In existographies, Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) (IQ:180|#106) (RGM:145|1,500+) (Gottlieb 1000:593) (EPD:M2/F4) [HD:51] [FA:117] (GAE:21) (Stokes 100:77) (GPhE:#) [CR:165] was a British mathematician, and philosopher, noted for his second law of thermodynamics based dismal view of human future in the explanation of his rejection of religion. The source of his main opinion on the second law seems to stem from his 1927 book Why I Am Not a Christian; a book listed by the New York Public Library as one of the most influential 150 books of the 20th century. [1]“Every living thing is a sort of imperialist, seeking to transform as much as possible of its environment into itself and its seed. We may regard the whole of evolution as flowing from this ‘chemical imperialism’ of living matter. Of this, man is the last example (so far). He transforms the surface of the globe by irrigation, mining, quarrying, making canals and railways, breeding certain animals and destroying others; and when we ask ourselves, from the standpoint of an outside observer [see: advanced perspective], what is the end achieved by all these activities [?], we find that it can be summed up into one very simple formula: to transform as much as possible of the earth's surface into human bodies [see: turnover rate]. And in pursuing the simple purpose of maximizing the amount of human life, we have at any rate the consolation of feeling at one with the whole movement of living things from their earliest origin on this planet.”— Bertrand Russell (1927), An Outline of Philosophy; cited by Alfred Lotka (1945) in his “The Law of Evolution as a Maximal Principle” (pg. 174) as a better “signpost pointing us in a better direction” than as compared to Vito Volterra’s 1926 predator-prey demographic ‘potential’ analogies; cited by Judson Herrick (1956) in The Evolution of Human Nature (pg. 123) [14]
“Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collections of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand [compare: Eddington rule]. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.”
“There will be an introductory chapter, which I shall probably leave to the last—the first substantial chapter, which I have nearly finished, is called "Preliminary description of Experience". Then I shall set to work to refute James's theory that there is no such thing as consciousness, then the idealist theory that there is nothing else. Then I shall classify cognitive relations to objects—sense, imagination, memory. Then I shall come on to belief, error, etc.; then to inference; then finally to "construction of the physical world"—time, space, cause, matter. If I go on the scale on which I have begun, it will be quite a big book-500 pages of print I should think.”— Bertrand Russell (1913), “Letter to Ottoline Morrell”, May 8 [24]
“We were both cross from the heat. I showed him a crucial part of what I had been writing. He said it was all wrong, not realizing the difficulties—that he had tried my view and knew it wouldn't work. I couldn't understand his objection—in fact he was very inarticulate—but I feel in my bones that he must be right, and that he has seen something that I have missed. If I could see it too I shouldn't mind, but as it is, it is worrying, and has rather destroyed the pleasure in my writing—I can only go on with what I see, and yet I feel it is probably all wrong, and that Wittgenstein will think me a dishonest scoundrel for going on with it. Well, well—it is the younger generation knocking at the door—I must make room for him when I can, or I shall become an incubus. But at the moment I was rather cross.”— Bertrand Russell (1913), “Letter to Ottoline Morrell”, May 28 [23]
“I can now express my objection to your theory of judgment exactly: I believe it is obvious that, from the proposition: ‘A judges that (say) a is in the religion R to b’, if correctly analyzed, the proposition ‘aRb.v. ~ aRb’ must follow directly without the use of any other premise. This condition is not fulfilled by your theory.”— Ludwig Wittgenstein (1913), “Letter to Bertrand Russell”, Jun 18 [24]
“The stuff I wrote about ‘theory of knowledge’ was criticized by Wittgenstein with the greatest of severity. This was an event of first-rate importance in my life, and affected everything I've done since. I saw he was right, and I saw that I could not hope ever again to do fundamental work in philosophy. My impulse was shattered, like a wave dashed to pieces against a breakwater.”— Bertrand Russell (1916), “Letter to Ottoline Morrell” [24]
“At the age of eighteen ... I read Mill’s Autobiography, where I found a sentence to the effect that his father taught him that the question ‘Who made me?’ cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question ‘Who made god?’. This led me to abandon the ‘first cause’ argument, and to become an atheist. Throughout the long period of religious doubt, I had been rendered very unhappy by the gradual loss of belief, but when the process was completed, I found to my surprise that I was quite glad to be done with the whole subject.”
See main: UbermanIn 1961, John Platt ranked Russell's IQ at 180. [13] Russell, before or after this point, supposedly, estimated his own IQ at 180.
“As a curiosity, it can be mentioned that Bertrand Russell sometimes interpreted Nietzsche's overman as a person with an IQ of at least 180 (Actually Russell considered himself to have this IQ!).”— ProCop (2003), SciForums.com post (Ѻ), Dec 9 [12]
| Uberman [Mean IQ:189] Archetypes: molds to future replacement for god theory | Description | |||
| ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ||||
| 1. |  Johann Goethe(1749-1832) German polyintellect | IQ:225|#1 [HD:19] [FA:54] | (Cattell 1000:7) [RGM:23|1,250+] The famed "trainer of assassins of god", namely: Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Libb Thims; among which, Nietzsche, according to Albert Camus (1942), is “the most famous of god's assassins.” | |
| 2. |  Leonardo da Vinci(1452-1519) Italian polymath | IQ:200|#7 | (Cattell 1000:86) [RGM:1|1,250+] Rejected Biblical flood myth theory (see: Noah's ark). | |
| 3. |  William Shakespeare(1564-1616) English writer | IQ:190|#49 [HD:4] [FA:23] | (Cattell 1000:2) [RGM:10|1,250+] His brand of atheism influenced Goethe greatly, second only in influence to that of Benedict Spinoza. | |
| 4. |  Michelangelo(1475-1564) Italian artist | IQ:180|#116 | (Cattell 1000:28) [RGM:11|1,250+] | |
| 5. |  Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) French leader | IQ:180|#106 [HD:20] [FA:57] | (Cattell 1000:1) [RGM:171|1,250+] Queried all the scientists of France about their atheism beliefs, and queried physicians about the location of the soul; noted for the Napoleon Laplace anecdote, the most famous atheism quip of all time. | |
| 6. |  Julius Caesar (I00-44BC) Roman leader | IQ:170|#248 | (Cattell 1000:8) | |
| 7. |  Socrates(c.469-399BC) Greek philosopher | IQ:180|#159 [FA:57] | (Cattell 1000:29) [RGM:14|1,250+] | |
“I was obliged to preserve an impenetrable secrecy towards my people. My interests were divided between sex, religion, and mathematics.”
“I was profoundly unhappy. There was a footpath leading across the fields to New Southgate, and I used to go there alone to watch the sunset and contemplate suicide. I did not, however, commit suicide, because I wished to know more of mathematics.”
“Considered as the climax to such a vast process, we do not really seem to me sufficiently marvelous … nevertheless, even after making allowances under this head, I cannot but think that Omnipotence operating through all eternity might have produced something better. And then we have to reflect that even this result is only a flash in the pan. The earth will not always remain habitable; the human race will die out, and if the cosmic process is to justify itself hereafter it will have to do so elsewhere than on the surface of our planet. And even if this should occur, it must stop sooner or later.”
“The second law of thermodynamics makes it scarcely possible to doubt that the universe is running down, and that ultimately nothing of the slightest interest will be possible anywhere. Of course, it is open to us to say that when the time comes god will wind up the machinery again; but if we do say this, we can base our assertion only upon faith, not upon one shred of scientific evidence. So far as scientific evidence goes, the universe has crawled by slow stages to a somewhat pitiful result on this earth and is going to crawl by still more pitiful stages to a condition of universal death.”
“If this is to be taken as evidence of purpose, I can only say that the purpose is one that does not appeal to me. I see no reason, therefore, to believe in any sort of God, however vague and however attenuated.”
“All human activity is prompted by desire. There is a wholly fallacious theory advanced by some earnest moralists to the effect that it is possible to resist desire in the interests of duty and moral principle. I say this is fallacious, not because no man ever acts from a sense of duty, but because duty has no hold on him unless he desires to be dutiful. If you wish to know what men will do, you must know not only, or principally, their material circumstances, but rather the whole system of their desires with their relative strengths.”
“A living organism, then, from the point of view of the scientific observer, is a self-regulating, self-repairing, physico-chemical complex mechanism. What, from this point of view, we call ‘life’ is the sum of its physico-chemical processes, forming a continuous interdependent series without break, and without the interference of any mysterious extraneous force. No hard-and-fast line can be drawn between the living and the non-living. There is no special living chemical substance, no special vital element differing from dead matter, and no special vital force can be found at work. Ever step in the process is determined by that which preceded it and determines that which follows.”— Edwin Goodrich (c.1925), “Evolution”, in: Encyclopedia Britannica; cited by Bertrand Russell (1935) in: Religion and Science (pg. 200); both cited by Julien Musolino (2015) in: The Soul Fallacy (pg. 130) [25]
“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”— Albert Einstein (1940), “Letter to Bertrand Russell”, comment on his City College of New York fiasco court decision (opposition: Bishop Manning, judge Jane Kay, etc.), wherein he lost his teaching post owing to slander about his views on sexual morality and irreligion [20]
“Taking ‘free will’ first to consider, there is no clear dividing line between man and the protozoon. Therefore, if we give free will to man, we must give it also to the protozoon. This is rather hard to do. Therefore, unless we are willing to give free will to the protozoon, we must not give it to man. This however is possible, but it is difficult to imagine, if, as seems to me probable, protoplasm only came together in the ordinary course of nature, without any special providence from god, then we and all living things are simply kept going by chemical forces and are nothing more wonderful than a tree (which no one pretends has free will) and even if we had a good enough knowledge of the forces acting on anyone at any time, the motives pro and con, the constitution of his brain at any time, then we could tell exactly what he will do. And not having free will we cannot have immortality.”— Bertrand Russell (1887), “Greek Exercise #5” (age 15), Apr 2 [21]
“Even if open windows of science at first make us shiver [chilling effect] after the cozy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end [warming effect] the fresh air brings vigor, and the great spaces have a splendor of their own.”— Bertrand Russell (1925), What I Believe [19]
“The plain man thinks that material objects must certainly exist, since they are evident to the senses. Whatever else may be doubted, it is certain that anything you can bump into must be real; this is the plain man's metaphysic. This is all very well, but the physicist comes along and shows that you never bump into anything: even when you run your hand along a stone wall, you do not really touch it. When you think you touch a thing, there are certain electrons and protons, forming part of your body, which are attracted and repelled by certain electrons and protons in the thing you think you are touching, but there is no actual contact. The electrons and protons in your body, becoming agitated by nearness to the other electrons and protons are disturbed, and transmit a disturbance along your nerves to the brain; the effect in the brain is what is necessary to your sensation of contact, and by suitable experiments this sensation can be made quite deceptive. The electrons and protons themselves, however, are only crude first approximations, a way of collecting into a bundle either trains of waves or the statistical probabilities of various different kinds of events. Thus matter has become altogether too ghostly to be used as an adequate stick with which to beat the mind. Matter in motion, which used to seem so unquestionable, turns out to be a concept quite inadequate for the needs of physics.”— Bertrand Russell (1928), “What is the Soul?” (Ѻ)
“My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race. I cannot, however, deny that it has made some contributions to civilization. It helped in early days to fix the calendar, and it caused Egyptian priests to chronicle eclipses with such care that in time they became able to predict them. These two services I am prepared to acknowledge, but I do not know of any others.”— Bertrand Russell (1930), “Has Religion Made Useful Contribution to Civilization?” (Ѻ)
“So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.”— Bertrand Russell (c.1930) in FSM app
“Man is a rational animal—so at least I have been told. Throughout a long life, I have looked diligently for evidence in favor of this statement, but so far I have not had the good fortune to come across it, though I have searched in many countries spread over three continents. On the contrary, I have seen the world plunging continually further into madness. I have seen great nations, formerly leaders of civilization, led astray by preachers of bombastic nonsense. I have seen cruelty, persecution, and superstition increasing by leaps and bounds, until we have almost reached the point where praise of rationality is held to mark a man as an old fogey regrettably surviving from a bygone age. All this is depressing, but gloom is a useless emotion. In order to escape from it, I have been driven to study the past with more attention than I had formerly given to it, and have found, as Erasmus found, that folly is perennial and yet the human race has survived. The follies of our own times are easier to bear when they are seen against the background of past follies. In what follows I shall mix the sillinesses of our day with those of former centuries. Perhaps the result may help in seeing our own times in perspective, and as not much worse than other ages that our ancestors lived through without ultimate disaster.”
— Bertrand Russell (1943), “An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish” [26]
“The freethinker’s universe may seem bleak and cold to those who have been accustomed to the comfortable indoor warmth of the Christian cosmology. But to those who have grown accustomed to it, it has its own sublimity, and confers its own joys.”— Bertrand Russell (1944), “The Value of Free Thought” [20]
“I can’t prove that either the Christian god or the Homeric gods do not exist, but I do not think that their existence is an alternative that is sufficiently probable to be worth serious consideration.”— Bertrand Russell (1947), “Am I an Atheist or an Agnostic” [17]
“I do not believe that a decay of dogmatic belief can do anything but good. I admit at once that the new systems of dogma, such as those of the Nazis and the Communists, are even worse than the old systems, but they could never have acquired a hold over men’s minds if orthodox dogmatic habits had not been instilled in youth. Stalin’s language, e.g., is full of reminiscences of the theological seminary. What the world needs is not dogma, but an attitude of scientific inquiry, combined with a belief that the torture of millions is not desirable, whether inflicted by Stalin or by a deity imagined in the likeness of the believer.”— Bertrand Russell (1954), Human Society in Ethics and Politics (see: atheism atrocities fallacy) [18]
“Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.”— Bertrand Russell (1956), “What I Have Lived For”, Prologue to Autobiography [9]
“I am myself a dissenter from all known religions, and I hope that every kind of religious belief will die out.”— Bertrand Russell (1958), The Will to Doubt (pg. 17) [11]
“There can’t be a practical belief for believing what isn’t true. Either a thing is true or it isn’t. If it is true, you should believe it. If it isn’t, you shouldn’t. If you can’t find out whether it is true or it isn’t, you should suspend judgment.”— Bertrand Russell (1959), response to query: “do you think there’s a practical reason for having religious beliefs?” (Ѻ)
“I am not, myself, satisfied with what I have read or said on the philosophical basis of ethics. I cannot see how to refute the arguments for the subjectivity of ethical values, but I find myself incapable of believing that all that is wrong with wanton cruelty is that I don't like it. I have no difficulty in practical moral judgments, which I find that I make on a roughly hedonistic basis, but, when it comes to the philosophy of moral judgments, I am impelled in two opposite directions and remain perplexed. I have already expressed this perplexity in print, and I should deeply rejoice, if I could find or be shown a way to resolve it, but as yet I remain dissatisfied.”— Bertrand Russell (1960) quote (Ѻ) on morality
