Such is the power of illusion, that even the would-be wise are sometimes consumed. C.S. Lewis declared that man needed god--and was partly right. People need an explanation, and they need hope in the face of failure and suffering; hope and an explanation they are given, in the place of improved condition and knowledge.
The failures believe they are blessed, and so curse the successful as failures. That which is written in flesh is declared false, and falseness declared absolute truth.
"Democrats: Always standing up for what they later realise they should have believed in." -Jon Stewart, the Daily Show
NS: In your book you are quite harsh on religion. Aren't people entitled to their faith?
Jamie Whyte: This is one of my favourite errors. An interesting change has happened, at least in the west. It used to be that people would argue for a particular religious dogma or a clear religious doctrine. That is no longer what happens. The world is increasingly dividing into those who have "faith" and those who don't. It doesn't really matter what the faith is. That is why you now get "faith groups" coming together from all kinds of different religions. The weirdest manifestation of this new tendency is when people say: "I'm not a Christian but I believe in something." Then I say: "Of course, I believe in many things, like there is a chair there and a table. What are you talking about?" And they reply: "Well, you know, something more." But what "more"? What they mean is something more than we have any good reason to believe in.
NS: That really seems to get to you!
Jamie Whyte: What amazes me is that they like to set themselves up as having a slightly finer sensibility than you or me but in fact they are completely intellectually irresponsible. They used to come up with very bad arguments for their faiths but at least they felt that there was something they should provide. Now mere wilfulness has triumphed. This is what I describe as the egocentric approach to truth. You are no longer interested in reality because to do that you have to be pretty rigorous, you have to have evidence or do some experimentation. Rather, beliefs are part of your wardrobe. You've got a style and how dare anybody tell you that your style isn't right. Ideology is seen as simply a matter of taste and as it's not right to tell people that they've got bad taste, so it's not right to tell them that their opinions are false. I'm afraid that the cast of mind of most people is the opposite of scientific.
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Russell: The difficulty of this argument is that I don't admit the idea of a necessary being and I don't admit that there is any particular meaning in calling other beings "contingent." These phrases don't for me have a significance except within a logic that I reject.
Copleston: Do you mean that you reject these terms because they won't fit in with what is called modern logic"?
Russell: Well, I can't find anything that they could mean. The word "necessary," it seems to me, is a useless word, except as applied to analytic propositions, not to things.
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