Russell and Copleston

Overview

Recall questions on the 1948 debate, the dispute over sufficient reason and brute fact, and the argument from religious experience within it.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   Who were Russell and Copleston, and what were they doing?

   Model answer

   Russell was a mathematician and philosopher, one of the founders of modern logic, who had given up religious belief as a young man and wrote widely against it. Copleston was a Jesuit priest and a historian of philosophy working in the tradition of Aquinas. They met for a live radio discussion in 1948 to argue about whether God's existence can be established, and the exchange became a standard text because each man pressed the other on his starting assumptions instead of reciting familiar positions.

2. 2

   Set out Copleston's argument from contingency.

   Model answer

   He begins from beings that do not contain within themselves the reason for their own existence: each of us depends on parents, on food, on conditions we did not make, and might never have existed at all. Such beings require an explanation beyond themselves. Adding more of them, however many, only multiplies what needs explaining, so the series as a whole is not self-explanatory. Therefore, Copleston argues, there is a being which does contain the reason for its own existence, one that cannot fail to exist, and this is what people mean by God.

3. 3

   What principle is Copleston relying on, and why does he think it reasonable?

   Model answer

   The principle that things have explanations - that where something exists which need not have existed, there is a reason why it does. He argues this is the assumption on which all rational enquiry, science included, proceeds, and that it is arbitrary to apply it everywhere except at the one point where it becomes inconvenient. He presses Russell to say whether he denies the principle outright or merely declines to apply it to the totality of things.

4. 4

   What is Russell's first objection?

   Model answer

   That the phrase necessary being has no clear sense. Necessity, on Russell's account, is a property of propositions that are analytic, true by the meanings of their terms, and no proposition asserting that something exists is like that, since any existential claim can be denied without contradiction. A being whose non-existence is impossible is therefore not a difficult idea but an incoherent one, and the argument stops before it starts. Copleston answers that this is a decision about how to use words which rules the question out in advance.

5. 5

   Explain Russell's second objection, that the argument commits a fallacy of composition.

   Model answer

   That the argument illegitimately treats the totality as a further item needing the same kind of explanation as its members. Every human being has a mother, he pointed out, but it does not follow that the human race has one. The universe is the collection of the things in it, and once each thing has been explained by another there is no additional object left over to explain. Copleston replies that a series of dependent things is still a series of dependent things however long it runs, and that dependence has to terminate somewhere or nothing has been explained at all.

6. 6

   What is Russell's third position?

   Model answer

   That the universe simply exists and there is nothing further to say. He accepts that we look for causes within the universe but denies that asking why there is anything at all is a proper question with a missing answer; he treats it as a question that should not be put. Copleston's response is that refusing to ask a question is not the same as showing it has no answer, and that someone who declines to sit down and play cannot claim to have won.

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