Bertrand Russell famously wrote, at the age of 15, that “the search for truth has shattered most of my old beliefs”—at least according to the diary extracts he reproduces in My Philosophical Development, which detail his departure from the comfortable, Christian teachings of his youth into the realm of rigorous enquiry. “My thinking,” he adds, “was, in a crude form, along lines very similar to that of Descartes.”
15 may seem a precocious age for the commencement of questing as a full-blown philosopher, but it’s beginning to look positively geriatric in comparison to the more recent British, intellectual and faithless crop. Martin Amis, for one, describes in his 2002 essay “The voice of the lonely crowd” his apotheosis at the age of just 12:
Later - we were now in Cambridge - I gave a school speech in which I rejected all belief as an affront to common sense. I was an atheist, and I was 12: it seemed open-and-shut.
Even this pales in comparison to Christopher Hitchens, however, whose intellectual atheism was fully achieved before he even hit double figures. As he tells it in the opening pages of his (sensationally irate) new book, God is not Great:
At the age of nine… I simply knew, almost as if I had privileged access to a higher authority, that my teacher [explaining why it was obvious the world was made by God] had managed to get everything wrong in just two sentences… There still remain four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking. I do not think it arrogant of me to claim that I had already discovered these four objections… before my boyish voice had broken.
Eat your heart out, Bertrand.
This posturing is very common among intellectuals who try to out do each other in precocity. It is just another arena of their competitiveness and we should take such comments with a pinch of salt. As a child and adolescent psychologist, I often find myself in conversation with the brightest of the next generation. I have never met a teenager who comes even close to the insights Russell, Amis et al claim of themselves. And if we analyse ourselves we will catch ourselves doing it more than we might like to admit.
I’m waiting for the first intellectual to claim that they knew that they were atheists at birth. My money’s on The Hitch(ens).