Just Finished Reading: Why I am not a Christian by Bertrand Russell

Lately I’ve been trying to catch up on some of the reading I attempted in my youth and failed to finish. Several of them – from my local library – where by Bertrand Russell. This was one of them. As I have said on several (OK, many) occasions I have never believed in God. I am one of those lucky people who have never had to go through religious withdrawal systems later in life after being indoctrinated into the faith at an earlier and more impressionable age. In my teens I looked for some structured underpinnings of my faithlessness but was too young to appreciate books like this. Now, almost 40 years later I do appreciate books like this. Unfortunately I’m also knowledgeable and experienced enough to find this book in particular somewhat disappointing.

I’m sure that, even when first published in 1957, this slim volume caused quite a stir – though somewhat less I’m guessing than if it had been published some decades earlier. By the late 50’s (1957 was a mere 3 years before I was born) Christianity in England at least was showing early signs of its terminal decline. So I doubt if much book burning or calls for legal action followed its publication. However, when the opening lecture – and title of the book – was delivered in 1927 I’m guessing it caused a few more raised eyebrows although not a single comment in the press. In it Russell outlined the classic arguments for God and demolished them one by one. It seems that such demolition has been going on ever since – which doesn’t deter Christians from presenting the same old tired ‘arguments’ in favour of Gods existence. None of this came as much of a surprise to me and I honestly yawned my way through the first part of the book. Russell was not exactly preaching to the converted but he hardly had to make much effort for me to appreciate his arguments. That was the first source of my disappointment. The other source was that Russell, being the product of his time and class background was simply too nice and obviously didn’t want to upset his readers too much. A clear example of this was his debate, broadcast on the BBC in 1948, with Father F C Copleston about the existence of God. Despite the opportunity to land some very good (and all too easy) blows against a very weak argument put up by Copleston he continually failed to do so – being in this instance too polite for his own good. My final disappointment was the fact that, because of the age of the majority of the articles, Russell did not have information to hand that could have enabled him to make much stronger arguments for his cause – knowing what we do now about the nature of consciousness, the early universe and the mechanisms of evolutionary biology.

Despite all of the above reservations however, this is still an interesting and, in some ways at least, a valuable historical document. What it won’t do is to convince anyone to give up their Christian beliefs nor will it greatly undermine them. Likewise it will give little comfort to those deciding to jump the Christian ship for a life of Atheism. It’s just not that strong. It is however worth adding to an atheist’s book collection as an example of how far we have come in the last 50 years. For that alone this is a book worth reading.