The priest who outpointed a world champion atheist
Fifty years ago a Jesuit took on Bertrand Russell in debate – and won, says Quentin de la Bédoyère
1 February 2008

‘In the red corner is Bertrand Russell, perhaps the best-known popular philosopher of our age. In the blue corner is Frederick Copleston, little-known Jesuit priest, and philosopher with a reputation for thoroughness and accuracy.”

I have perhaps dramatised a little: the venue was not a boxing ring but the BBC Third Programme, on January 28, 1948; the weapons were not fisticuffs but words; and the matter in contention was whether the existence of God could be proved.

The outcome of the Russell-Copleston clash is still being debated 60 years later. And it is very important to us today in a society where belief in God, at least among the chattering classes, is distinctly unfashionable. Of course, decent people do not object to our eccentricity, and some may envy us for our certainties, just as one might envy a child who still believed in fairies. But take such benighted superstition seriously, let alone act on it? We’re not in the Middle Ages now.

Copleston was ready to go out into the marketplace and demonstrate against an opponent of high reputation that belief in God was not only rational but effectively inescapable by anyone with a reasonable intellectual grasp and was prepared to consider the arguments with an open mind. He was not arguing in favour of divine faith, for that is a non-transferable encounter in which God reveals himself to the individual. He was proposing to demonstrate that, by the light of natural reason and based on our human experience, we can arrive at the certainty of the existence of God. The contest, to revert to the boxing analogy, was in three rounds: the cosmological argument, the argument from religious experience, and the argument from moral responsibility.

The cosmological argument is a family of approaches which demonstrates that it is necessary to have a self-sufficient being for the universe to exist at all. We find it in Aristotle, and further developed by Aquinas. Copleston used the version proposed by Leibnitz which (expressed loosely) starts from the fact that the universe is made up of contingent entities. That is, everything that we know depends for its existence on external causes – which are, in turn, themselves contingent. It does not matter whether the number of contingent entities is finite or infinite because an infinite series still requires a sufficient reason for its existence, and that reason must be outside the series and not itself contingent but inherently and necessarily self-existent. And this is what we call God.

This is a dry argument; it scarcely fires the blood. Nevertheless it is sound, although many refutations have been attempted. Russell and Copleston debated it in some 4,000 words which ranged over many aspects of what was then modern philosophical analysis. In the final exchange, Russell declared that he held that to ask what the cause of the world may be was a question which had no meaning.

Who won that round? Copleston said of Russell later: “If one refuses to sit down and make a move, you cannot be checkmated.” It was, in boxing terms, as if the contestants came out from their corners, but one of them ducked and feinted with such skill that the other’s powerful blows could never land.

In round two Copleston decided to come out more cautiously. He was not trying for a knockout but merely to show that the existence of God is the best explanation for religious experience. He stressed that he was not talking about visions or marvels but about the private experience of mystical prayer – a deep sense of contact with a loving God which can inspire the individual to reach out to others in love. Since in secular love – perhaps of a poem or a person – we are always loving an object, who or what is the object we love in prayer, if not God?

Christians practised in prayer will recognise the strength of Copleston’s point, but Russell, who had had no such experience, remained unscathed. He even suggested that Copleston would have done better to appeal to the virtually universal human sense of something or someone above and beyond us. And indeed this might have been a better tactic. But as it was, I would judge the round as a draw.

The third and final round centred on the question of the source of moral responsibility. Russell belonged to the school which held that moral approval depended only on feelings – perhaps derived from parental approval or disapproval but now hidden in the unconscious (Freud was popular at the time). Copleston maintained that our sense of obligation to do good and avoid evil was innate and could only originate in God as an ultimate ground of value. Russell countered by quoting the differing moral rules in different cultures, and appeared unable to grasp Copleston’s distinction between our sense of obligation and the actual content of moral rules about which people might disagree. Copleston further argued that a Freudian, or any other secular cause (such as conditioned reflexes), removed any content from the concept of moral obligation.

He tested Russell by asking him how he could condemn the commandant of Belsen (a notorious concentration camp much in people’s minds in 1948) when the commandant merely had different feelings from Russell. Without objective moral standards, morality as a source of good or evil simply had no meaning.

To my mind, Copleston won the final round by a big margin, with Russell ending up in confusion on the ropes. And this was inevitable because he had said to Copleston in their planning discussion for the public debate: “I find myself in a dilemma. On the one hand I certainly want to condemn the Nazis’ behaviour towards the Jews as wrong in itself. On the other hand, my ethical theory does not allow me to say this.”

Looking back on the debate, Copleston did not think that it was of the highest standard. “I had the impression that each of us got down into his own trench, so to speak, and sniped at each other over the parapet. Neither was going to change his position. It was a question of who could snipe the more effectively, in the estimation of the audience at any rate.”

He came to believe that his first round argument from contingency needed a fuller exposition than he could give it, and he regretted that brevity prevented him from developing his argument from religious experience with more clarity. But I judge that he was suffering from l’esprit de l’escalier – the realisation, following a debate, of all those telling points one wished one had made at the time.

But that doesn’t matter. Nor does it matter whether you agree with my verdict on the outcome. The complete transcript of the debate is available on the internet, and you can judge for yourself. What does matter is that the existence of God is not, as many would have it, a matter of choice or superstition but a conclusion which can be rationally derived from purely secular observation. Those who deny His existence have a tough case to answer – and one with which even the great mind of Bertrand Russell failed to cope.