Religion and Science
2. The Views of Bertrand Russell
~ 32 ~
for accepting ‘the broad truth of science as things
which the philosopher should take as data’ is that
even though ‘their truth is not quite certain, it has a
higher degree of probability than anything likely to
be achieved in philosophical speculation.’
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Another passage from the same book completes the
picture of Russell’s views, which we have
attempted to present here:
It is not always realized how exceedingly
abstract is the information that theoretical
physics has to give. It lays down certain
fundamental equations that enable it to deal
with the logical structure of events, while
leaving it completely unknown what is the
intrinsic character of the events that have the
structure. We only know the intrinsic
character of events when they happen to us.
Nothing whatever in theoretical physics
enables us to say anything about the intrinsic
character of events elsewhere. They may be
just like the events that happen to us or they
may be totally different in strictly
unimaginable ways. All that physics gives us
