Good Morning!
The subject about which I am going to speak to you tonight is: "Why I Am
Not a Christian." Perhaps I should first try to make out what one means by
the word "Christian." It is used in these days in a very loose sense by a
great many people. Some people mean no more by it than a person who
attempts to live a good life. In that sense I suppose there would be
Christians in all sects and creeds; but I do not think that that is the
proper sense of the word. It would imply that all the people who are not
Christians — all the Buddhists and Muslims, and so on — are
not trying to live a good life. I do not mean by a Christian any person
who tries to live decently according to his believes. I think that you
must have a certain amount of definite belief before you have a right to
call yourself a Christian. You have to believe in God's existence.
The question of the existence of God is a large and serious
question, and if I were to attempt to deal with it in any adequate manner
I should have to keep you here until Kingdom Come, so that you will have
to excuse me if I deal with it in a somewhat summary fashion. You know, of
course, that the Catholic Church has laid it down as a dogma that the
existence of God can be proved by the unaided reason. This is a somewhat
curious dogma. They had to introduce it because at one time the
Freethinkers adopted the habit of saying that there were such and such
arguments which mere reason might urge against the existence of God. The
arguments and the reasons were set out at great length, and the Catholic
Church felt that they must stop it. Therefore they laid it down that the
existence of God can be proved by the unaided reason, and they had to set
up what they considered were arguments to prove it. There are, of course,
a number of them, but today I shall take only two.
Perhaps the simplest and easiest to understand is the argument of the
First Cause. It is maintained that everything we see in this world has a
cause, and as you go back in the chain of causes further and further you
must come to a First Cause, and to that First Cause you give the name of
God. The argument that there must be a First Cause is one that cannot have
any validity. I once read John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, and found this
sentence: "My father taught me that the question, Who made me? cannot be
answered, since it immediately suggests the further question, Who made
God?"
That very simple sentence showed me, as I still think, the fallacy in
the argument of the First Cause. If everything must have a cause, then God
must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just
as well be the world as God. There is no reason why the world could not
have come into being without a cause; nor, on the other hand, is there any
reason why it should not have always existed. There is no reason to
suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that things must
have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination.
Therefore, perhaps, I need not waste any more time upon the argument about
the First Cause.
Then there is also a curious moral argument, which is this: they say that
the existence of God is required in order to bring justice into the world.
In the part of the universe that we know there is a great injustice, and
often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows
which of those is the more annoying; but if you are going to have justice
in the universe as a whole you have to suppose a future life to redress
the balance of life here on earth, and so they say that there must be a
God, and that there must be Heaven and Hell in order that in the long run
there may be justice.
That is a very curious argument. Supposing you got a crate of oranges
that you opened, and you found all the top layer of oranges bad, you would
not argue: "The underneath ones must be good, so as to redress the
balance." You would say: "Probably the whole lot is a bad consignment;"
and that is really what a scientific person would argue about the
universe. He would say: "Here we find in this world a great deal of
injustice, and so far as that goes that is a reason for supposing that
justice does not rule in the world."
Of course I know that the sort of intellectual arguments that I have
been talking to you about is not really what moves people. What really
moves people to believe in God is not any intellectual argument at all.
Most people believe in God because they have been taught from early
infancy to do so, and that is the main reason. Religion is based, I think,
primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and
partly the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will
stand by you in all your troubles and disputes.
Fear is the basis of the whole thing — fear of the mysterious, fear of
defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is
no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand-in-hand. It is because
fear is at the basis of those two things. In this world we can now begin a
little to understand things, and a little to master them by the help of
science, which has forced its way step by step against the Christian
religion, against the churches, and against the opposition of all the old
precepts.
Science can help us to get over this craven fear in which mankind has
lived for so many generations. Science can teach us, and I think our own
hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supports, no
longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts
here below to make this world a fit place to live in, instead of the sort
of place that the churches in all these centuries have made it.
We want to stand upon our own feet and look fair and square at the world
— its good facts, its bad facts, its beauties, and its ugliness; see the
world as it is and be not afraid of it. Conquer the world by intelligence
and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from
it. The whole conception of a God is a conception derived from the ancient
oriental despotisms. We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in
the face. We ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not
as good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these
others have made of it in all these ages.
A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need
a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free
intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs a
fearless outlook and a free intelligence. It needs hope for the future,
not looking back all the time toward a past that is dead, which we trust
will be far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create.