Why I Am Not
A Christian
By Bertrand
Russell
This
lecture was delivered by Russell on March 6, 1927 to the National Secular
Society, South London Branch, at
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
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
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
Christians can. You will remember that He said, "Resist not evil: but whosoever
shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also." That is not a
new precept or a new principle. It was used by Lao-tse and Buddha some 500 or
600 years before Christ, but it is not a principle which as a matter of fact
Christians accept. I have no doubt that the present prime minister [Stanley
Baldwin], for instance, is a most sincere Christian, but I should not advise any
of you to go and smite him on one cheek. I think you might find that he thought
this text was intended in a figurative sense.
Then there is another point which I consider excellent.
You will remember that Christ said, "Judge not lest ye be judged." That
principle I do not think you would find was popular in the law courts of
Christian countries. I have known in my time quite a number of judges who were
very earnest Christians, and none of them felt that they were acting contrary to
Christian principles in what they did. Then Christ says, "Give to him that asketh of thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn
not thou away." That is a very good principle. Your Chairman has reminded you
that we are not here to talk politics, but I cannot help observing that the last
general election was fought on the question of how desirable it was to turn away
from him that would borrow of thee, so that one must assume that the Liberals
and Conservatives of this country are composed of people who do not agree with
the teaching of Christ, because they certainly did very emphatically turn away
on that occasion.
Then there is one other maxim of Christ which I think has
a great deal in it, but I do not find that it is very popular among some of our
Christian friends. He says, "If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that which
thou hast, and give to the poor." That is a very excellent maxim, but, as I say,
it is not much practiced. All these, I think, are good maxims, although they are
a little difficult to live up to. I do not profess to live up to them myself;
but then, after all, it is not quite the same thing as for a
Christian.
Defects in Christ's
Teaching
Having granted the excellence of these maxims, I come to
certain points in which I do not believe that one can grant either the
superlative wisdom or the superlative goodness of Christ as depicted in the
Gospels; and here I may say that one is not concerned with the historical
question. Historically it is quite doubtful whether Christ ever existed at all,
and if He did we do not know anything about him, so that I am not concerned with
the historical question, which is a very difficult one. I am concerned with
Christ as He appears in the Gospels, taking the Gospel narrative as it stands,
and there one does find some things that do not seem to be very wise. For one
thing, he certainly thought that His second coming would occur in clouds of
glory before the death of all the people who were living at that time. There are
a great many texts that prove that. He says, for instance, "Ye shall not have
gone over the cities of
The Moral
Problem
Then you come to moral questions. There is one very serious
defect to my mind in Christ's moral character, and that is that He believed in
hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can
believe in everlasting punishment. Christ certainly as depicted in the Gospels
did believe in everlasting punishment, and one does find repeatedly a vindictive
fury against those people who would not listen to His preaching — an attitude
which is not uncommon with preachers, but which does somewhat detract from
superlative excellence. You do not, for instance find that attitude in Socrates.
You find him quite bland and urbane toward the people who would not listen to
him; and it is, to my mind, far more worthy of a sage to take that line than to
take the line of indignation. You probably all remember the sorts of things that
Socrates was saying when he was dying, and the sort of things that he generally
did say to people who did not agree with him.
You will find that in the Gospels Christ said, "Ye
serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of Hell."
That was said to people who did not like His preaching. It is not really to my
mind quite the best tone, and there are a great many of these things about Hell.
There is, of course, the familiar text about the sin against the Holy Ghost:
"Whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost it shall
not be forgiven him neither in this World nor in the world to come." That text
has caused an unspeakable amount of misery in the world, for all sorts of people
have imagined that they have committed the sin against the Holy Ghost, and
thought that it would not be forgiven them either in this world or in the world
to come. I really do not think that a person with a proper degree of kindliness
in his nature would have put fears and terrors of that sort into the world.
Then Christ says, "The Son of Man shall send forth his
His angels, and they shall gather out of His kingdom
all things that offend, and them which do iniquity, and shall cast them into a
furnace of fire; there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth"; and He goes on
about the wailing and gnashing of teeth. It comes in one verse after another,
and it is quite manifest to the reader that there is a certain pleasure in
contemplating wailing and gnashing of teeth, or else it would not occur so
often. Then you all, of course, remember about the sheep and the goats; how at
the second coming He is going to divide the sheep from the goats, and He is
going to say to the goats, "Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire."
He continues, "And these shall go away into everlasting fire." Then He says
again, "If thy hand offend thee, cut it off; it is better for thee to enter into
life maimed, than having two hands to go into Hell, into the fire that never
shall be quenched; where the worm dieth not and the
fire is not quenched." He repeats that again and again also. 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
partly responsible for that.
There are other things of less importance. There is the
instance of the Gadarene swine, where it certainly was
not very kind to the pigs to put the devils into them and make them rush down
the hill into the sea. You must remember that He was omnipotent, and He could
have made the devils simply go away; but He chose to send them into the pigs.
Then there is the curious story of the fig tree, which always rather puzzled me.
You remember what happened about the fig tree. "He was hungry; and seeing a fig
tree afar off having leaves, He came if haply He might find anything thereon;
and when He came to it He found nothing but leaves, for the
time of figs was not yet. And Jesus answered and said unto it: 'No man
eat fruit of thee hereafter for ever' . . . and Peter . . . saith unto Him: 'Master, behold the fig tree which thou
cursedst is withered away.'" This is a very curious
story, because it was not the right time of year for figs, and you really could
not blame the tree. I cannot myself feel that either in the matter of wisdom or
in the matter of virtue Christ stands quite as high as some other people known
to history. I think I should put Buddha and Socrates above Him in those
respects.
The Emotional
Factor
As I said before, I do not think that the real reason why
people accept religion has anything to do with argumentation. They accept
religion on emotional grounds. One is often told that it is a very wrong thing
to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have
not noticed it. You know, of 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 quietly away.
That is the idea — that 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 all its tortures; there were
millions of unfortunate women burned as witches; and there was every kind of
cruelty practiced upon all sorts of people in the name of religion.
You find as you look around the world that every single
bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every
step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the
colored 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 endure celibacy or
stay together. And if you stay together, you must not use birth control to
prevent the birth of syphilitic children." 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 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."
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 thing — fear 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 in hand. 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 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. 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 around 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
better 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 world — its 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 toward a past that is dead,
which we trust will be far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can
create.