Why I am not a Christian

"Russell was an atheist, although he described himself as an agnostic, as [do] a lot of people do who are sensitive to the scientific requirement to be open-minded about even outré possibilities of things. It’s interesting that he should be a public sceptic of religion – that he should be prepared to talk and indeed to write about this matter – at a time when to do that was to put yourself a little bit beyond the pale. It was still the case even in the interwar period that people were regarded as particularly provocative to come out and speak with such clarity. In this talk, published as Why I Am Not a Christian , he sets out the reasons that somebody who takes a very rational, philosophical, sceptical look at the claims, arguments and supposed evidences for a [Christian] outlook might apply. Given that Christianity was then, and had been for a long time, such a major influence in European culture, it was a brave and in my view very appropriate attempt to shake up people, to get them to think, get them to see that there could be serious, careful and considered reasons why you might not accept that outlook. So it’s a bold, brave statement for its time – and indeed it sets out quite a few of the reasons why somebody might not be [religious]. I agree with it, yes. He was not alone, by the way, at that time in making that sort of point. George Bernard Shaw said, the day that I gave up my religious faith – which happened when he was a young teenager – I felt the dawning of moral passion. Russell and Shaw and many other people of their persuasion felt that the putatively religious European culture had been a disaster. It had fallen into the catastrophe of the First World War, which is why he and [Karl] Popper and Wittgenstein and a number of other people thought that the only possible remedy was education. This would be an education in how to think, in how to get away from just accepting these great slabs of traditional attitudes, which led to English bishops blessing English tanks and German priests blessing German tanks, and nobody ever seriously thinking about the underlying moral principles. That, I think, was a brave and correct thing to do. Because I’m not any kind of religious person. I’m an atheist, so none of the religions – Hinduism or Zoroastrianism or the belief in the Olympian deities or Christianity – appeal to me. You have to start quite a long way back, in belief in the existence of supernatural agency, before you get to any of the particular historical religions, and when I start that long way back I find every reason not to think that there are such agencies in the universe. Not only is there no good evidence for the existence of supernatural agency – gods and goddesses and demons and so on – but there is a very great deal of evidence suggesting that this universe is not the kind of place that has those sorts of things in it. Very often people say you can’t prove that there aren’t gods and goddesses. And I say you can, if you understand the nature of proof in the contingent case. Of course, in the formal case of mathematics and logic, proof is something completely coercive – the conclusion is entailed by the premises. But in the contingent case what we mean by proof is test. We prove a bar of steel by bending it until it snaps. That’s the test of it. This is where we get expressions like “the proof of the pudding”. Proof in the contingent, empirical sense about the world around us is a matter of testing it. [This argument] is beautifully done by Carl Sagan with the dragon in the garage. Somebody says, I’ve got a dragon in my garage. You say, I’d love to see it. Ah, says the other person, it’s invisible. You say, let’s sprinkle some powder on the floor and see if we can see its footprints. Oh, it never lands on the floor. Well then we can hear its wings fluttering. It’s got silent wings. And so on and so on. Nothing whatever will count as a test, one way or another, for the claim that there’s a dragon in the garage. And that simple, straightforward but very deep observation applies to all claims to the effect that there are supernatural agencies or entities in this universe of ours. For that reason it’s not rational – ratio means proportion, so we’re proportioning evidence to judgements – to think that there are fairies at the bottom of the garden, gods on Olympus or Poseidon under the sea. I think that’s a very good way of putting it. It’s exactly the same pattern we’ve been talking about earlier, which is the attempt to attain a certain degree of self-understanding about what one’s capacities are – what one can offer, what contribution one can make – and then trying to develop them, and trying to fulfil the potential, if any, that lies within them. Trying to be a responsible, cooperative partner in the great conversation of mankind – to take a share in that endeavour, and to try to do it with the degree of sincerity or authenticity which would make it really intrinsically worthwhile. [This way] one would feel on one’s deathbed that one hadn’t tried to pretend to be something that you’re not. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I’ve been extremely fortunate. I’ve been able to dedicate my life to reading and to study and to writing. I don’t pretend for one minute to be able to tell anybody else how they should live or what they should think. I think that would be quite wrong to do. It’s everybody’s own individual responsibility to do that. But you might be able to share with them things that you’ve learned or discovered, or to encourage them to read something or see something a certain way. To offer them a perspective which they might accept or reject, or that they might engage in that dialogue with the great minds of the past, with people who are eager now to debate and think about them, and write about them – in the hope, and indeed in the faith, that when people do think, when people do read, when people become a bit more knowledgeable about the past and about ideas, that their overall tendency is towards the good."

"There’s a lot that Russell had to say about religion over the course of his career. He wrote an enormous amount of stuff and, like his writings on everything else, it’s not all consistent. He changed his mind about lots of things as he went on. The thing that I was interested in really with this book is the title essay, ‘Why I am not a Christian.’ This was a public lecture that he gave in about 1927. When I read that as a teenager, I was very impressed by it. I came back to it many years later and wrote a much more critical piece about it, thinking about how I — if I had been in Russell’s shoes — would have said a lot of things differently than what he said. But it was very influential for me in informing my early views. Russell’s attitude towards religion has two different parts to it. Even in this essay, he sometimes says that religion is a vile institution that’s responsible for most of the worst evils that we see in the world. But at the same time, he was interested in secular substitutes for religion, putting something in place that could play some of the social roles but also the psychological roles that religion plays for believers. Sometimes, when he’s talking about religion, he really is just talking about Christian religion. Often, he’s just talking about the Catholic Church. We have to pay careful attention to the context to work out what he’s talking about. When he starts talking about arguments for the existence of God, he’s really just engaging with Christians at that point. So, in ‘Why I am not a Christian,’ a big part of it is why I don’t believe in God, but another part of it is why I don’t believe that Jesus was the greatest and best of men. So, there are two parts in the essay that run along together. There’s another part of the essay where he’s saying critical things about the church, and there he’s talking about the Catholic Church. He picks up these little things in the gospels. There’s an occasion where Christ curses a fig tree because it’s not in fruit at the time. It’s not the right season, so it’s not surprising that it’s not bearing fruit. Russell says that this is bizarre behaviour; it’s clearly not the behaviour of someone who was fully rational and fully in control of their emotions. And there are other little stories like that that are scattered. But he also picks on some of the bigger doctrinal teachings as well. I’m now trying to remember whether he agrees with them or disagrees with them. He says that there are some good things about the Christian teachings as well. There are some important principles—one that he mentions is the principle of turning the other cheek. I think that Russell was in favour of that, whereas I’m inclined to be sceptical that that’s a good principle. I think that the discussions of arguments for the existence of God in that essay are quite unsatisfactory. Russell is presenting to a public audience, but I think he simplifies the arguments to a point where they’re not really recognisable of worthy targets of attack. Of course, it’s difficult. There are many arguments and some are very complicated. If you just want to do a public lecture, it’s quite hard to do justice to all of them. I would have been inclined, if I were Russell, either not to talk about the arguments at all, or to go about it in a rather different way. I would say something much more general rather than saying here’s an argument and here’s what’s wrong with it, when the argument that he puts up is one that no Christian philosopher would have defended. Russell gives an argument where he says if you suppose that the universe needs a cause and you postulate God, then why do you not need to postulate a cause for God as well? How can postulating God help with having something that doesn’t have an explanation? I’m guessing that many theists would say that God exists of necessity. So, there’s an explanation of why God exists: because it’s necessary that God exists. As for why it’s necessary that God exists, well, necessary truths — by their very nature— have no explanation. It’s true no matter what. The version that Russell gives of that argument is still somewhat unsatisfactory. I have more sympathy for Russell’s position, but I just think that what he should have said is: to the extent that you think that God exists of necessity, your opponent should just suppose that the initial state of the universe exists of necessity. Then, you’re no worse off in terms of having an explanation of what’s there at the very beginning, but you’re postulating less because you’re not postulating God. But that’s not how Russell says it. People can certainly change their minds. The extent to which it’s rational is a bit unclear. I think it’s very hard to suppose that, when people are persuaded by being given arguments, it’s the virtues of the argument that are doing all the work in persuading them. It’s certainly possible for some charismatic evangelical to talk to someone and present them with an argument and make them change their mind by the force of their personality or for other reasons having to do with cultural circumstance. But I would think that if what you’re really interested in is the virtues of the arguments, then you’ll probably come to the view that I have which is that there are no arguments on either side that are particularly compelling. There are very well-informed philosophers on both sides of the fence still. If there were these compelling arguments, that would be extremely hard to explain. “I think it’s very hard to suppose that, when people are persuaded by being given arguments, it’s the virtues of the argument that are doing all the work in persuading them.” That doesn’t mean that people go around having irrational beliefs. I’m inclined to think that you can be a rational believer on either side of this issue. You can be well informed and have thought about it a lot. It’s just that argument is not very important in whether or not you’re rational. That’s my view. It’s not a requirement for my being rational that I can persuade you to accept the things that I believe. We can just reach a point where we each recognise that there’s a whole lot of things that we disagree about. We’ve both thought hard about these matters but we just agree to disagree because further pursuit of the argument is not going to get us any further. Of course, we’ll both go away still thinking we’re right and the other person is wrong in the sense that I am the one with the true beliefs and you’re the one with the false beliefs. But you shouldn’t mix up that kind of consideration with questions about rationality, thoughtfulness, sensitivity, intelligence, and so on. Yes, I think similar things about politics. I think that would have to be right. When we acquire beliefs, with lots of them we don’t even notice that we’re acquiring them. For some things there is explicit instruction, but lots of them you pick them up by making inferences from what your parents taught you about and the kind of behaviour that your parents — and later on, your kids — engage in. It’s not anything like being given a bunch of arguments with conclusions and you’re accepting the arguments on the basis of the premises. That’s got to be true for everybody. “Argument is not very important in whether or not you’re rational. That’s my view.” It’s also got to be true that you can after the fact reconstruct a set of arguments that could have been the ones that got you to the position that you’re now in. I certainly accept those points. It helps to make it understandable why there were no Christians in China three thousand years ago. If there were really were people somewhere that have a kind of direct line from God, and they’re acquiring their beliefs from God, the distribution of religious belief around the rest of the planet over the past fifty thousand years starts to look pretty mysterious."