-Friend spiritual-religious resurgent integrity, and its implications of the accumulating embedded spiritual-religious features in the established system and prevailing spiritual-religious levels of consciousness. Look at the distributed complexity that was accumulating. Bertrand Russell´s main mentor was AN Whitehead. He came up with an electromagnetic version of gravity that challenged Einstein´s. He entered into metaphysics, the philosophy of religious issues, and interrelated Jesus, Christianity literately with his situating science, along with other religious cultures. He came up with Process Philosophy, and the notion used in Process Theology of God as dipolar- having an eternal/atemporal side, and a temporal one. Yet, he rejected spiritual-religious experience as uninformative. Meanwhile, he drew on William James, who had begun to identify very relevant issues in religious experience. Einstein for his part, is actually quoted so much for Spinoza´s God, that we don´t hear much about Einstein affirming Jesus´ reality, and Einstein´s intense admiration for Gandhi, who himself affirmed his regular study of the Bible for Jesus. Nor do we hear much about FD Roosevelt and Eleanor´s Social Gospel Christianity. We might focus on Gandhi and see the association between a high integrity like his correlating with his equally intense references to perceiving God´s reality. We know that Indian gurus and holy men do all manner of things dressed in simple clothes. Gandhi was trained as a western lawyer in his balance of orientations. His activism was ultimately a brilliant alignment of Eastern influences structured by Christian integrity, empowered by his relating to God, and Jesus as importantly as his Hindu and interfaith interests. Not just intellectually. But in his lifestyle identified by the specifially Judeo-Christian tradition of activism, for which he cited Thoreau, etc.. In this day and age, it reaches the point where we have to consider the issues of spiritual-religious intelligence, since some people clearly do have greater insight and appropriate orientation that others simply reject. Einstein is interesting as a cross-over figure from science to spirituality. Yet, spirituality in FD Roosevelt and Gandhi demonstrate how science requires deconstructing into empiricism. Einstein was spiritual enough that he´s known for playing the violence and advocating first the atomic bomb, then controlling it. To his credit, he was outspoken in his admiration for Gandhi, whose complexity makes a reminder that it´s not science itself that made Einstein spiritual. It was philosophy and the issues of the transcendental and conduct/morality. As for evil, we need to note that the Quaker-Friend anchored anti-slavery abolition movement faced the resistance of the profiteering businesspeople. The accomplishment is incredible to appreciate, because the UK had extremely limited and highly aristocratic voting. The US North may have given non-propertied males the vote already, along with their alternative economic options. In the US South, , it came to war. We benefit from understanding how human beings are not just like peaceful bonobo chimps, but like massacre capable Jane Goodall Pan troglodytes chimps in Tanzania. Humans have trans-animal character that allows indulgence in the abuse of power, privilege, and pleasure. That´s why the Christian accomplishment of turning monastic schools into Universities became a two-edged sword with Descartes´ "mind-body (spirit) split". German scientific-tech and discipline didn´t turn off when Nazis took over. They did face the mass attempted exodus, and that the US elected the Social Gospel FD and Eleanor Roosevelt at the same time as the 1929 Crash reflected rich investor game-playing. While the pro-rich businesspeople then took advantage of Christianity´s complexity and funded Billy Graham pro-rich, subtly anti-social fundamentalism shrouded in anti-communism. Progressives were knocked off-balance, which explains prevailing secular and other materialism. I like the Buddha´s transcendental views as the road back to grasping a spiritually modernized, Quaker-Friend and Gandhi informed Social Gospel. Blaming God for evil in the world is a belief that human beings aren´t prone to indulge in the abuse of power, privilege, and pleasure and materialistic forms of power and control. My dad left Catholicism for its violent history, staying an atheist humanist and emphasizing education. Emphasizing education, I love learning, including biology, psychology, and the rest. Does Nazi hate, for example, reflect God? No, it reflects a Christian culture´s complexity, going from Anthony of the Desert´s spiritual ascetic Christian practice to monastic schools to Universities to ending Roman church autocracy to scientific and multiple forms of philosophy and constitutional democracy. Scientific objective thinking and natural law opened up some Pandora´s boxes, and economic ideology has intensified "freedom" instead of responsibility. Evil doesn´t prove that a good God doesn´t exist. It proves that people are willing to blame God, let people off the hook, and ignore the reality of spiritual-religious phenomena and the meaning of spiritual-religious practice.