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 has been able to produce in millions of years.
Interpretation
This quote questions the belief that the world, despite its flaws, is the best possible creation by an all-powerful and all-knowing being.
Bertrand Russell's quote prompts deep reflection on the nature of existence, suggesting that the imperfections and challenges of our world raise questions about the idea of a perfect and all-powerful creator. It invites us to consider whether the world we experience is truly the best that could have been created, given the vastness of time and potential outcomes.
In practice
This quote can be used in a philosophical discussion at a university seminar about creationism vs. evolution.
St. Paul introduced an entirely novel view of marriage, that it existed primarily to prevent the sin of fornication. It is just as if one were to maintain that the sole reason for baking bread is to prevent people from stealing cake.
Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.
Of these austerer virtues the love of truth is the chief, and in mathematics, more than elsewhere, the love of truth may find encouragement for waning faith. Every great study is not only an end in itself, but also a means of creating and sustaining a lofty habit of mind; and this purpose should be kept always in view throughout the teaching and learning of mathematics.
At all times, except when a monarch could enforce his will, war has been facilitated by the fact that vigorous males, confident of victory, enjoyed it, while their females admired them for their prowess.
Moreover, the attitude that one ought to believe such and such a proposition, independently of the question whether there is evidence in its favor, is an attitude which produces hostility to evidence and causes us to close our minds to every fact that does not suit our prejudices.
Extreme hopes are born from extreme misery.
Ambition and hatred are enough to bring Iraq and al Qaeda together.
But when a manβs religion becomes really frantic; when it is a positive torment to him; and in fine, makes this earth of ours an uncomfortable inn to lodge in; then I think it high time to take that individual aside and argue the point with him.
You can make some inferences about a man's character if you know something about the conditions in which he has survived and prospered.
The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.
He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.
The world is not dialectical - it is sworn to extremes, not to equilibrium, sworn to radical antagonism, not to reconciliation or synthesis. This is also the principle of evil.
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