A Practical Application of Van Til’s Presuppositional Apologetics; A blog reflecting on Bertrand Russell’s essay “Why I am not a Christian”

In this short blog of mine, I would like to reflect and react on what I think one of the most important part of Bertrand Russel’s essay “Why I am not a Christian” This essay of him is a well-known critique against Christianity that was published in many different language translations. It was on March 6, 1927 when he delivered this critique-turned-to-article to the National Secular Society in London.

Before I start on my main intention, I would like to give a brief summary of Russel’s essay.

In his essay, Russel begins by defining first what he meant by the term Christian. In order to point it out quickly, he just gave two great importance which “for him” are quite essential for one to be called a Christian. The first importance is, that one must believe in God and immortality. Second is, one must have a belief about Christ, that he is divine, or if not, at least the best and wisest of men.

After defining what a Christian is, he then considers a number of logical arguments for the existence of God by which he strongly refute. Some of these are, The First Cause Argument, The Natural Law Argument, and the Argument from Design by which he favors the theory of evolution of Charles Darwin.

In this essay of Russell, he argued that he could not be a Christian because of these:

1. The Roman Catholic Church is mistaken to say that the existence of God can be proved by unaided reason.

2. There are serious defects in the character and teaching of Jesus show that he was not the best and wisest of men, but actually morally inferior to Buddha and Socrates.

3. People accept religion on emotional grounds, particularly on the foundation of fear, which is "not worthy of self-respecting human beings".

4. The Christian religion "has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.

The only thing I would like to reflect and react upon is on Russell’s quick definition of what a Christian is. Though I do not have much to say on the first importance he gave for the definition of a Christian, but I believe that he had made a huge mistake of misrepresenting Christ and Christianity when he said that Jesus Christ is at least the best and wisest of men. For me, he just gave a false definition of who Christ is. I saw it as a wrong assertion or completely an assumption from Russel. To have a right view of who Jesus is, or to perfectly describe Him, one must believe that He is God in flesh. And I think this is non-negotiable for all the Christian denominations. What Russel did was he misrepresented Christ on which he build his arguments and which I think enough for all of his arguments against Christianity to fall apart. He was just attacking Christianity using incorrect assertions and not on facts. And because of his failure to properly describe/define who Jesus Christ is as well as His nature, which is one of his fundamental arguments, he just refuted his self with his own error.

As I conclude this short blog, I learned one of the reasons of Bertrand Russel why he is not a Christian is because Jesus is not the wisest and brightest man and for him it shows that Christianity is false.

Other things that I noticed on Russel’s logic are:

He is so confident on his reasoning and thinking. I assume that he thinks everything can be explained even by mere observation.

He has limited understanding about Scriptures. He interprets it based on his own understanding, human reasoning, not using other Scriptures. He sticks only on one passage and explain it limitedly.

He used the Scriptures to contradict itself which makes his reference or argument invalid.

He is inconsistent on his worldview and perspective, as well as arbitrariness can be observed to him.

Reasoning and I think Empiricism is his ultimate standards of truth.

He seems to contradict himself every time he is going to make an argument. For example, the belief of RC that the existence of God can be prove by the unaided reason which he also used his own unaided reason to refute it. And also refuting what he thinks emotional factor why some people accept religion while also appealing to emotional feelings.

 All in all, he did not refute in an intellectual manner but in an emotional way.


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