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?
First of all, it trades on the virtually universal respect for evidence. But what justification did the eminent philosopher ever provide for honoring that implicit value? (If near universality were proof of belief-worthiness, he’d have had to believe in God.)
After all, if this world were, as he believed, the random outcome of chance occurrences[4], why demand evidence for anything? One only demands evidence in an intelligible world. Chance undermines intelligible predication and inquiry.
The relationship of evidence of one thing to another depends on there being minds fitted with reliable cognition in order to surmise and test a connection between them. What must the world include for evidentiary relationships to be possible?
Christians believe in a God who created them and the world in which they can argue about evidence using a common language, trust their fallible but reliable memories, and record events for posterity. And create families. And art. In what world can such a variety of justifications comport with one another without distorting them?
Russell accepted his demand for reasons as a brute fact. He showed no interest in the source of the exigency that motivated his professional life or why it obligated him. That is, his acceptance was arbitrary. And being arbitrary is incompatible with being a philosopher.
What were Russell’s justifications for his moral condemnations, including those that got him incarcerated for opposing Britain’s involvement in the Great War; the deductions comprising his investigations (with A. N. Whitehead) into the logical foundations of mathematics; his inductive inferences about the physical world, even though he admitted that the problem of induction was in the same shape in which David Hume left it.
Regarding the last: there are no non-theistic grounds for believing that the future will be like that past—except that past futures were like past pasts!
We may not be certain whether A is evidence of B, but that things are in evidentiary relationships to each other something about which we not only have no doubt, but wouldn’t know how to doubt. Is that merely a brute psychological fact without further ground? For doubting expresses intellectual exigency, critical “demandingness,” an unwillingness to be duped, and that virtue makes no sense except in a world that is completely intelligible (formally, efficiently, materially, and finally).
Completely, for any deficiency of intelligibility is a surd that infects the whole. There can be no evidence, however, for a completely intelligible world: the latter is presupposed, not inferred. It is the basis of evidence-seeking.
Christianity holds not only that God’s power and glory are manifestly evident (Romans 1:18-20), but also that the self-blinded and self-deceived won’t acknowledge it. That is, Russell’s rejection of Christianity was not critical, but dogmatic.
To professed atheists and agnostics, the suggestion that they know God and that their professions are disingenuous is as preposterous as it offensive. But Russell didn’t refute the Apostle Paul’s claims that the evidence for God is not only sufficient, but overwhelming: rather, he ruled that possibility out of court, even though it’s the ground of evidence-seeking and -honoring.
There is a world in which it not only makes sense to reason, but in which it is morally commanded. The Apostle Peter says we should be prepared to give a reason defense (apologia) for our hope. Russell may not have approved of that justification for reason-giving, but what was his? Russell felt like giving reasons and refuting opponents in a world where many feel like throwing punches. It’s a matter of taste, and tastes differ.
At least, reason-giving makes sense in Peter’s worldview, with its all-knowing creator, creator-enlightened image-bearers (Genesis 1:27; John 1:9) and a created universe that harbors no surds. What other worldview can account for reason-seeking and -giving? Certainly not the one that expresses itself in Russell’s neutral monism or logical atomism.
For a devastating exposé of the poverty of Russell’s worldview, which renders his criticisms of Christianity impossible, I highly recommend Greg L. Bahnsen’s “Firing an Unloaded Gun: Bertrand Russell on Christianity,” the title I gave to a portion of a chapter of Bahnsen’s Always Ready: Directions for Defending the Faith (Covenant Books, 1996, which portion has been available on my old site since 2009.
Notes
[1] Emily Eakin, “So God’s Really in the Details?,” the New York Times, May 11, 2002.
[2] Wesley C. Salmon, “Religion and Science: A New Look at Hume’s Dialogues,” Philosophical Studies 33 (1978), 176 n. 20. The note continues: “Several years ago I gave a talk on the design argument at De Pauw University. After the lecture there was a party, and this story about Russell was told. The next day we learned that he had died that very evening.”
[3] Leo Rosten, “Bertrand Russell and God: A Memoir,” The Saturday Review, February 23, 1974, 25-26. Pace Salmon, there’s no mention of Cleanthes.
[4] Natural laws were, for Russell, conventions that smoothed over statistical generalizations. See Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian, 7-9. (The text of the essay bearing that title is available here.) How does that unruly subatomic reality comport with the logical laws he (and Whitehead) relied on in Principia Mathematica? It somehow must, that’s all. Apparently, he never clarified what precisely demarcated logical inquiry from any other kind. See Nicholas Griffin, “Russell on the Nature of Logic,” Synthese, 45:1, September 1980, 117-188.
