BERTRAND RUSSELL ARGUES THAT GOD DOES NOT GIVE US MORALITY

Bertrand Russell made many objections to Christ and Christianity in his paper Why I am not a Christian.

It could be that God belief depends more on the notion that all injustices will be fixed one day than any real credibility.

Russell objects to the doctrine that there is a lot of unfairness and injustice in the world and that some day maybe in the next life God will rectify this and give justice to all.

He states "Supposing you got a crate of oranges that you opened, and you found all the top layer of oranges bad, you would not argue: "The underneath ones must be good, so as to redress the balance." You would say: "Probably the whole lot is a bad consignment;" and that is really what a scientific person would argue about the universe."

This is said by critics to be a false analogy. They would say, "God is working with people not oranges and they abuse their free will. The evil that happens in one place could well be balanced out by the good God does elsewhere in the universe or he might bring a wonderful good out of it."  The fact remains that this is not scientific.  Russell was right.  Also, if people are bad it is not fair to refuse to be neutral and say, "If they are bad then I will be neutral on whether God is as much to blame as them or innocent."  Real respect for people as people demands that.

Russells's oranges argument would be perfect if we did not have free will.  What if we do?  The huge majority of creatures such as animals do not. Our free will is only a small thing in this mix. We will leave aside the notion that we do not actually have free will. It is known that free will is tormented with limitations. Russell is right but he just needed to be clearer. It is actually evil to use free will to get out of the argument.

So if there are humanitarian objections to God looking after us then God is not much use if you want to give morality a solid ground.

He argues against the moral argument for God which states that “there would be no right and wrong unless God existed. I am not for the moment concerned with whether there is a difference between right and wrong, or whether there is not: that is another question. The point I am concerned with is that, if you are quite sure there is a difference between right and wrong, then you are then 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.”

Russell’s argument is obviously and undeniably correct. No honest person will dispute it. No decent person will say that the problem with killing babies for fun is not that it needlessly hurts the babies but that it is forbidden by God. To be unable to admit it is bad just because it is cruelty is to admit that you don't really know what evil or good are.

Christians dispute Russell's argument. They say its flaw is that it is too simplistic.  Some of them say, "If there is no God who is working to bring a greater good out of all the evil that happens, then for all you know, murdering a baby could change the course of history for the better and letting the baby live might not. Everything we do has a butterfly effect or domino effect. Every event however small ultimately changes the course history will take. So you have no way of proving that it is really right or wrong. To believe in the possibility of knowing the objective moral values you need to believe in a God whose authority forbids us to murder babies." An atheist would not kill the baby for he has no reason to think it can better the future. The believer in a God who turns evil into good could not agree with the atheist. The argument they give is no response to Russell. Russell is not on about what is moral or immoral but about the justification for believing that morality is real.

Is wrong really wrong or is it wrong just because God says so? If we say the former it implies that right and wrong are independent of God and God must obey those standards. The Christian "solution" is that God’s character is good and he only commands good because he is good. There is no standard of good and evil independent of God. God's nature is good and that grounds good not God's commands. So good has an objective existence and violating it is objectively wrong. In reality, the solution says that both options are out and then it combines them and rewords them to make it seem there is a third option.  Why is God's character good?  So the new answer takes us back to where we started!

With that we will say that if there is a difficulty with grounding good and morality the God solution makes it worse.