In 1948, the BBC commissioned a live radio debate between the Jesuit priest Frederick C. Copleston and the famously skeptical philosopher Bertrand Russell. They debated the existence of God, touching upon arguments from cosmology, contingency, religious experience and morality. The first portion, covering Copleston’s cosmological argument and Russell’s challenges to it, is perhaps the most philosophically significant. It is indeed one of the most compelling debates between modern thinkers, thoroughly exploring every aspect of the God problem.
Copleston kicks things off with some definitions that he asks Russell to confirm. He clarifies that in referring to God, “We mean a supreme personal Being, distinct from the world.…” Russell accepts this definition, and upon being asked whether he denies the existence of this God, says, “No, I should not say that: my position is agnostic.” He makes an important deviation here from total atheism to mere skepticism, and later reveals why. Russell is wise enough to know that although we cannot prove God, we cannot, at the moment, disprove him either.
Cause in the World Leads to Cause for the World
With the subtleties cleared up, Copleston presents his argument from contingency, which is influenced by Aquinas and Leibniz. He makes two statements: 1) that the beings in the world do not contain "within themselves" the reason for their existence; everyone has a cause, be it our parents, the oxygen in the air we breathe, or the food we eat; and 2) the world itself can only be defined by the things that make it up; it is nothing more than the totality of what's inside it. Therefore, Copleston concludes the world must have a cause. If it is made entirely of things that don’t bring themselves into existence, then it couldn’t have brought itself into existence.
He adds that if something equally contingent brought the world into existence (contingent meaning having the same causal laws applied to it) then we would have to proceed further. But if we proceed into infinity, that is not solving the problem of cause, so we must arrive at some point at a non-contingent being that is able to make himself exist. This necessary being, Copleston infers, is God.
Can Existence be Necessary?
Russell’s first challenge to this is the use of the word "necessary" to describe a being; he says that “the word 'necessary' can only be applied significantly to propositions.” But Copleston ignores this criticism, which is mostly to do with terminology rather than the argument. He says “...a 'contingent' being is a being which has not in itself the complete reason for its existence. A 'necessary' being means a being that must exist and cannot not exist. You may say that there is no such Being, but you will find it hard to convince me that you do not understand the terms I am using.”
What Russell rejects is the idea of existence being a definite attribute of anything, saying that existence can "occur" and can "not occur," but it never "must occur" because this is illogical. He links back to Kant’s criticism of the ontological argument in this respect, alluding that existence is not a predicate; it cannot be used to define a thing because the thing itself can only be proved with empirical evidence.
Copleston then addresses the issue of an infinite regression as another route for explaining his argument: “If you add up chocolates you get chocolates after all and not a sheep.” Consequently, if we add up contingent beings to infinity, we don’t get anything other than contingent beings, which cannot cause themselves. Because of this, Copleston sees the self-causing being (i.e., God) to be logically necessary in order to break the chain of everything needing a cause before it.
Fallacious Analogies
Perhaps the biggest blow to this argument is Russell’s point about the arbitrary nature of Copleston’s analogy. He criticises the assumption that because the things in the world have a cause, the world as a whole must have a cause. This is a random judgment for Russell, and one that Hume had also picked up on when criticising Aquinas’ cosmological argument. Applying what happens in the parts to the whole is perhaps a fallacy; “Every man who exists has a mother, and your argument is that therefore the human race must have a mother, but obviously the human race hasn't a mother; that's a different logical sphere.”
In Copleston’s eyes, the world can’t be necessary if it is only made up of contingent things. As agreed at the beginning of the argument, the whole is only a name given to the totality of the members, which are in this case, contingent. If these are caused, then the cause of them must be external, and this is God. If they are not caused, then they must be self-sufficient. But they can’t be self-sufficient because contingency means to rely on something else. So they therefore must be caused.
Some Things Don’t Need a Cause
But Russell argues then that these groups can be not caused and still be self-sufficient because they are meaningless. “The physicist looks for causes; that does not necessarily imply that there are causes everywhere.” To this Copleston is stuck, as to look for a cause you must be hoping to find one, but Russell is not, and sees the question of looking for one to be illegitimate. And so the pair’s argument draws to an unsolved close.
In a sense, neither Russell nor Copleston wins the debate. They agree to disagree by the end of it, unable to prove each other’s idea of causes wrong. Ultimately, the question of whether everything has a cause, needs a cause, or is cause-less, is something we cannot yet answer scientifically. So what is left is for us to assume everything has a cause, or assume otherwise. And this is the point at which even the best philosophers will perpetually disagree!
Sources
- Phil Provaznik, Fr. Copleston vs. Bertrand Russell: A Debate on the Existence of God (20/4/11)
- Scandalon, The Cosmological Argument: Russell vs. Copleston (20/4/11)
