Whyiamnot A Christian and The Faith of A Rationalist by Bertrand Russell
Whyiamnot A Christian and The Faith of A Rationalist by Bertrand Russell
A CHRISTIAN
and
THE FAITH OF A
RATIONALIST
by
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Why I Am Not a Christian was originally given as a public lecture for the South London Branch of the
National Secular Society at Battersea Town Hall on 6 March 1927. It was first published in May 1927 as a
pamphlet by C. A. Watts for the Rationalist Press Association, and was reprinted many times. It was
republished by the National Secular Society in 1967, and again in 1970. It appeared in the Truthseeker and
as a Haldeman-Julius Little Blue Book in the United States, and in many other foreign editions and
translations. It was included in the book Why I Am Not a Christian, and Other Essays on Religion and
Related Subjects, a collection of Russell's essays, which was edited by Paul Edwards, and was published in
1957 in the United States and Great Britain; and also in The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell, which was
edited by Robert E. Egner and Lester E. Denonn, and was published in 1961 in the United States and Great
Britain: both books have been reprinted and translated several times.
The Faith of a Rationalist was originally given as a radio talk on the BBC Home Service on 20 May 1947, in
a series called "What I Believe" (when sceptical views were broadcast for the first time after twenty years of
campaigning by the freethought movement). It was first published in the Listener on 29 May 1947, and was
reprinted in the Literary Guide in July 1947. It was first published as a pamphlet by C. A. Watts for the
Rationalist Press Association in August 1947, and was reprinted several times. It was included in the
collection of the broadcasts, a booklet called What I Believe, which was edited by George Woodcock and
published by the Porcupine Press in 1948. It appeared as a Haldeman-Julius Big Blue Book in the United
States, and in some other foreign editions and translations. It was included in the book Atheism, a collection
of Russell's essays, which was edited by Madalyn Murray O'Hair and was published in 1972 by the Arno
Press in the United States.
Bertrand Russell (18721970), who was one of the most distinguished thinkers and one of the most
remarkable people of the twentieth century, was a leading freethinker. He was an Honorary Associate and
the President of the Rationalist Press Association, and a Distinguished Member of the National Secular
Society. These two organisations are jointly republishing these two essays because, although they have
inevitably dated in a few minor details, they remain excellent summaries of the arguments for rejecting
religion in general and Christianity in particular and for adopting rationalism and secularism.
National Secular Society, 702 Holloway Road, London N19 3NL.
Rationalist Press Association, 88 Islington High Street, London NI 8EW.
Printed by Aldgate Press, 84B Whitechapel High Street, London E1 9Q
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 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
that 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 Indian'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 favourite argument all through the
eighteenth century, especially under the influence of Sir Isaac Newton and his cosmogony. People observed
the planets going round 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 that 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 find that 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 law giver is due to a confusion between natural and
human laws. Human laws are behests commanding you to behave in a certain way, in which way you may
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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 issued he had a reason for giving those laws rather than othersthe reason, of course,
being to create the best universe, although you would never think it to look at itif there was 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 have really a law outside and anterior to the divine edicts, and
God does not serve your purpose, because he is not the ultimate law-giver. In short, this whole argument
about natural law no longer has anything like the strength that it used to have. I am travelling 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 this 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 rather
a 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 has 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, the Fascists, and Mr. Winston
Churchill? Really I am not much impressed with the people who say: "Look at me: I am such a splendid
product that there must have been design in the universe." I am not very much impressed by the splendour of
those people. Therefore I think that this argument of design is really a very poor argument indeed.
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 merely a 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 tendingsomething 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 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 outat 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 consolationit is not such as to
render life miserable. It merely makes you turn your attention to other things.
course, the parody of that argument in Samuel Butler's book, Erewhon Revisited. You will remember that in
Erewhon there is a certain Higgs who arrives in a remote country, and after spending some time there he
escapes from that country in a balloon. Twenty years later he comes back to that country and finds a new
religion, in which he is worshipped under the name of the "Sun Child"; and it is said that he ascended into
heaven. He finds that the Feast of the Ascension is about to be celebrated, and he hears Professors Hanky
and Panky say to each other that they never set eyes on the man Higgs, and they hope they never will; but
they are the high priests of the religion of the Sun Child. He is very indignant, and he comes up to them, and
he says: "I am going to expose all this humbug and tell the people of Erewhon that it was only I, the man
Higgs, and I went up in a balloon." He was told: "You must not do that, because all the morals of this
country are bound round this myth, and if they once know that you did not ascend into heaven they will all
become wicked"; and so he is persuaded of that, and he goes away quite quietly.
That is the ideathat we should all be wicked if we did not hold to the Christian religion. It seems to me
that the people who have held to it have been for the most part extremely wicked. You find this curious fact,
that the more intense has been the religion of any period and the more profound has been the dogmatic
belief, the greater has been the cruelty and the worse has been the state of affairs. In the so-called ages of
faith, when men really did believe the Christian religion in all its completeness, there was the Inquisition,
with its tortures; there were millions of unfortunate women burnt as witches; and there was every kind of
cruelty practised upon all sorts of people in the name of religion. You find as you look round the world that
every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step towards
the diminution of war, every step towards better treatment of the coloured races, or every mitigation of
slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the
organized Churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its
Churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.
HOW THE CHURCHES HAVE RETARDED PROGRESS
You may think that I am going too far when I say that that is still so. I do not think that I am. Take one fact.
You will bear with me if I mention it. It is not a pleasant fact, but the Churches compel one to mention facts
that are not pleasant. Supposing that in this world that we live in today an inexperienced girl is married to a
syphilitic man, in that case the Catholic Church says: "This is an indissoluble sacrament. You must stay
together for life," and no steps of any sort must be taken by that woman to prevent herself from giving birth
to syphilitic children. That is what the Catholic Church says. I say that that is fiendish cruelty, and nobody
whose natural sympathies have not been warped by dogma, or whose moral nature was not absolutely dead
to all sense of suffering, could maintain that it is right and proper that that state of things should continue.
That is only an example. There are a great many ways in which at the present moment the Church, by its
insistence upon what it chooses to call morality, inflicts upon all sorts of people undeserved and unnecessary
suffering. And of course, as we know, it is in its major part an opponent still of progress and of improvement
in all the ways that diminish suffering in the world, because it has chosen to label as morality a certain
narrow set of rules of conduct which have nothing to do with human happiness; and when you say that this
or that ought to be done because it would make for human happiness, they think that has nothing to do with
the matter at all. "What has human happiness to do with morals? The object of morals is not to make people
happy. It is to fit them for heaven." It certainly seems to unfit them for this world.
FEAR THE FOUNDATION OF RELIGION
Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown, and partly,
as I have said, the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your
troubles and disputes. Fear is the basis of the whole thingfear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of
death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand-inhand. It is because fear is at the basis of those two things. In this world we can now begin a little to
understand things, and a little to master them by the help of science, which has forced its way step by step
against the Christian religion, against the Churches, and against the opposition of all the old precepts.
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Science can help us to get over this craven fear in which mankind has lived for so many generations. Science
can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach us, no longer to look round for imaginary supports, no
longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a fit
place to live in, instead of the sort of place that the Churches in all these centuries have made it.
WHAT WE MUST DO
We want to stand upon our own feet and look fair and square at the worldits good facts, its bad facts, its
beauties, and its ugliness; see the world as it is, and be not afraid of it. Conquer the world by intelligence,
and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it. The whole conception of God is
a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men.
When you hear people in church debasing themselves and saying that they are miserable sinners, and all the
rest of it, it seems contemptible and not worthy of self-respecting human beings. We ought to stand up and
look the world frankly in the face. We ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as
we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made of it in all these ages. A good world
needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past, or a fettering
of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs a fearless outlook and a free
intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not looking back all the time towards a past that is dead, which we
trust will be far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create.
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true; these beliefs, they say, should not be critically examined. I cannot myself admit any such doctrine. I
cannot believe that mankind can be the better for shrinking from the examination of this or that question. No
sound morality can need to be based upon evasion, and a happiness derived from beliefs not justified on any
ground except their pleasantness is not a kind of happiness that can be unreservedly admired.
RELIGIOUS BELIEFS AND THE UNIVERSE
These considerations apply especially to religious beliefs. Most of us have been brought up to believe that
the universe owes its existence to an all-wise and all-powerful Creator, whose purposes are beneficent even
in what to us may seem evil. I do not think it is right to refuse to apply to this belief the kind of tests that we
should apply to one that touches our emotions less intimately and profoundly. Is there any evidence of the
existence of such a Being? Undoubtedly belief in Him is comforting and sometimes has some good moral
effects on character and behaviour. But this is no evidence that the belief is true. For my part, I think the
belief lost whatever rationality it once possessed when it was discovered that the earth is not the centre of
the universe. So long as it was thought that the sun and the planets and the stars revolved about the earth, it
was natural to suppose that the universe had a purpose connected with the earth, and, since man was what
man most admired on the earth, this purpose was supposed to be embodied in man. But astronomy and
geology have changed all this. The earth is a minor planet of a minor star which is one of many millions of
stars in a galaxy which is one of many millions of galaxies. Even within the life of our own planet man is
only a brief interlude. Non-human life existed for countless ages before man was evolved. Man, even if he
does not commit scientific suicide, will perish ultimately through failure of water or air or warmth. It is
difficult to believe that Omnipotence needed so vast a setting for so small and transitory a result.
Apart from the minuteness and brevity of the human species, I cannot feel that it is a worthy climax to
such an enormous prelude. There is a rather repulsive smugness and self-complacency in the argument that
man is so splendid as to be evidence of infinite wisdom and infinite power in his Creator. Those who use
this kind of reasoning always try to concentrate our attention on the few saints and sages; they try to make us
forget the Neros and Attilas and Hitlers and the millions of mean poltroons to whom such men owed their
power. And even what is best in us is apt to lead to disaster. Religions that teach brotherly love have been
used as an excuse for persecution, and our profoundest scientific insight is made into a means of mass
destruction. I can imagine a sardonic demon producing us for his amusement, but I cannot attribute to a
Being who is wise, beneficent, and omnipotent the terrible weight of cruelty, suffering, and ironic
degradation of what is best that has marred the history of man in increasing measure as he has become more
master of his fate.
A PLAUSIBLE CONJECTURE
There is a different and vaguer conception of cosmic Purpose as not omnipotent but slowly working its way
through a recalcitrant material. This is a more plausible conception of a God who, though omnipotent and
loving, has deliberately produced beings so subject to suffering and cruelty as the majority of mankind. I do
not pretend to know that there is no such Purpose; my knowledge of the universe is too limited. But I do say,
and I say with confidence, that the knowledge of other human beings is also limited, and that no one can
adduce any good evidence that cosmic processes have any purpose whatever. Our very inadequate evidence,
so far as it goes, tends in the opposite direction. It seems to show that energy is being more and more evenly
distributed, while everything to which it is possible to attribute value depends upon uneven distribution. In
the end, therefore, we should expect a dull uniformity, in which the universe would continue for ever and
ever without the occurrence of anything in the slightest degree interesting. I do not say that this will happen;
I say only that, on the basis of our present knowledge, it is the most plausible conjecture.
Immortality, if we could believe in it, would enable us to shake off this gloom about the physical world.
We should say that although our souls, during their sojourn here on earth, are in bondage to matter and
physical laws, they pass at death into an eternal world beyond the empire of decay which science seems to
reveal in the sensible world. But it is impossible to believe this unless we think that a human being consists
of two partssoul and bodywhich are separable and can continue independently of each other.
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Unfortunately all the evidence is against this. The mind grows like the body; like the body it inherits
characteristics from both parents; it is affected by diseases of the body and by drugs; it is intimately
connected with the brain. There is no scientific reason to suppose that after death the mind or soul acquires
an independence of the brain which it never had in life. I do not pretend that this argument is conclusive, but
it is all that we have to go upon except the slender evidence supplied by psychical research.
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