More Russell Quotes on Religion

[purnell]

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Maybe the problem is you see 'unyielding despair' as his conclusion when he says it is a firm foundation which kind of suggest it isn't.

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I think it's the foundation he laid from a conclusion he came to because of his acceptance of chance as ultimate. I think he probably read Nietzsche. I like the quote because it rubs your nose in the only possible reasonable position to hold if God doesn't exist - though of course calling anything reasonable in a universe of chance is problematic at best.

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Reason is a human thing. One should not expect the universe to be reasonable.



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Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.

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It's a metaphorical sentence. I think it means about the same as "We cannot hope to reach a true understanding of ourselves and our place in the universe if we start out by denying the truth of our mortality".

[chezlaw]

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I think Wittgenstein (I am not an expert in this area by any means) meant that if it could not be put into words (like feelings, God, etc..) then it wasn't worth discussing or even thinking about. He was basically saying that most philosophy was worthless. Wasn't this the Logical Positivists stance?

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Logical positivists (LPs) liked to claim Wittgenstein (W) as one of their own but I don't think he agreed.

I think W was saying that if something cannot be put into language then nothing can be said about it (I find W hard to understand so that could be wrong).

LPs argued the claim that 'something is only meaningful if it can be verified'. They had a lot of fun destroying whole swaythes of metaphysics until someone pointed out that their claim could not be verfied.

chez