(1969, 30). Russell ’s analysis of traditional arguments in favour of the existence of God appears in ... , xi). Russell ’s criticism of arguments traditionally offered in favour of the existence of God includes ... property or, in Russell ’s terminology, a predicate. His reasoning, like that of Immanuel Kant , is that if ... In fact, Russell often claims that he has more confidence in his methodology than in any particular philosophical conclusion. This broad conception of philosophy arose in part from Russell’s idealist origins (Hylton 1990a; Griffin 1991). This is so, even though Russell tells us that his one, true revolution in philosophy came as a result of his break from idealism. Russell saw that the idealist doctrine of internal relations led to a series of contradictions when working with the kinds of asymmetrical (and other) relations necessary for mathematics. As he reports, It was towards the end of 1898 that Moore and I rebelled against both Kant and Hegel. Perhaps most importantly, Russell opened the door to the demystification of religion, writing in plain language at a time when people had been told that serious discussions about religion required a detailed knowledge of Latin and church history. The result was twofold: first, that many people came to understand religion as a subject about which they were entitled to develop their own beliefs and views; second, that arguments from ecclesiastical authority suddenly became less formidable and less influential than they had been for centuries. In this respect, it is not too much to say that Russell did as much to usher in the twentieth century’s age of secularism as Luther did to usher in the sixteenth century’s age of Protestantism. As the Nobel Prize committee noted, the 1950 award went to Russell “in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought” (Nobel Media 2020). Russell himself reports that he received the award primarily for his anti-religious book, Marriage and Morals (1969, 30). Russell’s analysis of traditional arguments in favour of the existence of God appears in both his popular and his philosophical writings. Russell’s criticism of arguments traditionally offered in favour of the existence of God includes his discussions of the First Cause Argument, Problem of Evil, Ontological Argument, Teleological Argument, Argument from Pre-established Harmony, Natural Law Argument, Argument from Morality, Remediation of Injustice Argument, and Argument from Religious Experience. (ix) Finally, in response to the Argument from Religious Experience , the argument that people report having had direct experience of the supernatural or the divine, Russell simply notes that we are just as likely to make mistakes when reporting such experiences as we are to make mistakes in other areas of our lives: “If you have jaundice you see things yellow that are not yellow. You’re making a mistake” (A1957, 161). Thus, it is our total body of evidence that needs to be considered when making such judgments, a body of evidence that leans heavily against the existence of anything divine or supernatural. The conclusion to be drawn, says Russell, is that religious faith has served as a shield against the advancement of knowledge, both in ethics and in the sciences: “When two men of science disagree, they do not invoke the secular arm; they wait for further evidence to decide the issue, because, as men of science, they know that In support of his view that the writings handed down by the church fathers were “full of invectives against Woman”, he quotes the historian, W.E.H. Lecky: “Woman was represented as the door to hell, as the mother of all human ills. She should be ashamed at the very thought that she is a woman. She should live in continual penance, on account of the curses she has brought upon the world” (1929, 61). Russell concludes that “It is only in quite modern times that women have regained the degree of freedom which they enjoyed in the Roman Empire” (1929, 60–61). It is intellectual blindness not to recognize the revolutionary import of early Christianity, whatever the contemporary feeling concerning the sacrament of marriage may be, when it set itself like a wall against the tides of boundless sensuality and impressed upon the Roman world the sanctity of human life. (Kayden 1930, 88) Contrary to what was often said about his personal life, it is also worth noting that Russell did not practice or defend a libertine ethic. He thought that sex was a natural need, like food and drink, but that it should not be trivialized by disassociating it “from serious emotion and from feelings of affection” (1929, 127). (Wood 1957, 174) Underlying Russell’s writings on religion was also his observation that religion is not simply a body of doctrine but also a vehicle for the expression of emotion. This explains why arguments against the existence of the supernatural, although influential among intellectuals, are not the main driving force behind most religious belief (A1957, 9). Instead, religion is based largely on fear and ignorance: our fear of the mysterious, our lack of knowledge of natural causes, our fear of death (A1957, 16). As a young man, he says, he spent part of each day for many weeks reading Georg Cantor, and copying out the gist of him into a notebook. At that time I falsely supposed all his arguments to be fallacious, but I nevertheless went through them all in the minutest detail. This stood me in good stead when later on I discovered that all the fallacies were mine. (1967, 127) As a result, “Against my will, in the course of my travels, the belief that everything worth knowing was known at Cambridge gradually wore off. In this respect”, says Russell, “my travels were very useful to me” (1967, 133).