A little over fifty years ago, when my interest in philosophy was budding, I encountered Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian. (My edition was the 1957 Simon & Schuster paperback, the one pictured below).
I was a recent Marxist convert; Russell was no Marxist, but this rebellious teenager welcomed his criticisms of theism in general and Christianity in particular.
Upon reading his obituary fifty years ago this past February, I marveled at the longevity some enjoy—he died age 97—and therefore how long ago a contemporary of mine might have lived. A Victorian, Russell grew up in the age of Gladstone and Disraeli. He had John Stuart Mill, whose On Liberty I was then reading, as his godfather.
Recently I stumbled upon words attributed to Russell, words I’ve read many times over the years, but could never find in his writings. An internet search turns up many reflections on these words, but their authors never source the quote. I was beginning to think them apocryphal until a more precise query yielded its source in, not an essay, but an interview.
The initial search string was <Russell not enough evidence>. It yielded, among many other hits, Emily Eakin’s imagined post-mortem exchange, in a 2002 essay for the Times’s arts section, between the sage and God, whose existence he says he could not affirm.
Asked what he would say if God appeared to him after his death and demanded to know why he had failed to believe, the British philosopher and staunch evidentialist Bertrand Russell replied that he would say, “Not enough evidence, God! Not enough evidence.”[1]
Philosopher of science Wesley C. Salmon (1925-2001) created this version for a footnote to a 1978 journal article:
If I recall correctly, Bertrand Russell was once asked if there were any conceivable evidence which could lead him to a belief in God. He offered something similar to Cleanthes’s suggestion. He was then asked what he would say if, after dying, he were transported to the presence of God; how would he justify his failure on earth to be a believer? “I’d say, ‘Not enough evidence, God, not enough evidence!’”[2]
This game of telephone has one final (for now) regression. It’s from an interview of Russell by humorist and Yiddish lexicographer Leo Rosten, conducted “many years” (Rosten says) before 1974, the year in which this memoir was published.
I asked, “Let us suppose, sir, that after you have left this sorry vale, you actually found yourself in heaven, standing before the Throne. There, in all his glory, sat the Lord—not Lord Russell, sir: God.” Russell winced. “What would you think?” “I would think I was dreaming.” “But suppose you realized you were not? Suppose that there, before your very eyes, beyond a shadow of a doubt, was God. What would you say?” The pixie wrinkled his nose. “I probably would ask, ‘Sir, why did you not give me better evidence?’[3]
With the origins of the story fairly nailed down, what do we make of Russell’s quip?