thoughts of philosophy....

Something to ponder for today....

 

I was reading Bertrand Russell's "Why I Am Not Christian" during lunch today.  Prof. Russell begins this essay chapter by discussing what a Christian is by definition and if one can be called a Christian if he or she is a partial believer of all of the aspects of the religion (e.g. if you don't believe in hell, then can you be called a Christian?).  After discussing definitions, he goes into the three earliest arguments used by clerics to combat disbelief in a higher authority:  The First Cause Argument in which everything has a cause...but then you have to question that if everything has a cause in its creation, then what made God?; The Natural Law Argument in which God created natural laws such as the way the planets revolve around the sun....but then he questions that if God selected the natural laws with which we live, then he must have had reasons...and if he had reasons, then isn't it fair to say that God himself was subject to laws?; and finally the The Argument from Design in which it is argued that the world was made just so that we could live in it...but if the world was created so we could live in it, then why was the Klu Klux Klan created or (to bring up to contemporary times) the Al-Qaeda?   In this last argument, he says that if you accept the basic laws of science, you have to accept that life will eventually die out and Earth will become as empty and desolate as our moon.  Because this is a depressing thought, it's not something many people focus on.  Here are a few of my favorite passages thus far: "....although it is of course a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out - at least I suppose we may say so, although sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation - it is not such as to render life miserable.  It merely makes you turn your attention to other things."and "We now find that a great many things we thought were natural laws are really human conventions.  You know that even in the remotest depths of stellar space there are still three feet to a yard.  That is, no doubt, a very remarkable fact, but you would hardly call it a law of nature."