Why I Am Not A Christian

 

 

by Bertrand Russell
March 6, 1927
National Secular Society, South London branch
Battersea Town Hall

 

 

 

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 the thought that God had given a behest to these planets
to move in a 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 any explanation 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 depth 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 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 says
if you throw dice you will get double sixes only about once in thirty-six times,
and we do not regard that as evidence to the contrary
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 to a great many of them.

They are statistical averages such as would emerge from the laws of chance;
and that makes the 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 supposedly someone
who told them to do that, because even supposing there were,
you are faced with the question,
"Why did god issue just those 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, as he is not the ultimate lawgiver.

In short, this whole argument from natural law
no longer has anything like the strength that it used to have.
I am traveling on in time in my review of these 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, 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
and 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 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 bad digestion;
but nobody is really seriously rendered unhappy by the thought of something
that is going to happen in 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 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 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 and 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 fact that he made them.
If you are going to say that,
you will 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 a 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.

 

 

 

Why I Am Not A Christian
by Bertrand Russell
 

March 6, 1927
National Secular Society, South London branch
Battersea Town Hall