Humanism

A Beginner's Guide (updated edition)

Peter Cave

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780861543571
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Humanism in Philosophy

Life does not become empty and meaningless in a godless universe. This is the contention at the heart of humanism, the philosophy concerned with making sense of the world through reason, experience and shared human values.In this thought-provoking introduction, Peter Cave explores the humanist approach to religious belief, ethics and politics, and addresses key criticisms. Revised and updated to confront today's great crises – the climate emergency and global pandemics – and the future of humanism in the face of rapid technological advancement, this is for anyone wishing to better understand what it means to be human in the twenty-first century.

1

Humanism: scene setting

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.

E. M. Forster

Understanding the world without God, giving sense to the world without God, is the heart of today’s humanism. There are two segments here: understanding how things are; understanding how things ought to be. This is the distinction between facts and values, though arguably there is no sharp boundary. In each segment the humanistic stance is that we can, and should, flourish – one way or another – without God. Humanists speak of humanism making sense of the world using reason, experience and shared human values. Humanists encourage us to make the best of our lives, lives containing meaning and purpose, without resort to superstitions and the supernatural. That people are concerned for others, can empathize, feel and imagine as well as reason, test and evaluate, simply is true; and, when we feel alienated from others, it is worth calling to mind the twentieth-century novelist and humanist E. M. Forster and his ‘Only connect!’

We have spoken starkly. Here is a caveat. Some religious believers, Jews, Christians, Muslims and others speak of themselves as humanists and they engage in humanitarian activities. According to mainstream humanists though, belief in Yahweh, God or Allah, if the belief is suitably tepid or humanized, at best adds nothing of value to godless humanism; at worse, if the belief is stringent and literal, it is highly dangerous to both reason and morality. Religion, here, is understood as essentially involving belief in God or gods, where the belief generates doctrines of morality and how life should be lived, involving attention to scriptures, rituals and salvation. For ease, we shall usually drop the qualifier of ‘or gods’; we assume that humanist arguments against God’s existence can be suitably modified to apply to gods of polytheistic religions.

Unless implied otherwise, we take it that when people talk of God, they are talking of a supreme immaterial being, all powerful, all good and all knowing, standing in some continuing personal relationship with humans. Deists are more austere, believing God to be little more than the creator-designer. For further ease, we shall often refer to religious believers, be they Jew, Christian or Muslim, or some other variety, as ‘theists’, the context making it clear which believing features are relevant. God, traditionally understood as a really existent being, holding a personal relationship with human beings, is what God is for millions and millions of Jews, Christians and Muslims – whatever some academic theologians may say. True, some thinkers, such as the nineteenth-century Ludwig Feuerbach, see theology as anthropology, arguing that God is, in some way, humanity’s projection of human ideals; but that is not the understanding of most religious believers. True, some believing theologians do see God in a light radically different from that of an existent being: in Chapter 3, we blink, a little, in that light – and we blink sympathetically. Humanists have no good reason to reject, for example, belief in God if all that amounts to is the encouragement to love thy neighbour – well, I suppose it can depend on the neighbours.

This book is about current mainstream humanism, humanism that lacks godly belief, where ‘godly belief’ is taken as the traditional belief in God. It is a humanism which does not collapse into relativism; hence, there is but the occasional passing wave at relativists and those of a postmodernist persuasion. ‘Humanism’ throughout is the current mainstream, unless context implies otherwise – and the context is otherwise, later in this chapter, when we briefly look at ‘humanism’ in history. Chapters thereafter run through some key humanist stances of today together with criticisms of those stances.

The greatest weight

Let us approach these matters further by means of a rather bizarre thought, a thought from the nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. In rejecting religion, Nietzsche is at one with today’s humanism; but his rejection of much traditional morality and his questioning of truth places him at odds with typical humanists. Here is Nietzsche’s greatest weight:

What if, some day or night, a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you:

This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence – even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!

Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? … Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life – to long for nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?

This greatest weight is nonsensical, leading to absurdity (to be seen in Chapter 7); yet it may impel us to ask: how ought we to live?

How ought we to live? Humanism tritely answers: with truth, not illusion; with morality, not immorality; with tolerance, not repression. In contrast, according to humanists, religions are grounded in illusion, threaten morality, and often show little tolerance. Of course, the religious see matters in reverse. Humanists, though, point to the irrational groundings of religions. Through scriptures, revelations and alleged miracles – through bishops, rabbis and imams – religions aim to permeate believers’ lives, their daily toils, sexual behaviour, even permitted music. Humanism lacks scriptures, revelations and miracles; it lacks bishops, rabbis and imams. Humanists do not burn books, threaten eternal damnation, or take offence at anti-humanist cartoons.

Humanists rely on our common humanity. Some critics, atheist even, regard this as making humanity into God, a god to be worshipped here on earth; but contemporary humanism typically is committed to nothing of the kind. Humanism simply recognizes that human beings have similar basic needs, interests and values; and, through our rationality and fellow feeling, we can lead good, cooperative and meaningful lives. Life does not become empty and meaningless in a godless universe. Apart from this outlook outlined, humanists do not conform to any stereotype. Today’s humanists range from those happy to tend their family and garden, to those who seek artistic success alone, to those who fight for political reform, be it on the political right or political left – to those who save the whale.

What is the relationship between humanism, atheism and agnosticism? In today’s terminology, atheists believe there are no gods; agnostics leave things open, suspending belief. Today’s humanism is, then, ‘atheism–agnosticism plus’, the plus being the belief in shared human values and rationality.

HUMANIST VOICES

It is said that the Devil has all the best tunes. Whether or not true, humanist lyrics often go unnoticed. Maybe that is because they are sensible, reasonable and usually sung somewhat quietly, not ranted from mountaintops, preached from pulpits. Many distinguished voices are humanist even though with no ‘humanist’ label. Humanist voices, with or without the label, deserve to be heard – such as:

Charles Darwin: I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: You take the way from man, not to man.

Mark Twain: God’s inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn.

Albert Einstein: A man’s ethical behaviour should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.

Richard Rorty: The utopian social hope which sprang up in nineteenth-century Europe is still the noblest imaginative creation of which we have record.

Philip Pullman: The true end of human life … is not redemption by a non-existent Son of God, but the gaining and transmission of wisdom.

We could add today, for example, the voices of Salman Rushdie and Jonathan Miller, Terry Pratchett and Christopher Hitchens, Margaret Atwood and Richard Dawkins. From earlier times, we would hear Thomas Hardy, James Joyce, Bernard Shaw and Manabendra Nath Roy. Earlier, we find David Hume, Benjamin Franklin, John Stuart Mill and Giuseppe Verdi – to mention a few.

From Midwest America’s Christian fundamentalisms to Middle Eastern and Far Eastern Muslims, many believers understand that their duty is to convert, or deal in some way with, non-believers – with ‘devils in disguise’. This affects their ethics, politics and daily living, leading some determined to bring non-believers to see the religious light or, at least, to live according to religious law. When humanists become vocal about the dangers of religion, they therefore are not making a big fuss about kindly and tolerant Church of England vicars who share tea and cucumber sandwiches with parishioners. They are rightly making a big fuss about those whose godly belief leads to the repression of many here on earth, be it through death threats to questioners of religious belief, or punishment to women who dare to remove the veil in public.

We are all ‘atheists’

Our use of ‘atheism’ carries no moral disapproval or threat of burning at the stake, though historically such has often been dished out to those so deemed – and dished out in the name of ‘caring’ religion. Fortunately, dealing with atheists in this manner in the West is largely out of vogue. It is indeed fortunate, if we, for literary effect, in the next paragraph, weaken our understanding of ‘atheist’ to the denial of some gods or other.

We are all atheists – to varying extents. The ‘we’ includes Jews, Christians, Muslims and other godly believers. We reject the existence of – well, allow me to mention but a few, from a spectacular rolling display that has involved a cast of thousands, from the nasty to nice. There are the Olympian gods: Aphrodite, Apollo, Ares, Artemis, Athene, Demeter, Dionysus, Hades, Hephaistos, Hera, Hermes, Hestia, Persephone, Poseidon and Zeus – and many more. Here are some African gods: Abassi, Anansi, Babalu-aye, Bumba, Elegua, Eshu, Obatala, Olorun, Shango and Yemaya. Now for some Nordic gods: Baldur, Freya, Frigg, Idun, Loki, Odin, Thor and Tyr. We could pop along to many other parts of the world, listing yet more and more. Let us not pretend all such colourful gods have vanished from people’s beliefs, with the religious all believing in one transcendent being. Some still worship the gods of Olympus; druid ceremonies involve pagan worship. Millions of Hindus worship a baffling array of gods, for example, the Vedic and Vaishnava gods – though maybe they are but facets of Brahman. Christians and Muslims are committed to the one God – the same one God? – yet they often assert the existence of other supernatural beings, namely angels and the Devil.

That millions have believed and do believe in gods and other supernatural powers should not, of course, lead us to conclude that there are such gods and powers, not least because many of the believed gods and powers rule out the others. It is worth making that obvious point because sometimes believers in solely one god, namely, God, shore up belief by observing that so many people are religious believers.

Humanism’s rejection of God leads some to insist that humanism is negative. That is no more a legitimate accusation than that religion is negative, being a rejecter of the natural as all there is. True, the term ‘atheist’ is etymologically grounded in ‘not’ and ‘god’. The use of the term ‘atheist’ is a tribute to religion’s power: the presumption has been in favour of theism. After all, we do not believe in fairies, witches and scientific entities such as phlogiston, yet lack terms such as a-fairyist, a-witchist or a-phlogistonist. To avoid the theistic playing ground, suggestive of their being only ‘anti’ something, many humanists avoid ‘atheist’ and opt, for example, for ‘rationalist’ or ‘naturalist’, each of which points away from the supernatural.

Curiously, a staunch and outspoken humanist, namely, Richard Dawkins, who often promotes himself as strongly atheistic, takes the line that you cannot prove a negative. Hence, he reluctantly concludes that it is hugely unlikely that God exists, but, none the less, he is not absolutely certain. Indeed, I recall a radio interview when Dawkins was challenged as being committed to certainties, his reply being, ‘Certainly not!’

The reluctance to be certain of God’s non-existence may result from confusion. What counts as a negative? Is ‘bald’ negative, referring to no hair; or is ‘hairy’ negative, referring to no baldness? Either way, we can be certain that some people are bald and some not. I can prove that there are neither elephants nor round squares in this room. It may be thought more difficult to prove a negative, when it involves denying an item’s existence anywhere in the universe. Modifying a much used example from Bertrand Russell, can we disprove the existence of a teapot somewhere beyond our solar system? Well, it seems odd to insist that we should be a little uncertain. We have not the faintest reason or evidence to believe in such a teapot. Furthermore, concerning God, he is not like a teapot. God is not typically thought of, these days, as an object to be found somewhere in space; so, it is not even clear what is involved in finding him. The search for God is no hunting expedition.

A general point is this. If you are justified in being certain that something is so, it does not follow that it is so. You are, no doubt, certain that no one popped a diamond in your pocket this week without your noticing, but removed it a few minutes later, also without your noticing. Yet, of course, it is possible that you are mistaken. Does that mean that you should be a little bit agnostic about the matter? Obviously not.

Whether humanists prefer to think of themselves as atheists or agnostics, they look only to the actual world around them including human beings, rather than to supernatural agents. The natural–supernatural distinction, though, is not easy to identify: some theists speak of seeing God ‘in’ nature. Our use, here, of ‘natural’ points just to those concepts which both believers and non-believers alike use when talking about the world – about tables and chairs, people cycling and falling in love, molecular structures and photons. References to angels or the Devil or God, if meant literally, are supernaturalistic. Of course, we still have problems: who knows which concepts physicists will be employing next century? What we can truthfully say is that humanism does not make use of beings that go beyond our common experience, scientific evidence and reasoning, in order to understand the world. And perhaps that is the best we can say.

Humanists ask religious believers:

To those who ground morality in God: were there no God, would deceiving, torturing and killing be acceptable?

To the religiously faithful: what is your response to those who base terrorism and oppression on faith?

To those who say that, without God, the universe is a mystery: is not God a mystery?

To those who believe in immortal souls: how can immortal souls be what persons really are?

To those with god-inspired meaningful lives: what is the meaning for billions suffering now on earth and eternally in hell?

Religious believers ask humanists:

Whatever can justify moral principles, if there is no God?

Is not humanism also a religion, a leap of faith, in humanity?

Why is the world life-giving, comprehensible and beautiful?

Without a soul, is not a person just a lump of matter?

How can l...