"God and immortality, the central dogmas of the Christian religion, find no support in science. No doubt people will continue to entertain these beliefs, because they are pleasant, just as it is pleasant to think ourselves virtuous and our enemies wicked. But for my part I cannot see any ground for either. I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian God may exist; so may the Gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them. I shall not enlarge upon this question, as I have dealt with it elsewhere."
-Bertrand Russell "What I Believe" (1925).
What I Believe was published as a little book in 1925. In it, Russell wrote in the preface, ‘I have tried to say what I think of man’s place in the universe, and of his possibilities in the way of achieving the good life. In human affairs, we can see that there are forces making for happiness, and forces making for misery. We do not know which will prevail, but to act wisely we must be aware of both’. In the New York court proceedings in 1940 What I Believe was one of the books presented as evidence that Russell was unfit to teach at City College. Extracts from it were also widely quoted in the press, usually in such a way as to give quite a false impression of Russell’s views.
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