Why I Am Not A Christian
by Bertrand Russell
Introductory note: Russell delivered this lecture on March 6, 1927 to the
National Secular Society, South London Branch, at Battersea Town Hall. Published in pamphlet
form in that same year, the essay subsequently achieved new fame with Paul Edwards' edition of
Russell's book, Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays ... (1957).
As your Chairman has told you, the subject about which I am going to speak to you tonight
is "Why I Am Not a Christian." Perhaps it would be as well, first
of all, to try to make out what one means by the word Christian.
It is used these days in a very loose sense by a great many people. Some
people mean no more by it than a person who attempts to live a good life.
In that sense I suppose there would be Christians in all sects and creeds;
but I do not think that that is the proper sense of the word, if only because
it would imply that all the people who are not Christians -- all the Buddhists,
Confucians, Mohammedans, and so on -- are not trying to live a good life.
I do not mean by a Christian any person who tries to live decently according
to his lights. I think that you must have a certain amount of definite belief
before you have a right to call yourself a Christian. The word does not
have quite such a full-blooded meaning now as it had in the times of St.
Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. In those days, if a man said that he was
a Christian it was known what he meant. You accepted a whole collection
of creeds which were set out with great precision, and every single syllable
of those creeds you believed with the whole strength of your convictions.
What Is a Christian?
Nowadays it is not quite that. We have to be a little more vague in our
meaning of Christianity. I think, however, that there are two different
items which are quite essential to anybody calling himself a Christian. The first
is one of a dogmatic nature -- namely, that you must believe in God and
immortality. If you do not believe in those two things, I do not think that you
can properly call yourself a Christian. Then, further than that, as the
name implies, you must have some kind of belief about Christ. The Mohammedans,
for instance, also believe in God and in immortality, and yet they would not
call themselves Christians. I think you must have at the very lowest
the belief that Christ was, if not divine, at least the best and wisest
of men. If you are not going to believe that much about Christ, I do not
think you have any right to call yourself a Christian. Of course, there
is another sense, which you find in Whitaker's Almanack and
in geography books, where the population of the world is said to be divided
into Christians, Mohammedans, Buddhists, fetish worshipers, and so on; and in that sense we are
all Christians. The geography books count us all in, but that is a purely geographical sense, which I
suppose we can ignore.Therefore I take it that when I tell you why I am not a Christian I have
to tell you two different things: first, why I do not believe in God and in immortality; and,
secondly, why I do not think that Christ was the best and wisest of men, although I grant him a
very high degree of moral goodness.
But for the successful efforts of unbelievers in the past, I could not take
so elastic a definition of Christianity as that. As I said before, in olden days it had a much more
full-blooded sense. For instance, it included he belief in hell. Belief in eternal hell-fire was an
essential item of Christian belief until pretty recent times. In this country, as you know,
it ceased to be an essential item because of a decision of the Privy Council, and from that decision
the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Archbishop of York dissented; but in this country our
religion is settled by Act of Parliament, and therefore the Privy Council was able to override their
Graces and hell was no longer necessary to a Christian. Consequently I shall not insist
that a Christian must believe in hell.
The Existence of God
To come to this question of the existence of God: it is a large and serious
question, and if I were to attempt to deal with it in any adequate manner
I should have to keep you here until Kingdom Come, so that you will have
to excuse me if I deal with it in a somewhat summary fashion. You know,
of course, that the Catholic Church has laid it down as a dogma that the existence
of God can be proved by the unaided reason. That is a somewhat curious dogma,
but it is one of their dogmas. They had to introduce it because at one time
the freethinkers adopted the habit of saying that there were such and such
arguments which mere reason might urge against the existence of God, but
of course they knew as a matter of faith that God did exist. The arguments
and the reasons were set out at great length, and the Catholic Church felt that
they must stop it. Therefore they laid it down that the existence
of God can be proved by the unaided reason and they had to set up what they
considered were arguments to prove it. There are, of course, a number of them, but I shall take
only a few.
The First-cause Argument
Perhaps the simplest and easiest to understand is the argument of the First
Cause. (It is maintained that everything we see in this world has a cause,
and as you go back in the chain of causes further and further you must come
to a First Cause, and to that First Cause you give the name of God.) That
argument, I suppose, does not carry very much weight nowadays, because, in the
first place, cause is not quite what it used to be. The philosophers and
the men of science have got going on cause, and it has not anything like
the vitality it used to have; but, apart from that, you can see that the
argument that there must be a First Cause is one that cannot have any validity.
I may say that when I was a young man and was debating these questions very
seriously in my mind, I for a long time accepted the argument of the First
Cause, until one day, at the age of eighteen, I read John Stuart Mill's
Autobiography, and I there found this sentence: "My father taught me
that the question 'Who made me?' cannot be answered, since it immediately
suggests the further question `Who made god?'" That very simple
sentence showed me, as I still think, the fallacy in the argument of the
First Cause. If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause.
If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world
as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly
of the same nature as the Hindu's view, that the world rested upon an elephant
and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, "How about
the tortoise?" the Indian said, "Suppose we change the subject."
The argument is really no better than that. There is no reason why the world
could not have come into being without a cause; nor, on the other hand,
is there any reason why it should not have always existed. There is no reason
to suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that things must
have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination. Therefore,
perhaps, I need not waste any more time upon the argument about the First
Cause.
The Natural-law Argument
Then there is a very common argument from natural law. That was a favorite
argument all through the eighteenth century, especially under the influence
of Sir Isaac Newton and his cosmogony. People observed the planets going
around the sun according to the law of gravitation, and they thought that
God had given a behest to these planets to move in that particular fashion,
and that was why they did so. That was, of course, a convenient and simple
explanation that saved them the trouble of looking any further for explanations
of the law of gravitation. Nowadays we explain the law of gravitation in
a somewhat complicated fashion that Einstein has introduced. I do not propose
to give you a lecture on the law of gravitation, as interpreted by Einstein,
because that again would take some time; at any rate, you no longer have
the sort of natural law that you had in the Newtonian system, where, for
some reason that nobody could understand, nature behaved in a uniform fashion.
We now find that a great many things we thought were natural laws are really
human conventions. You know that even in the remotest depths of stellar space
there are still three feet to a yard. That is, no doubt, a very remarkable
fact, but you would hardly call it a law of nature. And a great many things
that have been regarded as laws of nature are of that kind. On the other
hand, where you can get down to any knowledge of what atoms actually do,
you will find they are much less subject to law than people thought, and that the laws at which you
arrive are statistical averages of just the sort that would emerge from chance. There is, as we all
know, a law that if you throw dice you will get double sixes only about once in thirty-six times,
and we do not regard that as evidence that the fall of the dice is regulated by design; on the
contrary, if the double sixes came every time we should think that there was design. The laws of
nature are of that sort as regards a great many of them. They are statistical averages such
as would emerge from the laws of chance; and that makes this whole business
of natural law much less impressive than it formerly was. Quite apart from
that, which represents the momentary state of science that may change tomorrow,
the whole idea that natural laws imply a lawgiver is due to a confusion
between natural and human laws. Human laws are behests commanding you to
behave a certain way, in which you may choose to behave, or you may choose
not to behave; but natural laws are a description of how things do in fact
behave, and being a mere description of what they in fact do, you cannot
argue that there must be somebody who told them to do that, because
even supposing that there were, you are then faced with the question "Why did
God issue just those natural laws and no others?" If you say that he did it simply
from his own good pleasure, and without any reason, you then find that there
is something which is not subject to law, and so your train of natural law
is interrupted. If you say, as more orthodox theologians do, that in all
the laws which God issues he had a reason for giving those laws rather than
others -- the reason, of course, being to create the best universe, although
you would never think it to look at it -- if there were a reason for the
laws which God gave, then God himself was subject to law, and therefore
you do not get any advantage by introducing God as an intermediary. You
really have a law outside and anterior to the divine edicts, and God does
not serve your purpose, because he is not the ultimate lawgiver. In short, this
whole argument about natural law no longer has anything like the strength
that it used to have. I am traveling on in time in my review of the arguments.
The arguments that are used for the existence of God change their character
as time goes on. They were at first hard intellectual arguments embodying
certain quite definite fallacies. As we come to modern times they become
less respectable intellectually and more and more affected by a kind of
moralizing vagueness.
The Argument from Design
The next step in the process brings us to the argument from design. You
all know the argument from design: everything in the world is made just
so that we can manage to live in the world, and if the world was ever so
little different, we could not manage to live in it. That is the argument
from design. It sometimes takes a rather curious form; for instance, it
is argued that rabbits have white tails in order to be easy to shoot. I
do not know how rabbits would view that application. It is an easy argument
to parody. You all know Voltaire's remark, that obviously the nose was designed
to be such as to fit spectacles. That sort of parody has turned out to be
not nearly so wide of the mark as it might have seemed in the eighteenth
century, because since the time of Darwin we understand much better why
living creatures are adapted to their environment. It is not that their
environment was made to be suitable to them but that they grew to be suitable
to it, and that is the basis of adaptation. There is no evidence of design about
it.
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.
I am told that that sort of view is depressing, and people will sometimes
tell you that if they believed that, they would not be able to go on living.
Do not believe it; it is all nonsense. Nobody really worries about much about what
is going to happen millions of years hence. Even if they think they are
worrying much about that, they are really deceiving themselves. They are
worried about something much more mundane, or it may merely be a bad digestion;
but nobody is really seriously rendered unhappy by the thought of something
that is going to happen to this world millions and millions of years hence.
Therefore, although it is of course a gloomy view to suppose that life will
die out -- at least I suppose we may say so, although sometimes when I contemplate
the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation
-- it is not such as to render life miserable. It merely makes you turn
your attention to other things.
The Moral Arguments for Deity
Now we reach one stage further in what I shall call the intellectual descent
that the Theists have made in their argumentations, and we come to what
are called the moral arguments for the existence of God. You all know, of course,
that there used to be in the old days three intellectual arguments for the
existence of God, all of which were disposed of by Immanuel Kant in the Critique of Pure
Reason; but no sooner had he disposed of those
arguments than he invented a new one, a moral argument, and that quite convinced
him. He was like many people: in intellectual matters he was skeptical,
but in moral matters he believed implicitly in the maxims that he had imbibed
at his mother's knee. That illustrates what the psychoanalysts so much emphasize
-- the immensely stronger hold upon us that our very early associations have than
those of later times.
Kant, as I say, invented a new moral argument for the existence of God,
and that in varying forms was extremely popular during the nineteenth century.
It has all sorts of forms. One form is to say there would be no right or
wrong unless God existed. I am not for the moment concerned with whether
there is a difference between right and wrong, or whether there is not:
that is another question. The point I am concerned with is that, if you
are quite sure there is a difference between right and wrong, then you are
in this situation: Is that difference due to God's fiat or is it not? If
it is due to God's fiat, then for God himself there is no difference between
right and wrong, and it is no longer a significant statement to say that
God is good. If you are going to say, as theologians do, that God is good,
you must then say that right and wrong have some meaning which is independent
of God's fiat, because God's fiats are good and not bad independently of
the mere fact that he made them. If you are going to say that, you will then have
to say that it is not only through God that right and wrong came into being,
but that they are in their essence logically anterior to God. You could,
of course, if you liked, say that there was a superior deity who gave orders
to the God that made this world, or could take up the line that some of the
gnostics took up -- a line which I often thought was a very plausible one
-- that as a matter of fact this world that we know was made by the devil
at a moment when God was not looking. There is a good deal to be said for
that, and I am not concerned to refute it.
The Argument for the Remedying of Injustice
Then there is another very curious form of moral argument, which is this:
they say that the existence of God is required in order to bring justice into the
world. In the part of this universe that we know there is great injustice,
and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly
knows which of those is the more annoying; but if you are going to have justice
in the universe as a whole you have to suppose a future life to redress
the balance of life here on earth. So they say that there must be a God,
and there must be Heaven and Hell in order that in the long run there
may be justice. That is a very curious argument. If you looked at the matter
from a scientific point of view, you would say, "After all, I only
know this world. I do not know about the rest of the universe, but so far
as one can argue at all on probabilities one would say that probably this world
is a fair sample, and if there is injustice here the odds are that there is injustice elsewhere also."
Supposing you got a crate of oranges that you opened, and you found all the top layer of oranges
bad, you would not argue, "The underneath ones must be good, so as to redress
the balance." You would say, "Probably the whole lot is a bad
consignment"; and that is really what a scientific person would argue
about the universe. He would say, "Here we find in this world a great
deal of injustice, and so far as that goes that is a reason for supposing
that justice does not rule in the world; and therefore so far as it goes
it affords a moral argument against deity and not in favor of one." Of course I know that the sort
of intellectual arguments that I have been talking to you about are not what really moves people.
What really moves people to believe in God is not any intellectual argument at all. Most people
believe in God because they have been taught from early infancy to do it, and that is the main
reason.
Then I think that the next most powerful reason is the wish for safety,
a sort of feeling that there is a big brother who will look after you. That
plays a very profound part in influencing people's desire for a belief in
God.
The Character of Christ
I now want to say a few words upon a topic which I often think is not quite
sufficiently dealt with by Rationalists, and that is the question whether
Christ was the best and the wisest of men. It is generally taken for granted
that we should all agree that that was so. I do not myself. I think that
there are a good many points upon which I agree with Christ a great deal
more than the professing Christians do. I do not know that I could go with
Him all the way, but I could go with Him much further than most professing