Why I Am An Agnostic

Clarence Darrow

An agnostic is a doubter. The word is generally applied to
those who doubt the verity of accepted religious creeds of
faiths. Everyone is an agnostic as to the beliefs or creeds
they do not accept. Catholics are agnostic to the
Protestant creeds, and the Protestants are agnostic to
the
Catholic creed. Any one who thinks is an agnostic about
something, otherwise he must believe that he is possessed
of all knowledge. And the proper place for such a person is
in the madhouse or the home for the feeble-minded. In a
popular way, in the western world, an agnostic is one who
doubts or disbelieves the main tenets of the
Christian
faith.




I would say that belief in at least three tenets is necessary
to the faith of a Christian: a belief in God, a belief
in
immortality, and a belief in a supernatural book.
Various
Christian sects require much more, but it is difficult to
imagine that one could be a Christian, under any
intelligent
meaning of the word, with less. Yet there are some people who

claim to be Christians who do not accept the literal
interpretation
of all the Bible, and who give more credence to some portions
of the book than to others.




I am an agnostic as to the question of God. I think that it
is
impossible for the human mind to believe in an object or
thing unless it can form a mental picture of such object or
thing. Since man ceased to worship openly an
anthropomorphic God and talked vaguely and not
intelligently about some force in the universe, higher than
man, that is responsible for the existence of man and
the
universe, he cannot be said to believe in God. One cannot
believe in a force excepting as a force that pervades
matter and is not an individual entity. To believe in a thing,
an image of the thing must be stamped on the mind. If one
is asked if he believes in such an animal as a camel,
there
immediately arises in his mind an image of the camel. This
image has come from experience or knowledge of the
animal gathered in some way or other. No such image
comes, or can come, with the idea of a God who is described
as a force.




Man has always speculated upon the origin of the
universe,
including himself. I feel, with Herbert Spencer, that whether
the universe had an origin-- and if it had-- what the origin
is
will never be known by man. The Christian says that the
universe could not make itself; that there must have been
some higher power to call it into being. Christians have
been obsessed for many years by Paley's argument that if a
person passing through a desert should find a watch and
examine its spring, its hands, its case and its crystal, he
would at once be satisfied that some intelligent being
capable of design had made the watch. No doubt this is true.
No civilized man would question that someone made the
watch. The reason he would not doubt it is because he is
familiar with watches and other appliances made by man.
The savage was once unfamiliar with a watch and would have
had no idea upon the subject. There are plenty of crystals
and rocks of natural formation that are as intricate as a
watch, but even to intelligent man they carry no
implication that some intelligent power must have made
them. They carry no such implication because no one has
any knowledge or experience of someone having made
these natural objects which everywhere abound.




To say that God made the universe gives us no explanation
of the beginnings of things. If we are told that God made
the universe, the question immediately arises: Who made
God? Did he always exist, or was there some power back of
that? Did he create matter out of nothing, or is his
existence coextensive with matter? The problem is still
there. What is the origin of it all? If, on the other hand,
one
says that the universe was not made by God, that it
always
existed, he has the same difficulty to confront. To say that
the universe was here last year, or millions of years ago,
does not explain its origin. This is still a mystery. As to
the
question of the origin of things, man can only wonder and
doubt and guess.




As to the existence of the soul, all people may either
believe or disbelieve. Everyone knows the origin of the
human being. They know that it came from a single cell in
the body of the mother, and that the cell was one out of
ten
thousand in the mother's body. Before gestation the cell
must have been fertilized by a spermatozoon from the body
of the father. This was one out of perhaps a billion spermatozoa

that was the capacity of the father. When the cell is fertilized

a chemical process begins. The cell divides and multiplies
and
increases into millions of cells, and finally a child is
born.
Cells die and are born during the life of the individual
until
they finally drop apart, and this is death.




If there is a soul, what is it, and where did it come from,
and
where does it go? Can anyone who is guided by his reason
possibly imagine a soul independent of a body, or the place
of its residence, or the character of it, or anything
concerning it? If man is justified in any belief or disbelief
on any subject, he is warranted in the disbelief in a soul.
Not one scrap of evidence exists to prove any such
impossible thing.




Many Christians base the belief of a soul and God upon the
Bible. Strictly speaking, there is no such book. To make
the
Bible, sixty-six books are bound into one volume. These
books are written by many people at different times, and
no one knows the time or the identity of any author. Some
of the books were written by several authors at various
times. These books contain all sorts of contradictory
concepts of life and morals and the origin of things.
Between the first and the last nearly a thousand years
intervened, a longer time than has passed since the
discovery of America by Columbus.




When I was a boy the theologians used to assert that the
proof of the divine inspiration of the Bible rested on
miracles and prophecies. But a miracle means a violation of
a natural law, and there can be no proof imagined that could
be sufficient to show the violation of a natural law; even
though proof seemed to show violation, it would only show
that we were not acquainted with all natural laws. One
believes in the truthfulness of a man because of his
long
experience with the man, and because the man has always
told a consistent story. But no man has told so consistent a
story as nature.




If one should say that the sun did not rise, to use the
ordinary expression, on the day before, his hearer would
not believe it, even though he had slept all day and knew
that his informant was a man of the strictest veracity. He
would not believe it because the story is inconsistent with
the conduct of the sun in all the ages past.




Primitive and even civilized people have grown so
accustomed to believing in miracles that they often
attribute the simplest manifestations of nature to
agencies of which they know nothing. They do this when the
belief is utterly inconsistent with knowledge and logic.
They believe in old miracles and new ones. Preachers pray
for rain, knowing full well that no such prayer was ever
answered. When a politician is sick, they pray for God to
cure him, and the politician almost invariably dies. The
modern clergyman who prays for rain and for the health of
the politician is no more intelligent in this matter than
the
primitive man who saw a separate miracle in the rising and
setting of the sun, in the birth of an individual, in the
growth of a plant, in the stroke of lighting, in the flood,
in
every manifestation of nature and life.




As to prophecies, intelligent writers gave them up long
ago. In all prophecies facts are made to suit the prophecy,
or the prophecy was made after the facts, or the events have
no relation to the prophecy. Weird and strange and unreasonable

interpretations are used to explain simple statements, that a

prophecy may be claimed.




Can any rational person believe that the Bible is anything
but a human document? We now know pretty well where the
various books came from, and about when they were
written. We know that they were written by human beings
who had no knowledge of science, little knowledge of life,
and were influenced by the barbarous morality of primitive
times, and were grossly ignorant of most things that men
know today. For instance, Genesis says that God made the
earth, and he made the sun to light the day and the moon to
light the night, and in one clause disposes of the stars by
saying that "he made the stars also." This was plainly
written by someone who had no conception of the stars.
Man, by the aid of his telescope, has looked out into the
heavens and found stars whose diameter is as great as the
distance between the earth and the sun. We know that the
universe is filled with stars and suns and planets and
systems. Every new telescope looking further into the
heavens only discovers more and more worlds and suns and
systems in the endless reaches of space. The men who
wrote Genesis believed, of course, that this tiny speck of
mud that we call the earth was the center of the universe,
the only world in space, and made for man, who was the only
being worth considering. These men believed that the stars
were only a little way above the earth, and were set in
the
firmament for man to look at, and for nothing else.
Everyone today knows that this conception is not true.




The origin of the human race is not as blind a subject as it
once was. Let alone God creating Adam out of hand, from
the dust of the earth, does anyone believe that Eve was
made from Adam's rib--that the snake walked and spoke in
the Garden of Eden--that he tempted Eve to persuade
Adam to eat an apple, and that it is on that account that
the
whole human race was doomed to hell--that for four
thousand years there was no chance for any human to be
saved, though none of them had anything whatever to do
with the temptation; and that finally men were saved only
through God's son dying for them, and that unless human
beings believed this silly, impossible and wicked story
they were doomed to hell? Can anyone with intelligence
really believe that a child born today should be doomed
because the snake tempted Eve and Eve tempted Adam? To
believe that is not God-worship; it is devil-worship.




Can anyone call this scheme of creation and damnation
moral? It defies every principle of morality, as man
conceives morality. Can anyone believe today that the
whole world was destroyed by flood, save only Noah and his
family and a male and female of each species of animal
that
entered the Ark? There are almost a million species of
insects alone. How did Noah match these up and make sure
of getting male and female to reproduce life in the world
after the flood had spent its force? And why should all the
lower animals have been destroyed? Were they included in
the sinning of man? This is a story which could not beguile
a
fairly bright child of five years of age today.




Do intelligent people believe that the various languages
spoken by man on earth came from the confusion of tongues at
the Tower of Babel, some four thousand years ago? Human languages

were dispersed all over the face of the earth long before that

time. Evidences of civilizations are in existence now that were

old long before the date that romancers fix for the building of

the Tower, and even before the date claimed for the flood.




Do Christians believe that Joshua made the sun stand still,
so that the day could be lengthened, that a battle might
be
finished? What kind of person wrote that story, and what
did he know about astronomy? It is perfectly plain that the
author thought that the earth was the center of the
universe and stood still in the heavens, and that the sun
either went around it or was pulled across its path each
day, and that the stopping of the sun would lengthen the
day. We know now that had the sun stopped when Joshua
commanded it, and had it stood still until now, it would not
have lengthened the day. We know that the day is
determined by the rotation of the earth upon its axis, and
not by the movement of the sun. Everyone knows that this
story simply is not true, and not many even pretend to
believe the childish fable.




What of the tale of Balaam's ass speaking to him, probably
in Hebrew? Is it true, or is it a fable? Many asses have
spoken, and doubtless some in Hebrew, but they have not
been that breed of asses. Is salvation to depend on a belief
in a monstrosity like this?




Above all the rest, would any human being today believe
that a child was born without a father? Yet this story was
not at all unreasonable in the ancient world; at least three
or four miraculous births are recorded in the Bible,
including John the Baptist and Samson. Immaculate
conceptions were common in the Roman world at the time
and at the place where Christianity really had its nativity.
Women were taken to the temples to be inoculated of God
so that their sons might be heroes, which meant,
generally,
wholesale butchers. Julius Caesar was a
miraculous
conception--indeed, they were common all over the world.
How many miraculous-birth stories is a Christian now
expected to believe?




In the days of the formation of the Christian religion,
disease meant the possession of human beings by devils.
Christ cured a sick man by casting out the devils, who ran
into the swine, and the swine ran into the sea. Is there
any
question but what that was simply the attitude and belief
of a primitive people? Does anyone believe that sickness
means the possession of the body by devils, and that the
devils must be cast out of the human being that he may be
cured? Does anyone believe that a dead person can come to
life? The miracles recorded in the Bible are not the
only
instances of dead men coming to life. All over the world
one finds testimony of such miracles: miracles which no
person is expected to believe, unless it is his kind of a
miracle. Still at Lourdes today, and all over the present
world, from New York to Los Angeles and up and down the
lands, people believe in miraculous occurrences, and even
in the return of the dead. Superstition is everywhere
prevalent in the world. It has been so from the beginning,
and most likely will be so unto the end.




The reasons for agnosticism are abundant and compelling.
Fantastic and foolish and impossible consequences are
freely claimed for the belief in religion. All the civilization
of any period is put down as a result of religion. All the
cruelty and error and ignorance of the period has no
relation to religion.




The truth is that the origin of what we call civilization is
not due to religion but to skepticism. So long as men
accepted miracles without question, so long as they
believed in original sin and the road to salvation, so long
as
they believed in a hell where man would be kept for
eternity on account of Eve, there was no reason whatever
for civilization: life was short, and eternity was long, and
the business of life was preparation for eternity.




When every event was a miracle, when there was no order
or system or law, there was no occasion for studying any
subject, or being interested in anything excepting a
religion which took care of the soul. As man doubted the
primitive conceptions about religion, and no longer
accepted the literal, miraculous teachings of ancient
books, he set himself to understand nature. We no longer
cure disease by casting out devils. Since that time, men
have studied the human body, have built hospitals and
treated illness in a scientific way. Science is responsible
for the building of railroads and bridges, of steamships,
of
telegraph lines, of cities, towns, large buildings and
small,
plumbing and sanitation, of the food supply, and the
countless thousands of useful things that we now deem
necessary to life. Without skepticism and doubt, none of
these things could have been given to the world.




The fear of God is not the beginning of wisdom. The fear of
God is the death of wisdom. Skepticism and doubt lead to
study and investigation, and investigation is the beginning
of wisdom.




The modern world is the child of doubt and inquiry, as the
ancient world was the child of fear and faith.