With its brevity and hard logic, Bertrand Russell‘s essay, “Why I Am Not A Christian,” is one of the most popular arguments against the Christian faith ever put forth. Originally given as a speech to the National Secular Society in South London in 1927, it seems almost 90 years later that many of the arguments refuted by Russell are still in use today. In the essay, Russell takes a two-fold approach to attacking Christianity. He first addresses its dogmatic nature, namely why he does not believe in God and immortality, and then addresses why he believes Christ was not the best and the wisest of men.
The first several sections of the essay deal with various arguments for the existence of God proposed by Christians. One still prevalent and very relevant today is the argument from design, which states that “everything in the world is made just so that we can manage to live in the world, an if the world was ever so little different we could not manage to live in it” (81). Russell argues ad absurdum to refute the claim, citing Voltaire’s famous parody of the nose being designed to hold up spectacles. Instead, the apparent design of the universe can be better explained by adaptation, where it is not that the environment was made to be suited to us but that we grew to be suitable to it.
Russell points out the vanity of people who believe that everything was created for them. He addresses beautifully how those with a secular lifestyle can cope without such narcissism: “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 mere flash in the pan; 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 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” (82).
Russell refers to the moral arguments for God as “the intellectual descent that Theists have made in their argumentation” (82). He points to Kant, who “in intellectual matters he was sceptical, but in moral matters he believed implicitly in the maxims that he had imbibed at his mother’s knee” (83). Kant began the moral argument that there would be no right or wrong unless God existed. Russell wonders whether this difference between right and wrong is due to “God’s fiat” or not, essentially using Socrates argument against divine command theory which I outlined in an earlier post.
Next, Russell addresses the argument that God is needed to balance the injustice in the world, which he calls a very curious argument. He uses an analogy of a crate of oranges, where the top layer has gone rotten. One would not surmise that the oranges underneath must be fresh, so as to “redress the balance.” Instead, one would assume the whole lot has gone bad, and that is what a scientific and rational view would be. Thus, if we find a great deal of injustice here, we should reason that a great deal of injustice is elsewhere and that there is good reason that justice does not rule.
Addressing the second tenet of Christianity, Russell criticizes the behavior and teachings of Christ, who he believes cannot be labeled the best of men, though he affords him much moral character. Russell does not believe that “any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment”: “I must say that I think all this doctrine, that hell fire is a punishment for sin, is a doctrine of cruelty. It is a doctrine that put cruelty into the world and gave the world generations of cruel torture; and the Christ of the Gospels, if you could take him as his chroniclers represent him, would certainly have to be considered responsible for that” (87). Russell lists Socrates and the Buddha as examples of whose teachings he considers better than Christ.
Russell believes that most people accept religion on emotional grounds which are not based on reason or solid arguments. He criticizes those who say it is wrong to attack religion because religion makes men virtuous. As an example, he cites the story of Erewhon and states that “the Christian religion, as organized in its Churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world” (89). He argues that the Church “has chosen to label as morality a certain narrow set of rules of conduct which have nothing to do with human happiness” (90).
In his closing remarks, Russell reveals what secular thinkers must do: “We want to stand upon our own feet and look fair and square at the world– its good facts, its bad facts, its beauties, and its ugliness; see the world as it is, and not be afraid of it. Conquer the world by intelligence, and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes with it” (90). These are fiery words which advocate a philosophy not of cynicism toward this broken world, but rather a viewpoint of reality, that this world needs fixing and this is how we can repair it.
Moral Musing 