Thoughts on Secular Humanism

Wikipedia says that secular humanism is “a philosophy, belief system, or life stance that embraces human reason, logic, secular ethics, and philosophical naturalism, while specifically rejecting religious dogma, supernaturalism, and superstition as the basis of morality and decision-making.” It espouses principles such as: 

• the need for each individual to weigh and test beliefs, dogmas, ideologies and traditions, whether religious, political or social, and not simply accept them on faith; 
• using reason, evidence, and the scientific method to seek solutions to human problems and answers to important human questions; 
• a primary concern with fulfillment, growth and creativity for both the individual and humankind in general; 
• a constant search for truth, with the understanding that new knowledge and experience constantly alter our imperfect perception of it; 
• a concern for this life and a commitment to making it meaningful through a better understanding of ourselves, our history, our intellectual and artistic achievements, and the outlooks of those who differ from us; 
• a search for viable individual, social and political principles of ethical conduct, judging them on their ability to enhance human well-being and individual responsibility; 
• justice and fairness, eliminating discrimination and intolerance; 
• and building a better world through reason, an open exchange of ideas, goodwill, and tolerance. 

My Take

I fully agree with each of those principles, which are also vital to Bahá'í efforts for cultural transformation. What I question is the notion that one can use reason to reject the existence of anything a priori, including God, a spiritual dimension, or an afterlife, especially in the face of growing evidence that such realities exist (more on that in the next post). 

Only an irrational attachment to the metaphysics of materialism would lead an otherwise open-minded, rational seeker of truth to reject them a priori. It would be no less irrational than for scientists working within one paradigm to reject a priori the findings of scientists working within a new, broader paradigm. The analogy is especially apt when you consider that what the materialistic metaphysic does is to draw a circle around everything contained within it, and then claim – irrationally and a priori – that anything that falls outside of that circle is either non-existent or at best irrelevant, which is precisely the mistake that each successive scientific paradigm has made. Claiming that one thing exists does not necessarily lead to claming that another, different thing does not.

I believe that humanity can get through its current adolescent phase and achieve a united, just, peaceful world, which is also a humanist goal according to the list of principles above. I agree that the modern scientific method is a particularly vital social (or ‘soft’) technology, especially when freed from a dogmatic insistence on the metaphysics of materialism, which tend to emphasize certain (material) objects of scientific inquiry and not just the method itself. However, I do not think it is, can or should be the only tool in our toolbox, at least if we are truly committed to building that better world. 

Science has greatly enhanced our ability to achieve incredible things, and is great at telling us what can be done, but not so good at saying what should be done. Unfortunately, as you know, there are powerful forces that use science to pernicious ends. And I’m not just talking about the A-bomb or how research is skewed to serve corporate interests. Two different research papers by the competing soy and palm oil industries, respectively, both scientifically concluded that the other was a terrible health menace while their own product might even be a future cure for cancer! 

Dethroning Religion

As a social science junkie, I am most interested in how the human sciences are used to manipulate the masses. The BBC documentary “The Century of the Self” shows how Edward Bernays used his uncle Sigmund Freud’s theories to revolutionize the advertising industry and get people to buy products they didn’t need by appealing to their baser instincts, in order to fuel an insatiable hunger for industrial growth. When that became the tonic, it sparked a whole new culture of consumerism, selfishness, discontent, greed, arrogance, and individualistic disregard for others.

Although not addressed in that series, another aspect of this drive was a concerted effort to undermine all things related to religion, as many creeds of the time had been fostering a culture of modesty, detachment, contentment, self-sacrifice, mutual aid, and hope, while what fueled industrial growth was pretense, craving, discontent, self-serving, competition, and a hopelessness that leads folks to try to fill the gaping hole in their hearts by buying more stuff. This was done by several means: 

• making science and technology seem hip and modern, while making all things religious appear as backward and stupid, such as framing religious worldviews as irrational (as if belief in the metaphysics of materialism were not equally irrational);
• highlighting and exaggerating any minor disagreements between particular scientific and religious worldviews (as if there were no quarrels and even censorship within the scientific community) while ignoring the many ways in which religion has driven scientific progress throughout history; 
• emphasizing any rifts between religious organizations and orthodoxies (as if there were no schisms among political, economic and academic structures and ideologies) while downplaying the rich history of ecumenism and interfaith collaboration; 
• blaming religions for wars that were actually launched for economic and political reasons, whose leaders exploited the power of religious commitment to mobilize the masses in support of their selfish exploits; 
• pooh-poohing and trying to explain away the shared experience of life after death, common to peoples and cultures throughout history and becoming more frequent as medical science makes it possible to revive the clinically dead; 
• deviously using blatant logical fallacies to attack non-materialistic views, such as equating belief in God with belief in unicorns and fairies… 

I will go into each of these in another post, but you get the picture. Of course, there has been enthusiastic support for the new-age spirituality industry and prosperity gospel churches, as they help feed consumerism while failing to satisfy the deepest yearnings of the soul, which can then be catered to by encouraging more consumption. Other especially pernicious outcomes of all this have been the atomization of society, the loss of a sense of community, heightened feelings of isolation, loneliness, fear and anger, loss of a sense of transcendent meaning and purpose in life, and the resulting epidemics of despair, drug abuse and suicides, to mention only a few. 

I am not suggesting that all we need to do is reintroduce traditional religion into public life and everything will be hunky-dory. Religion, like everything else that grows and thrives, is subject to the same laws of decline and decay and needs to be renewed, and those who attack religion often concentrate on its downward curves instead of looking at its upward curves as well. History has shown that religion is renewed by clearing away the trappings of ecclesiastic hierarchies and orthodoxies and getting back to its essence, as each successive world religion has done in its turn before it was gradually encumbered by add-on dogmas and ceremonies, originally meant to be vessels to contain its spirit, but which eventually constricted it. 

In this context, ‘essence’ means the essential characteristics of something without which it would not be that thing. For example, the essence of a chair might be that it has a sitting surface, a backrest and a support structure, leaving out all other considerations of material, design, color, etc. I understand that the essence of science is its solid method, aside from its diverse means of application and objects of study. The essence of religion is a relationship of love with a supreme center that represents the highest expression of all the attractive qualities that we most admire in each other and in the world around us. 

(Re)inventing God

Some say that people invented a supreme being to explain the unexplainable. This relates to the “god of the gaps” argument, like when scientists believed that every celestial object would be a perfect sphere, so they calculated the planets’ orbits as circles, not as ovals or ellipses. When their calculations resulted in variances not explained by that model, they concluded that these were due to God’s intervention, and therefore a sign of His existence. 

This assumed that God’s Will was not always in keeping with the laws of nature, which was used to explain why and how miracles occurred. I don’t espouse the god-of-the-gaps idea, but rather that the laws of nature are an expression of God's immutable Will in and through the contingent world. Therefore, miracles and other unexplained phenomena are just the operation of laws that we are –as yet– unaware of.

That said, I do agree that “man made up a supreme being”. This may seem paradoxical, given that I am convinced that there is every reason to believe that a God does, in fact, exist. The reason is that by definition, God would be beyond human comprehension, since the limited cannot encompass the unlimited, so any concept we have of Him is “made up” and therefore necessarily wrong or, at best, so limited as to be effectively wrong. That doesn’t mean limited or even wrong concepts can’t be useful. Many of Isaac Newton’s ideas have been disproved by the New Physics, and yet they served as a platform for the very scientific progress that made the New Physics possible. 

Human understanding evolves from strength to strength, while never reaching any “ultimate truth”, as agnostics rightly maintain. Clan gods gave each clan a strong sense of identity, were replaced by tribal gods that united several clans, which were then replaced by national gods that united the tribes, and now need to be replaced by the concept of one universal God, no matter the different names, no matter the divers concepts, no matter the varied forms that worship takes, in order to achieve one world, one planetary consciousness as one human race, organically united and inextricably interdependent in both the material and non-material dimensions of life. Our ideas of God may be wrong, but they are still useful.

While I am agnostic when it comes to comprehending God, I would say that whatever we can conceive of as God is the sum total of all the beautiful qualities we love in each other and in the world around us, elevated to their maximum expression. Being in love with a center like that means, among other things, building our lives around a commitment to a whole ecosystem of deeply held principles, virtues or values, and not just the selfish convenience of the moment: principles such as the balanced complementarities of 

• love coupled with wisdom, 
• justice coupled with mercy, 
• honesty coupled with courtesy, 
• strength coupled with gentleness, 
• stability coupled with flexibility, 
• tolerance and forgiveness coupled with challenge, 
• unity coupled with diversity, 
• peace coupled with righteous anger, 
• construction of the new coupled with destruction of the old, 
• freedom coupled with the rule of law, 
• a commitment to the truth coupled with a humble recognition of how little we actually can and do know, 
• and so on. 

This is what builds a healthy culture that becomes so pervasive that it exerts a positive influence even on the most adamant atheist. Can these principles, virtues or values thrive in a secular setting dominated by political and economic interests? In part, maybe, but history shows that without a firm center that can bring the whole ecosystem into harmony and balance, certain principles tend to take precedence over others, destabilizing the system, such as a capitalist ideology emphasizing personal freedom versus a communist ideology emphasizing social justice, both above all else, and both equally unable, therefore, to achieve their stated ends. It reminds me of Eberhart Arnold’s recurring nightmare of all the principles being out of place, such as justice being where mercy should have been, and mercy where justice should have been.

None of this is really the domain of science, however necessary and powerful Science is, and however much it can contribute to this process. Religion is a completely different sphere that is not opposite to, but complementary with science. It needs science as much as science needs it in order to contribute to building the kind of world we all yearn for and work towards, each in our own profession, trade, or field of action. The essence of science and the essence of religion are like two wings of a bird, and with only one of those wings, humanity will never be able to fly to the awesome heights it could attain if it used both well.