Why an Agnostic

● In giving his Credo of an agnostic in Look magazine, November 3, 1953, Bertrand Russell listed among his reasons for being an agnostic the Bible’s contradictions, claiming that in one place the Bible forbids a childless widow to marry her husband’s brother and in another place commanded it. In this article he did not give any Scriptural citations. However, in his book Human Society in Ethics and Politics, he does cite the two texts, Leviticus 20:21 and Deuteronomy 25:5. And how do they read? “Where a man takes his brother’s wife, it is something abhorrent. It is the nakedness of his brother that he has laid bare. They should become childless.” “In case brothers should dwell together and one of them has died without his having a son, the wife of the dead one should not become a strange man’s outside. Her brother-in-law should go to her and he must take her as his wife and perform brother-in-law marriage with her.” (New World Trans.) It does not take much learning to appreciate that these two texts refer to entirely different situations, the one to adultery and the other to the law of levirate marriage, which applied only in the event of a married man’s dying before he had any offspring. It is all very simple, but apparently not to a learned university professor, scientist and philosopher of more than eighty years, especially when such a one happens also to be an agnostic!