Russell, B. (1999).

8 The Existence and Nature of God. Russell On Religion.

Edited by: L. Greenspan; and S. Andersson.
London and New York, Routledge: 92-106.

THE EXISTENCE AND

NATURE OF GOD

I am very much impressed by the liberalism of those who have

organized this series in inviting me to speak on the subject upon
which I am to address you tonight. I think it really is a very good
proof of a desire to have all views of the case presented that they
should have asked me to speak. I observe, of course, that the
trepidation which is caused by the thought of what I am to say is
somewhat mitigated by the fact that whatever poison is brought by
my speech is to be followed by its appropriate antidote on
subsequent occasions.
The existence and nature of God is a subject of which I can
discuss only half. If one arrives at a negative conclusion concerning
the first part of the question, the second part of the question does
not arise; and my position, as you may have gathered, is a negative
one on this matter.
I have been asking myself since it was arranged that I should
lecture, what are the reasons which are most potent in leading
people of our time to believe in God? They are not quite the same
reasons as in the Middle Ages or in early modern times. Modern
men believe for somewhat different reasons than the old ones.
Therefore, I don’t propose to spend much time on the sort of
arguments that might be furnished by a scholastic on the subject.
There is one point of view which I think is quite irrelevant, but
nevertheless does have considerable influence. A good many people
seem to hold that a belief in God is necessary to virtue or to a
decent life, or that it is necessary for happiness or for social
cohesion, or in some way or another it must be preserved on
account of its social advantages. That sort of consideration I think
we ought to dismiss from our minds as quite irrelevant. However
true it might be that certain ethical and social advantages are
connected with the belief in God, that would not prove that there is

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a God, and would leave that question in exactly the same position it
was before. We might greatly regret that there should not be sound
arguments in favour of a position so advantageous. But we should
never be able to adopt that position if the arguments would seem to
show that that was not the case. For my own part, while my own
position is agnostic, if I were in any degree orthodox—if I did
believe in God—I should be ashamed to deduce His existence from
our terrestrial needs on this planet, which seems too petty a point of
view for so cosmic a conclusion. I think that when you are thinking
of God you must not think of God as the God of this planet or the
God of some chosen race on this planet. You must take the matter
up, thinking of God as a Universal God and consider us as
unimportant as we are.
There has been a very great deal in traditional religion which one
might call pre-Copernican, which speaks on the assumption that the
earth is the centre of the universe, that Man was very magnificent
and very important, and that the whole universe revolves about
Man. I think that since the time of Copernicus it is rather
preposterous to take that point of view. The earth is one of the
smaller planets of a not particularly important star, a very minor
portion of the Milky Way which is one of a very large number of
galaxies; and altogether the idea that we who crawl about on this
little planet are really the centre of the universe is one which I don’t
think would occur to anybody except us. It is just a trifle conceited,
if I may [say] so.
But I want to come back to this question of believing some
proposition because it is advantageous for us to believe it. That, I
think, is always not only fallacious in logic but morally disastrous,
because of all of the virtues one of the most important is veracity. I
don’t mean only to think what is true, but to think truthfully—as
truly as you are able to think; to form your opinion upon the
evidence obtainable. You would abandon that virtue of veracity if,
instead of asking yourself, ‘What evidence is there for this belief ?’
you asked yourself, ‘Will the belief have good social consequences?’
You would lend yourself to the view that people should be
compelled by all kinds of non-rational arguments to adopt the
beliefs which you hold to be socially useful and to adopt beliefs
which are convenient to the ones in power. You would be a
prosecutor. If it is desirable that people should believe a certain
proposition, certainly it must be justifiable to persecute those who
argue against it. Truth is to be decided by the police. All those
consequences follow if you allow us in debating such a question on

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the existence of God to ask ourselves not ‘is thete evidence of the
truth?’ but ‘is this belief going to have certain good consequences?’
So I dismiss from my mind this question of the social
consequences, which, if I were occupied with the second argument,
would be favourable. You could argue on the virtues which were
associated with Christianity, virtues which I should like to see
preserved! Not all of them, though. I think faith is a vice, because
faith means believing a proposition when there is no good reason
for believing it. That may be taken as a definition of faith. But the
great majority of Christian virtues I most wholeheartedly accept,
and wish to see perpetuated.
I shall have to point out that there are also Christian vices. The
attitude of the Christian towards certain religions was associated
with a great increase of persecution. Christianity has ceased to be
associated with persecution as it has ceased to control the
governments of the world. All that would have to be borne in mind.
If both sides were brought out, the argument might come out about
even. But I don’t wish to go into that.
Let us come on to tackle the question itself. I notice that
moderns, unless they are Catholic, conceive God somewhat
differently from the way in which God has been conceived until
quite recently. Until quite recently, God was not only completely
benevolent but also omnipotent. This position is nowadays not
often claimed. But let’s begin with a God both omnipotent and
completely benevolent. Can we really believe that the world was
created by such a God? I think that most of those who would
answer that question affirmatively have not really considered what is
involved in omnipotence. When you consider all the physical
suffering that there is in the world; when you consider the stupidity
of a good number of people; when you consider the cataclysms of
nature; when you consider that all of human life is only a transitory
phase of the universe, I think it is difficult to suppose that
omnipotence could not possibly have done better.
I think of the only other occasion on which I have publicly
discussed this question. I debated it with a bishop. It was maintained
against me that suffering was no argument against the benevolence
of the Deity because suffering was punishment against sin. It so
happened that on the very day I was making the debate, my elder
son was undergoing an operation for mastoid. He was suffering the
most appalling pain. I could not think that by the age of six he could
have committed such sins. And yet that is implied on the ground
that it is a punishment of sin. Perhaps there are still some people

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who would say that this [is] a case of the sins of the father being
visited upon the child.
I don’t think myself that it is logical to maintain that evil can have
been created by a creator who was completely good. If you could
imagine yourself in a position to create the world, having the power
to create such a world as you would like, you would realize that to
create this world you would have to be a fiend beyond imagination.
You would not have inflicted a great many of the sufferings that are
inflicted. They are intolerable if considered as deliberate acts.
Of course, there are other arguments I can furnish. Leibniz, an
ingenious thinker, said that there are a great many possible worlds
and that some of these possible worlds perhaps contained no evil.
But if they contained no evil they also contained much less good.
And in this actual world there is a great preponderance of good
over evil and therefore a creator who wanted to create a world
would create this world rather than any other. Now, there is a great
deal to be said about that. In the first place, there is no evidence that
it is the best of all possible worlds. The argument is based, as all of
these arguments are, on the fact that free will is a great good, and
that you can’t have free will without sin. That sort of argument
caused a great deal of bewilderment among geologists because it
had been held that before the fall no animal ate any other animal
and even mosquitoes did not bite. All these things happened only
after the fall. The geologists discovered the existence of carnivorous
animals before man. That caused a great deal of dissension and
alarm to orthodox theologians.
This whole question of the balance of good and evil does not
strike one as very realistic. Is it quite just? What if you have had
the bad luck to be evil and somebody else the good luck to be
good? If you are a good philosopher, you might think that some
one else happens to be good because you are so evil. It doesn’t
seem quite just.
This old position of an omnipotent creator is one which is not
logically debatable. It is connected with another orthodox argument,
the argument of the first cause. I am not going to waste time on
most of the old arguments. Possibly this one influences some
people who think that everything has a cause and therefore there
must have been a first cause. To which I should reply, in the first
place, we don’t know whether everything has a cause. Why should it
have had a beginning? This argument goes back indefinitely in time.
Nor should the first cause have been an extraordinary cause. It
might have been an ordinary event, just a little start. All that is

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needed is a little practice in the theory of infinite series to make the

whole argument seem preposterous.
When I was adolescent, I was very much influenced by the
argument of the first cause and believed in the existence of God
because of that argument, until I read John Stuart Mill’s
autobiography in which he remarked, ‘my father told me that the
question “who made me?” cannot be answered because it supposes
the question “who made God?”’. That is a complete answer.
I think that most moderns are not concerned with a God who is
quite so omnipotent. They are concerned with a God who finds
certain materials to manipulate, who is limited by his material, who
does the best with what he has to work upon, and who, like an
architect trying to construct a cathedral out of a heap of stones, is
limited by the heap of stones and by the laws of nature. I think
most moderns have that conception. One can think of a cosmic
purpose which does not know how to perceive the future as
infallibly as God would in orthodox theology: a purpose subject to
the same kinds of limitations, though not to the same degree, as
human beings are; the sort of God you may find in some of the
writings of H.G.Wells, or in various other modern writers. There are
a good many modern theologians who believe it too. That sort of
God is, I think, not one [that] can be actually disproved, as I think
the omnipotent and benevolent creator can. I should not maintain
that one can be sure there is no such God. All that I should be
inclined to say is that there is no reason to suppose there is such a
God; I shouldn’t go further and say that there is not.
This kind of God is supported, as a rule, by arguments from
evolution. We are told that evolution of life refers especially to men
and especially to the best type of men, who generally closely
resemble the people who use the argument. We are told that
evolution is so extraordinary and produced such marvellous results
that it cannot have been the result of accident. There must have
been a purpose behind it. And there must have been a God guiding
the whole plan in order to get such marvellous results. I find myself
in difficulties in dealing with those arguments because I am so little
impressed by the results. First of all consider it quantitatively. The
universe is quite large. It is not supposed to be infinite. The modern
astronomer will tell you how large it is. It is quite a size. In that
universe the only place where we know that there is life is this
planet. A good many astronomers believe that there is no life at all
except on this planet, and that if in any case there is, it is a very rare
phenomenon indeed. It appears that planets in such stages of

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development as this one, with the same temperatures, with the same
chemical ingredients, are exceptional, so that life, even if it does
exist elsewhere, exists in very few parts of the universe. I can’t help
thinking that a very wise being, given all time to do it in, and
assuming that he really did want to produce something like us, could
have done it better. When I consider what a small space is occupied
by life and what an amount of universe there is where there is
nothing living, it seems to me that it is not a very satisfactory result.
I think a really competent chemist probably could have done better.
And there has been plenty of time. Not only is the universe of
considerable size and space but of considerable time. In all that
length of time, with the opportunity of experimen-tation that there
has been, it seems to me just a little odd that there hasn’t been more
done, if it is really the purpose of the earth to produce life, and
especially what is called intelligent life.
Moreover, it is quite clear, I think, that life could have developed
simply by the steady operation of natural laws. Living matter is a
chemical product. It hasn’t come together very often. If it comes
into being at all it is likely to multiply and increase. Once you get
living matter you can quite easily see how on entirely mechanical
principles it can develop into people like ourselves. Certainly the
origin of living matter doesn’t seem quite beyond the happenings of
purely mechanical causes. Another point is this, that while we are
told that the production of such minds as our own is the purpose
of the universe, and perhaps in time even better ones, strange as it
may seem, while we are told that that is the purpose of the universe,
the men of science at the same time tell us that sooner or later the
earth will become uninhabitable and life cease to be. The whole
history of life will be a flash-in-the-pan, as something that existed
for a moment in the universe and then stopped. It doesn’t look as
though the cosmos has been concerned with the production of life.
Of course you may say, and if you are religious you will say, that
while life on this planet will cease, the human spirit will go on. But
that is not a scientific argument. If you are arguing from what you
know, you must take account of the upward march of man and also
the downward march when the world grows cold. From the
scientific point of view they are on the same level.
And if man is the result of evolution, is it a thing to be so very
proud of ? We think and we talk as if it was something very fine to
be a human being; and generally as if evolution tended to produce
continually better and better things. That, of course, is not true.
Evolution produced degenerate animals like the tapeworm which

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are just as much products of evolution as the animals we admire.

Evolution produced the sort of man whom we hate and despise as
well as the sort of man we love and admire. I don’t feel very well
about the sort of things happening in the world. Yet that is human
life at the present time. When I think that in my own country we
devote more than a quarter of everybody’s income to the business
of killing other people, when I think that in every country the main
object seems to be mass murder, I cannot feel that man is really very
fine. I like the animals better. I think if evolution would have
stopped with sheep and deer and cows, it would have done better.
You may say, ‘Oh, yes, but man is intelligent.’ But what’s the good of
being intelligent if you use your intelligence to slaughter others?
That is the main purpose now. It is confidently hoped that perfectly
enormous slaughter may be secured [when] the next war breaks out.
That doesn’t seem to be a cosmic purpose. Again I say if I were this
struggling Deity I should become very discouraged at this point. I
think I should feel as at the time of the flood. I should do it, I think,
more thoroughly than it was done then.
About this whole question we can’t get an impartial view. If you
want to try to judge man as a product of evolution, you should try
to imagine yourself not a man. Suppose you came from Mars or
Venus and you learned to know our ways, what would you think of
man? Well, I don’t know what the Martians would think, but I
judge they would think very ill of us indeed. It seems to me their
view would be at least as impartial as our own view. Suppose you
talked with a sheep on the humanity of man? They would say man
is a monster who eats us. Suppose you take the opinion of turkeys
on the celebration of Christmas. You would find that they had a
poor opinion of mankind. I don’t say that their view is wrong and
ours is right. You can’t give an impartial view. The verdict is partly
good and partly bad, and therefore, if you are going to judge of
the Creator by the creation you would have to suppose that God
also is partly good and partly bad, that He likes poetry, music, art,
and He also likes war and slaughter. On the other hand you may
take the view that the evil in the world He can’t help and that the
good He has produced. But that is not more probable than the
opposite view, that the world was created by the Devil who is
unable to find any good in it and is very pleased with the bad.
There is nothing to discriminate between these two views except
that one is pleasant and one unpleasant. So that if you are going to
judge of the Creator by His creation, I think you must single out
the good bits. On the other hand, I should say that there is

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everything in the world to show that it is a haphazard and

accidental world. I can’t imagine the being who could have
produced this world. It is too higgedly-piggedly, partly good,
partly bad. Some people like some part of it, and some another. It
doesn’t seem at all likely that any purpose produced it, but it seems
more likely it just grew, and that’s why it is such a mess.
There is another argument often used: the argument from the
moral sense. People say men have a sense of good and of evil, a
sense of right and wrong. This, they say, must have been
developed not by him but by the Deity. Your conscience is
supposed to be the voice of God. That view was accepted before
anthropology came in. Now that the science has become
established you find that conscience varies with different people in
different instances. Some people would think it cruelty not to sell
their old men and women to a neighbouring tribe to be eaten. I
think it is an abominable practice. At my age, I think it quite
monstrous. But to these savages it is the voice of conscience. It is
the right thing to do. Take such a thing as human sacrifice. It has
existed in pretty nearly all races. It is the normal phase of a certain
stage in the development of the race. To those who practised it, it
was an essential part of their religion. They would have felt
themselves monsters of inequity if they would have omitted this
sacrifice. People on this continent thought the sun would go out if
they didn’t have the proper number of sacrifices. They sacrificed
their enemies. That was a virtuous and religious act. You will find
that what your conscience tells you varies according to the age and
place, and is, in effect, what your parents tell you. There is hardly
anything in conscience except the unconscious uprising of the
precepts that you learned in early childhood. They come up as if
they had an external source and seem like the voice of God. I
don’t think there is anything in conscience beyond that.
Take even a much higher religion than that of human sacrifice,
compare Confucius with the Romans. The Romans preached
sacrificing their sons to the public whenever their sons were traitors.
On the other hand, Confucius praised very highly the young man
who refused to give up his father who was a traitor because he held
that duty to the parents is much more important than to the state.
Their consciences were diametrically different and accepted by their
community. To the Romans, the first duty was to the state; to the
Chinese the first duty was to the home. That view which was held by
the people who established the positive morality came to be held by
all those in the community. Moral law is entirely temporary,

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accidental, and dependent upon the circumstances in which you are

brought up.
I don’t mean to say that people never disagree with their parents
about moral law. When they do, it rises either from the fact that they
have been influenced from somewhere else or that what they were
taught didn’t hang together. In those ways, men become moral
innovators. The whole of moral law does not come in the moral
instructions that you have had in early youth. Some people think
that it is impossible that there should be morality without religion. I
think there are a great deal of examples to the contrary. There have
been a great many freethinkers in history who were quite as virtuous
as any of the Christians. More than that, if you go into the question
as to who were the people who did most to enlarge social sympathy,
who were the people most conscious of the sufferings and
injustices to the poorer portions in the community, and were the
most anxious to remedy those sufferings, who protested most
against cruelty to savages, you will find, I think, that very frequently
the innovators were the people who did not accept orthodox
Christianity. Take a very notable instance. You all know that
incredible misgovernment and cruelty was practised by Leopold,
King of Belgium, in the Congo. His government was so bad that in
the course often years, the population was cut in half. In Belgium,
these atrocities gradually came to be known. The Catholic Church
supported the King and the socialists, who were mostly
freethinkers, attacked it. There the practical morality was almost
entirely outside the Christian Church. You can find plenty of
examples on both sides. It is not by any means true as a formal
proposition that belief in Christianity tends to promote a larger
social sympathy. I don’t see any reason, in the moral sense, for belief
in the supernatural.
You remember that Kant, who is conventionally considered the
greatest of philosophers—but whom I have been guilty of calling
in print a misfortune—said that the two most sublime things are
the starry heavens and the moral sense. In the first case, I agree
with him. The moral sense I don’t myself think very sublime. It
takes so many odd forms in so many people. I find that one of the
forms the most commonly heard, that sinners ought to be
punished, has the minor premiss that the sinners have done
something to hurt me. It is called moral indignation. I suppose I
am a person without a moral sense. I can’t feel that when A has
caused pain to B you can make it right by B causing A pain. Yet
that is right according to a view that is common.

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Of course, I am quite willing to admit and I suppose everybody is

willing to admit that there is a morality which is good. What I think
is good is good because I think it is good. What I mean when I
criticize the moral sense is that it takes forms which any one of us
would reject. You can easily find a person who has an opposite
belief to yours. You can’t put any stress upon the moral sense. I
think it is ultimately derived from the desire for a certain sort of
world. You may desire a world in which everybody is happy, you
may desire a world in which everybody is unhappy, you may desire a
world in which everyone is just, in which you and your friends have
all the power and other people are slaves. According to the world
you desire, you will develop a different kind of moral sense.
I should like to sum up the sort of argument I have presented. I
am conscious of presenting an argument that is inconclusive. My
contention is that the matter is inconclusive. It would be irrational
to arrive at a conclusion: the data don’t exist. I think that if there is a
God, it is a pity He didn’t provide conclusive evidence of his
existence. You will remember Pascal’s argument. It is: if you
disbelieve, and it so happens that orthodox religion is true, you will
be damned; whereas, if you disbelieve and orthodox religion is not
true, you will not suffer any punishment. Therefore, man should
believe. Suppose one were to say, ‘Oh, yes, there is a God, but He
has quite deliberately created a world in which there is no conclusive
evidence. He is going to damn all those who don’t believe in Him
despite the evidence.’ I don’t think the argument is one that you can
lay much stress upon.
I should say in conclusion that it is possible that there may be an
omnipotent God. He would have had to create evil without any
temptation for creating evil. He must be infinitely weak, an absolute
fiend. That God is possible. I don’t see what conscience there will
come out of it. I don’t say an omnipotent God can fail to have that
bad character. There may be a non-omnipotent God who is slowly,
hesitatingly, and rather uncertainly guiding the universe towards
something a little better than what we have now; or perhaps to
something worse. How can we know? We can only know His major
purposes from what we see in the world. We have to say the bad
things in the world are inevitable. Then the good things are put
there on purpose. I don’t know why we should say that. I can think
the good things are inevitable, the bad things put there on purpose.
I don’t think either is very plausible. If you are going to suppose at
all that the world is the result of purpose you will have to say it is
partly good, partly bad. It may be that our conceptions are not right.

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If you take the Nietzschean view, the only thing that would
matter would be what was pleasant to the Master. Most of us don’t
accept the Nietzschean philosophy. Most of us think that it is
possible to arrive at happiness without harm to others. I think that
if you are going to infer God from the world you will have to say He
is partly good, partly bad, like ordinary mortals. I can’t see any
reason myself at all in the nature of the world for supposing any
purpose at all. I don’t see any evidence of any sort or kind that there
is any purpose in the world or that it is anything other than a
perfectly blind outcome of natural forces. The arguments from
evolution seem to be quite fallacious. I don’t want it thought that if
orthodox religion, if the Church of God decays that there will be a
moral degeneration. I know it may be argued plausibly that the
worst things that are going on are associated with opposition to
Christianity. That, I think, is true. But they have one factor in
common with traditional Christianity, and that is that they inculcate
irrational beliefs for which there is no evidence. My own feeling is
that one absolutely vital factor in common progress must be an
increase in the habit of forming our judgments from evidence, and
eliminating our dangerous habit of accepting judgments on
authority or because they are pleasant. I think all the irrational
causes of belief do harm, and that it is very, very necessary for
progress that we should learn to form our beliefs rationally. That
habit is one which is even less evident in those bad men who have
rejected traditional Christianity. It is less in them that it is in
Christians of our time. Therefore I think that what I want to urge
upon you is the habit of trying to think rationally. Try to reach the
basic conclusions on the evidence. What that conclusion is won’t
matter much. The important thing is not what you believe so long as
you believe with honest veracity. Do not allow your desires or likes
to interfere. That seems to be the vital thing. What conclusion you
come to is comparatively unimportant. The main thing about this
question of God is that it is one of the questions upon which it is
possible to think rationally. Think as truthfully as you can and then
it won’t matter what it is that you finally think.

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Discussion which followed address

QUESTION: How do you answer the argument that God is

beyond the conception of the human mind?
ANSWER: My answer to that would be that so far as it is true,
God becomes quite irrelevant to our thinking, and those who
say that God is beyond comprehension of the human mind
profess to know a great deal about God. They don’t really mean
that God is beyond comprehension, only partly beyond
comprehension. And generally they mean that He is beyond the
comprehension of your mind and not beyond the
comprehension of theirs.
QUESTION: If A does harm to B what do you suggest as a
remedy to stop A from harming B again?
ANSWER: It is a very large question. It would take at least
another hour to answer it. It depends enormously upon the
circumstances. If A, for example, is a homicidal lunatic, he will
have to be shut up. But shut him up as kindly as possible. I
shouldn’t bring in the conception of sin. The homicidal lunatic
is an extreme case but a great many cases approximate that.
Suppose A is a child. You really ought to begin with a child. If A
is a child and you deal with him by punishment you put rage
into his heart. He perhaps desists for the time being but as soon
as he is old enough and strong enough he finds somebody else
to inflict punishment upon. So that I don’t think you do any real
good by punishment except in so far as you can in the case of a
homicidal lunatic. You don’t cure the culprit by inflicting pain in
turn. You have to use other methods. Use more sympathy, more
understanding, getting him into a frame of mind where he no
longer wishes to inflict pain. I think the whole thing goes back
to childhood.
QUESTION: Please explain why we cannot have faith in
something which has a basis of truth?
ANSWER: The reason is that you don’t need faith in that case.
Nobody talks about the faith in the multiplication table. You
always use faith in doubtful situations, like that of the people in
England having faith in the power of the British Navy. You
don’t need faith where the thing is obviously true. That’s why I
call faith an evil, because it means attaching more meaning to
the evidence than it deserves.

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QUESTION: If we take away the simple belief in God what will

the poor uninformed populace have as the basis for their
spiritual life?
ANSWER: I am rather glad to have [this] question brought up
because it illustrates, I should say, one of the gravest defects of
religion. It illustrates the fact that religion can be used to keep
the poor contented with their lot, which is very convenient for
the rich. I certainly have no wish that people whose lives are
unfortunate should be contented with that unfortunate life. It is
not necessary with our technical progress that anybody should
be poverty stricken. I see nothing but evil in the consolation
about the hereafter to those people who put up with injustices.
QUESTION: Would you say a word, please, about mysticism and
modern religion?
ANSWER: Again it is difficult to say a word. A volume would
seem more appropriate. I should say this about mysticism, that
it has two different aspects. On the one hand it is an emotion.
On the other hand as a result of that emotion people come to
certain beliefs. Now, the emotion I value. I think it is a very
important emotion indeed. I think the people who have
experienced it are likely to be able to reach a higher level in
certain respects than people who never reach it. But the beliefs
that are based on that emotion vary according to the time and
place. Mohammedans came to the conclusion that the Koran is
in existence for all time. Buddhists came to beliefs about the life
of Buddha. Taoists came to strange beliefs about what
happened to Lâo-Tse. Everybody comes to conclusions which
have to a certain extent half-existed before. I attach no truth
whatever to the beliefs which mystics say result from their
mystic insight.
QUESTION: You admit the existence of natural forces guiding
the world. Should we not consider these laws and forces
constituting the God-force in the universe?
ANSWER: I don’t admit that natural forces guide the world. I
may have said something that sounded like it. It is difficult
always to speak in the language I consider logically correct. But
force has been eliminated from physics. It occurred in
Newtonian physics, but not in modern physics. I should never
speak of natural forces as guiding the world, as I don’t think the
natural forces are anything but a shorthand in describing what
does happen. If you arrange the names in the telephone book
alphabetically, you must not think there is a natural force to

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cause people to take an alphabetical order. You are apt to think

that occurs in the universe.
QUESTION: In your essay ‘A Free Man’s Worship’ in Mysticism
and Logic you say that victory over Fate and Death and suffering
is the baptism into the galaxy of courageous heroes. What is the
use? How would you inspire a despondent person without
encouraging faith? What would you offer him?
ANSWER: I would encourage a despondent person by pointing
out something that he could achieve. With every one of us there
is something that we can do, and we would be better for doing
it. There is no need for bringing in faith. It is always so much
too large for what you need to do. Supposing it is your own
welfare. You eat your breakfast but you don’t bother about
faith. If you bother about other people you will need very little
faith to provide them with breakfast. There is always something
you can do for somebody, and I include yourself as somebody.
You don’t need faith to know this, you just need a rational
realization of what is possible.
QUESTION: What do people who do not believe in God use as a
standard for right and wrong?
ANSWER: I should personally regard cruelty as the main bad
thing, much the worst thing; and I should regard affection, and
the kindly feeling, as the best thing. Then in addition to those
there are more intellectual virtues and vices. I spoke about
veracity and things of that sort. All those things you can
inculcate in youth without having to bring in God. In actual
fact, when you do bring in God it isn’t in consequence of God
being brought in that you succeed in persuading him that this or
that is wrong, it is because of the way you speak about it if you
really believe it yourself. One of the reasons why I think the
precepts of parents are ineffective is that they are precepts that
the parents think good for the children. What you really
genuinely believe you can convey just as easily without God as
with God. I speak with experience in dealing with children.
QUESTION: Is there such a thing as moral progress?
ANSWER: Well, there certainly have been ages of progress and
ages of degeneracy. We live in the latter. There have been ages
of moral progress, times when sympathy became wider. The
chief element in moral progress is a widening of sympathy. If
you confine it to your family it is not enough; if you confine it
to your nation it is narrow, and so on. You ought to include the
animals. I think it is the widening of sympathy that is the

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essential [thing]. In our age, we have gone the other way, we

have narrowed sympathy down more and more.
QUESTION: What do you think of such a definition of God as
offered by John Dewey: ‘God is the synthesis of man’s highest
precepts’?
ANSWER: I should say if Dewey likes to use the word God he
has a right to use it, as any person has a right to use it.
QUESTION: Is it possible, by maintaining a relative freedom
from local customs and morals, to find in history a common
form of the moral sense which can be taken as a standard (such
as Huxley’s principle of non-attachment)?
ANSWER: I should have said it was quite impossible. I should
have said that all those attempts to collect a common effect are
just plain humbug. You always find every fresh anthropologist
saying that his views, being that of a savage, must be right. That
view seems to be fallacious. You know how they talk about the
noble savage of the eighteenth century. Certain savages were
always monogamists. Another writer wrote a book about
savages to prove quite the opposite.
QUESTION: Do you believe that emotions play as large a part in
human existence as reason?
ANSWER: Most certainly I do. I think they play a larger part. I
think the person who asked that question probably didn’t
mean exactly what he said. Our emotions about a thing and
our belief in a thing are quite different. If somebody gives me
two dollars and then another two dollars I might passionately
desire it would be five dollars. To introduce emotion would
get me into trouble. While I fully admit and should be
prepared to urge that emotion is at least as important as
reason, it is not the thing by which you ought to decide which
of two propositions is true, or who has committed a murder.
You can’t decide that by emotion. You ought to go into the
evidence. Emotion ought not to come in.

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