Bertrand Russell: Why I Am Not a Christian
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Why I am not a Christian is an essay by Bertrand Russell in which he explains the reasons why he does not call himself a Christian. He puts up several arguments concerning the existence of god which include the First Cause Argument, the Natural Law Argument, the Argument from Design and moral arguments. He also goes in to explaining the character of Christ and flaws in his teachings. He further goes in to explaining why he does not think that Christ was the best and the wisest of men.
He believes that a true Christian is someone who believes in God and immortality and someone who truly believes in Christ and his teachings. Now he begins to gives reasons as to why he is not a true Christian. He begins with the first which is existence of God by using several arguments. The first one is First Cause Argument. It states that everything there is in the world has a cause and a purpose. Everything is made by someone, for example, take a watch, a watch is made by a human but who made humans. We come to a chain where if you go further and further back you come to the First Cause and people have given the First Cause the name of God. So in my example, if humans made watch then god made humans. God is the First cause. He argues here that if God made humans and humans made objects then who made god. If we are to believe this theory then we must believe that someone must have made god. The question is who made god. He is not trying to prove that there is no god he just believes that it is our minds and imagination that came up with the fact that everything in this world has a beginning. “There is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all,” (Russell, 24). I agree with his theory on the First Cause Argument. Not everything has a beginning because if we were to look at it deeper then nobody knows that God actually exists except for whats written in books by people many years ago. Even if he does exist according to the theory we should also know how god was created, but we dont therefore there are no real facts leading up to the belief that god in fact does exist. It is out human mind that assumes that everything has a beginning. We were brought up to believe that everything has a beginning, maybe there are only certain things that are set up in a way that they could have a beginning. There are many things in this world that is yet to be known for sure, such as life on the planet.
Russells second argument is the Natural Law Argument. In this argument, he explains that this argument should not be used as proof for the existence of God. “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,” (Russell, 24). In his argument he states that “We now find that a great many things we thought were natural laws are really human conventions,” (Russell. 24). He is talking about different kinds of sciences and trying to prove that certain things are always meant to behave in a certain way. I believe that this is very different from the natural law he is trying to disprove. The Natural Law is a law that actually causes us to behave a certain way. Natural laws are not descriptions of the way things are but rather laws that cause the things to be the way they are. Laws which govern the universe are not considered to be in the same category as the laws that describe the universe. He makes an argument on dices, “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,” (Russell, 25). The fault in this argument is that when the dices are rolled, the result you get is not because its supposed to be that way. It works that way because it is caused by the person who made it to work that way. The creator of the dice has thought about the dice, how many dots to put on the dice and he has created all the rules for the throwing of dice. It is the creator who designed the dice to work in a way it does. Therefore, we I believe that we behave in a way we do not because were supposed to be but because someone has made us to behave this way.
His third argument is Argument from Design, which states that everything in this 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. He argues “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