Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) was a British philosopher, logician and social critic who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950 for his humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought. Russell is also considered one of the founders of analytic philosophy along with G. E. Moore. The term "analytic philosophy" can refer to a style of philosophy characterized by analysis of the logical form of philosophical propositions. Here, a logical clarification of philosophical thoughts should be consistent with the success of modern science.
On the existence of God (Russell vs. Copleston debate).
1) Russell defends an agnostic position. He wants to suspend judgement about God's existence. Copleston, a Jesuit priest and philosopher, argues that God exists and proposes a cosmological argument from possibility and necessity. A more simple version of it, an argument from efficient cause, is built in the following way. Every event has a cause, which in turn as an event has its own cause. An infinite regress of causes is absurd hence there should be the first cause, which is self-caused. That is God.
Russell does not see any reason whatsoever to suppose that the total has any cause whatsoever. His illustration of this fallacy is as follows. Every man who exists has a mother, but it does not follow that the human race should have mother. That's a different logical sphere. The world is simply there.
2) Copleston persists in defending the existence of the first cause. He argues that the science would not exist if the world had no causes. Science assumes that there is an order and intelligibility in nature. Otherwise, it would not look for causes when investigating nature. In reply, Russell states that scientists do not necessarily imply that there are causes everywhere. They just observe causal relation between things.
3) Copleston also defends the idea of the God's existence from the perspective of the moral ideal. As long as we have an understanding of an ideal moral order, we should recognize that the idea of the "ought" is conveyed by God. However, Russell points out that law-givers has always been one's parents, professors or someone like. External moral values, rules or taboos can simply be explained by environment and education.
Hence, Russell's position is that it is illegitimate even to ask the question of the cause of the world, since we first should specify the logical and meaningful properties of God.
