Table Of ContentRUSSELL ON RELIGION
Russell on Religion contains a selection of writings designed to give
the reader representative material on all aspects of his thinking on
this subject.
Russell contends with religion in every genre of his writing from
mathematical treatises to his ventures in fiction; as a philosopher,
historian, social critic and private individual.
Students at all levels will find Russell on Religion a valuable
presentation of the development and diversity of Bertrand Russell’s
thinking about religion.
Louis Greenspan is Professor Emeritus, Department of Religious
Studies, McMaster University and former Director of the Bertrand
Russell Editorial Project.
Stefan Andersson is a research scholar at the Bertrand Russell
Archives, McMaster University.
RUSSELL ON…
General editor’s introduction
A.C.Grayling
Russell achieved public fame—often enough, notoriety—because
of his engagement in social and political debates, becoming known
to a wide audience as a philosopher in the popular sense of the
term. But his chief contributions, the ones that have made a
permanent difference to the history of thought, lie in logic and
philosophy; and they are such that his influence both on the matter
and style of twentieth-century philosophy, principally in its
Anglophone form, is pervasive. Elsewhere I have described his
contribution as constituting the ‘wall-paper’ of analytic philosophy,
in the sense that his successors ‘use techniques and ideas developed
from his work without feeling the need—sometimes without
recognizing the need—to mention his name; which is influence
indeed’.
Russell devoted much attention to central technical questions in
philosophical logic, epistemology and metaphysics. He also wrote
extensively and forcefully about moral, religious and political
questions in ways not merely journalistic. Much of his work in all
these areas took the form of essays. Some have of course been
famously collected, constituting a fundamental part of the canon of
twentieth-century analytic philosophy. But there are many more
riches in his copious output, their value to some degree lost because
they have not hitherto been collected and edited in such a way as to
do justice to the development and weight of his thinking about
these subjects. This series, in bringing together Russell’s chief
writings on major subject areas in an editorial frame that locates and
interprets them fully, aims to remedy that lack and thereby to make a
major contribution both to Russell scholarship and to
contemporary analytic philosophy.
RUSSELL ON
RELIGION
Selections from the writings of
Bertrand Russell
Edited by Louis Greenspan and
Stefan Andersson
London and New York
First published 1999
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002.
© 1999 selection and editorial matter Louis Greenspan and
Stefan Andersson; © 1999 Chapters 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9–13 and 16,
McMaster University; © 1999 Chapters 3, 7, 14, 15, 17 and 18–
22, The Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation Ltd
The right of the editors Louis Greenspan and Stefan Andersson to be
identified as the Authors of this Work has been asserted by them in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
Russell, Bertrand, 1872–1970.
Russell on religion: selections from the writings of Bertrand Russell/
edited by Louis Greenspan and Stefan Andersson. p. cm. Includes
bibliographical references and index.
1. Religion—Philosophy. I. Greenspan, Louis I., 1934–.
II. Andersson, Stefan, 1953–. III. Title.
81649.R91G74 1999 210–dc21 98–30931
ISBN 0-203-45096-5 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-75920-6 (Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 0-415-18091-0 (hbk)
ISBN 0-415-18092-9 (pbk)
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
PART I
Personal statements 19
1 From ‘My Mental Development’ and ‘Reply to
Criticisms’ 23
2 The Free Man’s Worship 31
3 Autobiography: Mystic Illumination 39
4 What is an Agnostic? 41
PART
II Religion and philosophy 51
5 The Essence of Religion 57
6 The Essence and Effect of Religion 70
7 Why I Am Not a Christian 77
8 The Existence and Nature of God 92
PART III
Religion and science 107
9 Mysticism and Logic 109
10 Science and Religion 131
v
CONTENTS
11 Review of Sir Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the
Physical World 140
12 Review of James Jeans, The Mysterious Universe 143
13 Do Science and Religion Conflict? 147
PART IV
Religion and morality 151
14 Religion and the Churches 153
15 Inherent Tendencies of Industrialism 167
16 Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to
Civilization? 169
17 The Sense of Sin 186
PART V
Religion and history 195
18 Introduction to History of Western Philosophy 199
19 The Religious Development of the Jews 203
20 Christianity During the First Four Centuries 219
21 Mohammedan Culture and Philosophy 229
22 The Reformation and Counter-Reformation 238
Notes 241
Selected bibliography 247
Index 249
vi
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The research for this volume has, in the case of Dr Andersson,
been supported by The Wenner-Gren Foundation in Stockholm,
The Hultengren Foundation for Philosophy in Lund and The
Anders Karitz Foundation in Uppsala. For information concerning
the papers published here we have relied heavily on The Bibliography
of Bertrand Russell by Kenneth Blackwell and Harry Ruja, and the
introductions and headnotes supplied by the editors of The Collected
Papers of Bertrand Russell. We are grateful to Dr John G.Slater for his
help and for giving us access to Volumes 10 and 11 before they were
published, to Dr Richard Rempel and Dr Andrew Brink for access
to Volume 12 and to Dr Rempel and Dr Beryl Haslam for access to
Volume 15 prior to its publication. In addition we would like to
thank McMaster University and Dr Richard Rempel as Director of
the Russell Project for their generosity in allowing us to draw on the
facilities of this Project. We are especially indebted to Arlene
Duncan, Office Manager of the Project, for her good cheer and
hard work in putting out this volume. We are grateful to series editor
Anthony Grayling for his learned counsel and unfailing support. We
are also grateful to our editor at Routledge, Richard Stoneman and
his assistant, Coco Stevenson, as well as Dr John Slater, Dr Kenneth
Blackwell at The Bertrand Russell Archives, Dr Nicholas Griffin, Dr
Richard Rempel and Dr Andrew Bone for stimulating discussions
concerning Russell on religion.
vii
INTRODUCTION
Bertrand Russell belonged to that company of freethinkers who
wrote continually about religion. Religion is the subject of one of
his earliest writings, the secret diary that he started to keep when he
was sixteen years old, it is the theme of well-known essays such as
‘The Free Man’s Worship’, and figures prominently in the mature
treatises on sociology and politics such as Prospects of Industrial
Civilization. Even some of his treatises on mathematics and
philosophy of science contain speculations about the reality of a
spiritual realm independent of the senses. Religion is prominent in
the unpublished fiction that he wrote early in the century as well as
the fiction that he published at a great old age. Throughout much of
his life Russell contended with religion as philosopher, as historian,
as social critic and as private individual. In one of his memoirs he
declared that he overcame religion when he was an adolescent
during a struggle recorded in his secret diary when ‘I rejected
successively, free will, immortality and belief in God’. But the record
of a lifetime of writing suggests that the struggle continued for
many years, and on several fronts.
In this volume we have presented only a small selection from
Russell’s vast corpus of writings on religion. We have chosen
material from diverse genres of literature, omitting only his most
technical work and his fiction. We have included his most important
philosophical and literary articles, his personal statements and
selections from his surveys of world history as well as his books on
science and society. We have been selective, but we have
endeavoured to cast as wide a net as Russell’s so that the reader will
be exposed to all aspects of his work on this subject.
Freethinkers and humanists cherish Russell as revealed in essays
such as ‘Why I Am Not a Christian’ and ‘Has Religion Made Useful
Contributions to Civilization?’ and in passages such as ‘my own
view of religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of
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