Book Review: Why I Am Not A Christian

Not so much a book as it is a compilation of essays and lectures, Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not A Christian encompasses, presumably, his reasoning for Christianity as a religious truth. I say “presumably” because I know Russell to have been a noted and influential philosopher, and that Why would follow in the tradition of philosophical publications, but this was not the case — perhaps because of the nature of it being a compilation where many topics are covered and not a predetermined proposition and the trail of reasoning behind the proposition. Whether the former constitutes an adequate statement of (dis)belief is up to the reader. To me it doesn’t, but that doesn’t necessarily make for bad reading.

It starts off in the initial, namesake chapter with brief criticisms of common arguments for the existence of God, like the argument from natural law and the law from design. This is what I had expected from the book and I thought that Russell would go into more depth with these in the later chapters. Instead, much of what Russell asserts as arguments against Christianity — or why he found Christianity unacceptable — might be appealing to those already convinced of the the untruthfulness and a selection of undecided thinkers, but it does nothing for believers nor most theists in general. This is because he presupposes the untruthfulness of Christianity in to bolster Christianity’s untruthfulness (circular reasoning…please note the example used on the site). Now, this is in a sense allowable in certain situations, such as when presenting propositions to those who share your own views already, like other skeptics, or if he’s working out his internal epistemic justification for his beliefs. But to Christians his arguments are logically unacceptable, just as using scriptures to convince skeptics of Biblical truths are logically unacceptable to skeptics.

To set this up this idea briefly, I wanted to look at a very barebones set of presuppositions of the Christian and atheist belief systems. They aren’t by any means comprehensive and someone has undoubtedly covered this before in better detail, but I think they are workable for now.

• 1. God A exists.
• 2. God A exists to the exclusion of other gods B.
• 3. God A has property x.
• 4. God A has property y.
• etc.

An atheist like Russell, on the other hand, would have something like this, depending on his type of atheism:

• 1. No gods C exist.

Russell posits that his rejection of Christianity stems from the belief that humans to do not need experience fear. He defines fear as “an irrational passion, not of the rational prevision of possible misfortune” (pg. 79), and that “all fear is bad” (pg. 54). To a Christian, fear of hell or God’s wrath are completely rational responses given the set of presuppositions outlined above (I would set “hell exists” as a very strong implication and not a presupposition, but that is irrelevant). In fact, to not have a fear of hell would be highly irrational with the premises of the Christian belief system. To deny the rationality of the fear of hell is to already presuppose Christianity’s presuppositions are false, a logical state of affairs which is cognitively assonant if you already don’t believe. The circular reasoning is complete, but I am hesitant to be really final about that. I’m nowhere near the logician Russell was so it’s possible there’s something I’m not inferring properly. I’m sure smarter people have already determined that; I’m not interested in being “that guy” to say that a genius is missing the mark in his own expertise.

There are other fallacies that Russell commits, like some odd overgeneralizations and biased sampling, and the false dilemma of religious belief versus scientific inquiry, a worn artifice of a conflict that may have been more novel in his time — but I wanted to focus on some positives. In the chapter “Can Religion Cure Our Troubles?”, he laments the idea that some offer proof of Christianity’s veracity in that “if people think this, they will act better than if they do not.” (pg. 196). Whether or not one might believe propositions like “belief system x causes behavior y“, categorically, it can be hard to verify or negate. Utilizing it as a measure of a belief system’s truthfulness is poor reasoning. The essay, “A Free Man’s Worship” was beautifully written and is a wonderful standalone piece of prose, no matter what the reader’s presumptions. The rather lengthy recounting of how Russell was prevented from teaching at the City College of New York was interesting as it was tragic.

Russell’s philosophical legacy is an important one for skeptics, though his bullets will only fit the gun held by the already-convinced. There is still a good deal of value in it for thinking believers as well as confirmed skeptics, who would do well to read his Why I Am Not and challenge themselves.