FIGS AND WASPS AND FOOLISH GENIUS: PART 1: CLICHES AND ROUND-A-BOUTS

Introduction

      Have you ever doubted you knew enough to intelligently discuss your faith? Have you feared people who consider themselves superior in knowledge and anyone-you who believes in the Bible of being simple minded?  I know I use to have those fears. Whom am I compared to someone with a bunch of letters behind their name?

At such times just remember :

And when they bring you unto the synagogues, and unto magistrates, and powers, take ye no thought how or what thing ye shall answer, or what ye shall say:

For the Holy Ghost shall teach you in the same hour what ye ought to say. (KJV)

Those smarter people are not always as smart as we might think to they consider themselves to be. One such example was Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl of Russell, May 18, 1872 to February 2, 1970. (Pictured to the right as a boy.)

Clichés and Round-a-bouts

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. A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. -- Bertrand Russell 1927

Sometime in the 1960s I read a half dozen books on Einstein's Theory of Relativity, nerd that I was. One of these was The ABCs of Relativity and that was the first book I ever read by Bertrand Russell. A decade or so later (probably 1977 when it came out in paperback) I read his Why I am Not a Christian and other Essays.

When I read the first book, I was an Atheist; when I read the second I was a Christian.

I remember my impression those 40+ years ago was, "This is an ignorant man."

Now I don't use the term ignorant to mean dumb, having a low IQ or being uneducated. A person might be very bright (Russell had a genius IQ; he ranks 94th on the list of genises with an IQ of 170), be highly educated and still be ignorant in some subjects. For example, when it comes to the area of higher mathematics, I am an ignorant man (boy am I ever). Russell built his status especially on his mathematical works, The Principles of Mathematics and the three-volume Principia Mathematica (co-authored with Alfred North Whitehead).

But Why I Am Not A Christian isn't dealing with mathematics so I had to reread his essay to find out why I had that initial reaction and if I still did. I do. 

In the first half of this opus he talks about the arguments made in various periods attempting to prove the existence of God and why those arguments are wrong. 

Personally, I don't think you can prove the existence of God. That is why it is called faith. Scripture tells us men have no excuse because God is evident in all we see (For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools. Romans 1:19-22).

I agree with that. But what is evident is not the same as concrete proof. If it were, we wouldn't have essays like Russell's.

I don't want to get into a discussion of each of his arguments. Frankly, it would be a futile, silly and a waste of time. His arguments against natural law, design and morality tend to be verbose, yet in the end sort of empty. For example, this taken from his rejection of the moral argument for God is typical: 
"The point I am concerned with is that, if you are quite sure there is a difference between right and wrong, then you are in this situation: Is that difference due to God's fiat or is it not? If it is due to God's fiat, then for God himself there is no difference between right and wrong, and it is no longer a significant statement to say that God is good. If you are going to say, as theologians do, that God is good, you must then say that right and wrong have some meaning, which is independent of God's fiat, because God's fiats are good and not bad independently of the mere fact that he made them. If you are going to say that, you will then have to say that it is not only through God that right and wrong came into being, but that they are in their essence logically anterior to God."

This basically boils down to little more than which came first, the chicken or the egg, or which came first, God or good? His "must then say' is not at all a must.  God is good, all goodness is measured against God's standard, there is no "good" independent of god. Right and wrong are not anterior to God for there is nothing anterior to God. 

This type of rigmarole is not what made me feel Russell was an ignorant man. It was his response to the argument of "First cause". Russell quoted this from John Stuart Mill's Autobiography: "My father taught me that the question, Who made me? cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question, Who made God?" Russell dismissed the First cause argument on the basis "If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause".

This is the question I though so brilliant when I confronted my minister with it as a boy, if God made everything, then where did God come from?

Now Russell's essay was actually a lecture he gave in March of 1927. Russell was born in May 1872 so he was not a young man when he gave this talk; he was 54. When I asked that question, I was 13. It wasn't a question I asked anymore when I was 54.

Why ask the question? The Atheist faces the same conundrum. If the universe came into existence by a singular event, where did the The Singularity come from? How can you have something come from nothing? Also, how can you have nothing without something? How can you have nothing or something that doesn't end?  Logically, the fact we are here is an impossibility. However, given the complexity of what is here denies the impossible and indicates design by a superior intelligence rather than a chance accident and lucky happenstance.

In the second half of Russell's lecture-essay, he questions the character and wisdom of Christ. It is pretty clear by the end of this that Russell considers himself both intellectually and morally superior to Jesus. He regards Buddha and Socrates as superior to Christ, as well. But it is in this area I again got that impression of ignorance. He does as so many do with scripture, pull out verses and passages without regard to their context, the situation where they occur and how the whole of scripture relates.  For example, he quotes the "sell all you own and give to the poor" answer Jesus gave the rich young ruler, but Russell views this as a maxim that we Christians fail to keep as a reason to reject Christianity. He totally misunderstood the reason for this particular quotation. (We may deal with this in a furture lesson.)

 Russell, going on in this practice of cherry-picking verses, thinks Jesus believed he was going to return and rule immediately, that Jesus was rude and intolerant by using terms such as "you vipers" and "you brood of snakes" in addressing the Pharisees and worse of all, that Jesus believed in Hell, a concept Russell rejects as being totally at variance with the God whose existence Russell denies, and that Jesus was unkind because he allowed those devils to go into pigs that then rush over a cliff into the sea.  Russell then says this:
"Then there is the curious story of the fig-tree, which always rather puzzled me... This is a

very curious story, because it was not the right time of year for figs, and you really could not blame the tree. I cannot myself feel that either in the matter of wisdom or in the matter of virtue Christ stands quite as high as some other people known to History."

It may be a curious story, but apparently not curious enough for Russell to puzzle over for long.

Well, we will puzzle over a bit longer. Next time: Figs and Wasps.