“When you come to look into this argument from design, it is a most astonishing thing that people can believe that this world, with all the things that are in it, with all its defects, should be the best that omnipotence and omniscience have been able to produce in millions of years. I really cannot believe it. Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan or the Fascists? Moreover, if you accept the ordinary laws of science, you have to suppose that human life and life in general on this planet will die out in due course: it is a stage in the decay of the solar system; at a certain stage of decay you get the sort of conditions of temperature and so forth which are suitable to protoplasm, and there is life for a short time in the life of the whole solar system. You see in the moon the sort of thing to which the earth is tending -- something dead, cold, and lifeless.”

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About Bertrand Russell

Welsh mathematician and philosopher

Bertrand Russell was a Welsh mathematician and philosopher, and a founder of analytic philosophy. He became one of the leading philosophers of the 20th century, known for work in logic, set theory, and the philosophy of language. He also helped bring philosophy to a wider public through his books and commentary. Outside academic philosophy, he was widely known for his outspoken atheism, pacifism, and opposition to nuclear weapons, and he often wrote on social and political questions.

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Books by Bertrand Russell

The Problems of Philosophy

2007

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Roads to Freedom

2007

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Unpopular Essays

2020

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Authority and the Individual

1985

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Autobiography

2000

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