Program / Course 19: Modern Challenges / Lesson 1.2
What you will learn
- State what secular humanists affirm about knowledge, ethics and human flourishing, in terms they would accept.
- Trace the roots of humanism in Renaissance and Enlightenment thought.
- Identify what is true and admirable in the secular humanist moral vision.
- Name the questions that Christians and other critics put to it.
The big idea
Secular humanism is the view that human beings can live good and meaningful lives, and build just societies, without belief in God. Its supporters rely on reason, evidence and shared human experience, and they put great weight on human dignity, freedom and compassion. It is not a mere absence of belief. It is a positive moral outlook, with its own history, its own organizations and its own manifestos. A fair study begins by taking that vision seriously, including the many good things humanists have done.
Key terms
- Humanism
- A broad outlook that values human worth, learning and flourishing. The word has been used for Renaissance scholars who revived classical learning, many of them Christian, and for modern non-religious movements.
- Secular humanism
- A modern worldview that seeks ethics and meaning without appeal to God or the supernatural, relying on reason, science and human experience.
- Christian humanism
- The Renaissance and Reformation tradition of scholars such as Erasmus who combined classical learning with Christian faith.
- Human dignity
- The idea that every person has worth that does not depend on usefulness, talent or status.
- Eupraxophy
- A term coined by the American philosopher Paul Kurtz for a worldview with a practical way of life. It is rarely used outside humanist writing.
- Humanist Manifesto
- A series of statements (1933, 1973, 2003) issued by American humanist groups. They set out the movement’s beliefs and have changed with the times.
Background
The word humanism has a long and mixed history. In fourteenth and fifteenth century Italy, the humanists were scholars who recovered the literature of Greece and Rome and made it the basis of education. Most were Christians. Erasmus of Rotterdam, one of the greatest, edited the Greek New Testament in 1516. The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, with figures such as Voltaire, Diderot and Kant, then made reason and individual freedom the tests for belief and law. Some Enlightenment thinkers were Christians, some deists, who believed in a Creator but not in miracles or revelation, and a few were atheists.
Organized secular humanism arose in the twentieth century. The first Humanist Manifesto of 1933, signed largely by American clergy and academics, described a religious humanism. Later documents were explicitly non-religious. In many countries today, humanist societies offer weddings, funerals and chaplaincy and campaign on education, medicine and civil liberties. Many people who share the outlook do not belong to any group and would call themselves simply non-religious.
Step-by-step explanation
Step 1: What humanists affirm about knowledge
Humanists generally hold that knowledge is gained through observation, reasoning and testing, and that claims should be believed in proportion to their evidence. They treat scientific method as the most reliable way of learning about the world. Most would say they do not claim certainty, and that they hold views open to revision.
A humanist will add that this is not arrogance. It is a discipline. Many point out that religious believers also use evidence in daily life, and ask why the same standard should not apply to claims about God.
Step 2: What humanists affirm about ethics
Humanists hold that morality can be understood and improved without commands from God. Some ground it in human wellbeing and the reduction of suffering, as the utilitarian tradition does. Some ground it in respect for persons, as Kant did, though Kant himself believed in God. Others point to the development of empathy and cooperation in human beings, which they think evolution explains.
Their typical commitments include human rights, equality, freedom of conscience, democratic government, the protection of the vulnerable and the use of education to advance each of these. Many humanists have been prominent in ending slavery, extending the vote, abolishing cruel punishments and advancing medical care. A Christian should not dispute that they were often right to do so.
Step 3: What humanists affirm about meaning
For humanists, life’s meaning is not handed down but made. It comes from relationships, from work, from learning, from the arts and from helping others. They deny that meaning needs a divine author, and they reply that a life limited by death can still be valuable. Some humanists say that death gives life its urgency.
Humanists also disagree among themselves, on issues such as the foundation of ethics, the limits of free speech, and how far humanism should be treated as a kind of religion for legal purposes.
Step 4: The questions Christians and others ask
The first question is about foundations. If human beings are the products of unguided processes, what makes each one of equal and unconditional worth? Humanists reply that equal worth is a reasonable moral commitment, adopted because societies that hold it flourish. Christian critics, and some non-Christian philosophers, reply that the commitment looks borrowed from the Christian claim that humans are made in God’s image (Genesis 1:27). The historian Tom Holland argued this in his book Dominion, and the philosopher Jurgen Habermas has made a related remark. Other scholars dispute it and point to Stoic and Enlightenment sources.
The second question is about motivation. Why should a person act for others when it costs him? Humanists reply that empathy, social ties and reason supply the motive. The third is whether the humanist account of wellbeing is complete, or whether people need something to worship or to be forgiven by. These questions are taken up again in the lessons on meaning and on nihilism.
- Would a humanist recognize this description of his view as fair?
- Which humanist commitments does the Christian share, and which does he not?
- What is the stated ground of human worth in this account?
- Is a particular claim a moral commitment or a claim about the universe?
- How does the humanist handle the problem of why one should care for strangers?
- What would a Christian lose by dismissing this movement as a whole?
Examples
A humanist hospice volunteer
A retired schoolteacher is a member of a local humanist society. She spends two afternoons a week at a hospice, sitting with the dying and reading to them. She says she does it because suffering matters and because someone should be there. (A constructed example.)
A Christian humanist
A fifteenth century scholar copies and edits Latin and Greek texts because he believes that learning is a way of serving God and of reading Scripture well. He is called a humanist by historians, though he believes in God. (A constructed example resembling Erasmus and his circle.)
Different perspectives
Secular humanist
Humanists say that their ethic stands on its own merits. Goodness does not need a lawgiver, any more than mathematics needs one. They point to cooperation, moral progress and the reduction of cruelty as evidence that humans can improve without revelation. They ask believers to judge them by their deeds, and not by caricatures of unbelief.
Catholic
Catholic teaching holds that human dignity is grounded in being made in God’s image and that natural reason can know much of the moral law, as Aquinas taught. This allows the Church to speak with humanists on common ground. John Paul II’s encyclical Fides et Ratio and Vatican II’s Gaudium et Spes affirm real goods in human achievement while warning against a humanism that shuts God out.
Orthodox
Orthodox writers speak of the human person as made for communion with God and called to theosis, a sharing in the divine life. They hold that a humanism without God diminishes the person because it denies his highest end. They do not deny the real goods found in human compassion, which they see as the image of God still at work.
Protestant
Protestants disagree among themselves. Reformed thinkers, following Calvin, speak of common grace, by which God gives good gifts, including moral insight, to unbelievers. Others emphasize that sin damages all human efforts and that without redemption humanism will fail. Both agree that human dignity depends on God, while differing on how much unbelievers can achieve.
Why it matters
Many Christians meet humanism not in books but in neighbors, colleagues and family who live generously without faith. A response that begins by denying their goodness will not persuade, and it would be untrue. A response that begins by recognizing the shared commitments, and then asks about their grounding, is honest and more likely to be heard.
Common misunderstandings
Misunderstanding: Secular humanists have no morals.
Correction: Humanists have developed and defended detailed ethics, and many are devoted to charity and justice. The question is not whether they are moral but how they ground morality.
Misunderstanding: Humanism is a modern invention opposed to Christianity.
Correction: Humanism began in Renaissance education, and many of its founders were Christian. Modern secular humanism is one later branch.
Misunderstanding: All humanists are atheists.
Correction: Most secular humanists are atheists or agnostics, but the word humanism is also used of religious humanists, and many Christians describe themselves as humanist in the older sense.
Misunderstanding: Humanism simply means believing in science.
Correction: Science is a method. Humanism adds claims about what matters, and these are ethical commitments and not scientific results.
Knowledge check
What is secular humanism?
It is a worldview that holds that people can understand the world through reason and evidence, live ethically and find meaning without belief in God. It values human dignity, freedom and compassion. It has roots in Renaissance learning and the Enlightenment, and in the twentieth century it became an organized movement with its own statements of belief.
What do Christians and humanists have in common?
Both commonly affirm human dignity, the care of the poor and sick, freedom of conscience and the value of education. They often work together on these causes. They differ over the ground of these values. Christians point to creation in God’s image, and humanists point to human reason, empathy and the experience of flourishing.
What is the best-known Christian question to humanism?
It is a question about foundations: if human beings are products of unguided natural processes, what grounds their equal and unconditional worth? Humanists reply that equal worth is a reasonable moral commitment that has proved its value. Critics reply that the idea has Christian roots. This is a real debate, and both sides offer serious arguments.
Why is it unfair to say humanists have no morals?
Because humanists hold and practice demanding ethical commitments, and many have worked for justice, medicine and human rights. The fair question is whether their ethic has an adequate foundation, which is a question about explanation and not about conduct. A person can behave well and hold a theory of morality that others find incomplete.
Think it through
- What do you admire in the best humanists you know or have read?
- Do you think equal human worth needs a religious ground? Give your reasons and your strongest doubt.
- How might you begin a conversation with a humanist neighbor so that both of you feel heard?
- Which humanist commitments did Christians themselves come to late?
Independent assignment
A humanist’s own account
In your notebook, write 400 to 600 words in which you state the humanist view of ethics and meaning as a thoughtful humanist would put it, without any comment of your own. Then write 200 words on the one question you think a humanist would find hardest to answer, and 200 words on the one question a Christian would find hardest. Do not send this to anyone.
Further study
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Moral Arguments for the Existence of God Read for the argument that morality points to God, and for the objections humanists raise.
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Virtue Ethics An account of the good life that Christian and non-Christian thinkers share.
- C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity Read the opening chapters on the moral law as one popular reply.
- Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae Use as a background source for the Catholic view that reason can know moral goods.
- Genesis 1:27 Humans are made in the image of God.
- Romans 2:14 Paul says that Gentiles who have not the law do by nature the things contained in the law.
- Matthew 25:40 Service to the least of these.