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What’s in a name?

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by Mike Flood

Photograph: GreenConnect Images

The Freethinker has recently published an interesting article arguing the case for new terminology to substitute for ‘atheist’ when describing the ‘new world view’ that has been evolving since the Enlightenment . The article reinforces the case I made in my last HumanistLife piece about the confusion surrounding the use of the term.

The author, Jeff Haley, argues that we need a term that can be “easily understood and used by everyone” and “complimentary inoffensive terminology to label the older worldviews so that we can talk to people who hold these views and cause a minimum of emotionally distracting insult.”

Haley dismisses the term ‘naturalistic’ — whilst it nicely contrasts with the word ‘supernatural’, it also “connotes the essence of the old worldviews much more than the essence of the new”. He also rejects the term ‘scientific’ because it would mean, amongst other things needing to change the generally understood meaning of ‘scientist’. His proposal is ‘evidist’, and or an ‘evidistic’ or ‘evidal’ worldview, with the labels ‘traditionalists’ or ‘intuitivists’ reserved for those who hold the ‘old worldview’.

The article is already causing waves: Barbara Smoker has applauded Haley’s neologism as better than ‘sceptics’ (which is “too equivocal”), ‘atheists’ (“solely negative”), ‘secular humanists’, (“inexplicit”), or ‘brights’ (“distastefully arrogant”). However she prefers the adjective ‘evidistic’, and the noun ‘evidism’. Another correspondent has suggested ‘innovist’. And no doubt there will be more…

But not everyone is convinced: “Whatever label we atheists use, we’re hell-bound unbelievers, so why mince around the subject?” And whilst recognising the confusion and ignorance over the word ‘atheist’ — and much more so over ‘humanist’ and ‘agnostic’ — another contributor argues that “throwing a word like ‘evidist’ into the mix will exacerbate the confusion”.

What kind of atheist are you?

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by Mike Flood

At Milton Keynes Humanists’ monthly meetings, we are always pleased to welcome new people, and many come with questions about atheism — “What exactly is an atheist?” “How does atheism differ from agnosticism?” and “How do you define humanism?” So we thought it might be useful to prepare a note to explain these and a host of other terms that one can come across in the media or rationalist, freethinker, skeptic or secular literature.1 We do this with some trepidation because there is as yet no consensus about many of the terms in use and no agreed definitions, indeed many terms incorporate or encompass others.

Basically, an atheist is someone who does not believe in a supreme being or other immaterial things.2 The term appears to have been first used in the 18th Century. A humanist is someone who has a positive approach to life and a strong concern for human welfare, values and dignity (ie “an atheist who cares”).3 Agnosticism is different: it is a statement about knowledge rather than belief — the view that the truth of metaphysical claims regarding theology, an afterlife, or the existence of god is unknown or inherently unknowable. When asked “Do you believe in god?” an agnostic or ‘ignostic’ (see below) would say “I don’t understand the question. How do you define god?”

But there are many different kinds of atheists, and this can be confusing: we find frequent reference in the media to ‘militant atheists’, ‘fundamentalist atheists’ and ‘anti-theists’ — terms sometimes lumped together as ‘new atheists’.4 These labels are invariably scornful and uncomplimentary and are regularly attached to people like Richard Dawkins who actively campaign against religion or religious influence in public life.5 But this is only the tip of the lexicological iceberg: in this paper we’ve explored a number of other (less pejorative) terms.

We start with ‘implicit’ and ‘explicit’ atheism, terms coined in the late 1970s by George Smith. Smith defined ‘implicit atheism’ as “the absence of theistic belief without a conscious rejection of it”, and ‘explicit atheism’ as “the absence of theistic belief due to a conscious rejection of it” — it should be said that many non-believers would not recognize ‘implicit atheism’ as atheism at all, preferring to use terms such as ‘skeptic’ or ‘agnostic’.

Then we have the idea of a ‘passionate atheist’ — “someone who considers God to be their personal enemy”, as distinct from ‘ordinary atheists’ “who do not believe in God” (the distinction was floated by Freeman Dyson in 2006); and Christopher Silver and Thomas Coleman have proposed a different classification after carrying out a survey of non-believers:

  • ‘intellectualatheists/agnostics’ — people who “seek information and intellectual stimulation about atheism” who “like debating and arguing, particularly on popular Internet sites” and are “well-versed in books and articles about religion and atheism, and prone to citing those works frequently”;
  • ‘activists’ — not content with just disbelieving in God, this kind of atheist / agnostic wants to “tell others why they reject religion and why society would be better off if we all did likewise”; they also “tend to be vocal about political causes like gay rights, feminism, the environment and the care of animals”;
  • ‘seeker-agnostics’ — “people who are unsure about the existence of a God but keep an open mind and recognize the limits of human knowledge and experience”;
  • ‘non-theists’ — “people who do not involve themselves with either religion or anti-religion”; and
  • ‘ritual atheists’ — people who don’t believe in God, do not associate with religion, and do not believe in an afterlife, but still “find useful the teachings of some religious traditions.”

Silver and Coleman’s full list also contains ‘anti-theists’, which we have already encountered — people who “regularly speak out against religion and religious beliefs” who “view religion as ignorance and see any individual or institution associated with it as backward and socially detrimental.” The late Christopher Hitchens described himself as ‘anti-theist’ rather than atheist.

Yet another classification was proposed by Rabbi Sherwin Wine in his essay ‘Reflections’:6

  • ‘ontological’ atheism — “a firm denial that there is any creator or manager of the universe” (ontology is the branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being);
  • ‘ethical atheism’ — “a firm conviction that, even if there is a creator/manager of the world, he does not run things in accordance with the human moral agenda, rewarding the good and punishing the wicked”;7
  • ‘existential atheism’ — “a nervy assertion that even if there is a God, he has no authority to be the boss of my life”;
  • ‘agnostic atheism’ — “a cautious denial which claims that God’s existence can be neither proven nor disproven, but which ends up with behaviour no different from that of the ontological atheist”;
  • ‘ignostic atheism’ — “another cautious denial, which claims that the word ‘God’ is so confusing that it is meaningless and which translates into the same behaviour as the ontological atheist”;
  • ‘pragmatic atheism’ — “which regards God as irrelevant to ethical and successful living, and which views all discussions about God as a waste of time.” (Pragmatic atheism is also known as ‘practical atheism’ of ‘apatheism’).

And we conclude with ‘positive atheism’, which to some will sound like an oxymoron. Positive atheism — also called ‘strong atheism’ or ‘hard atheism’ — asserts that no deities exist. It contrasts with ‘negative atheism’ (‘weak atheism’ / ‘soft atheism’) which covers all other types of atheism wherein persons “do not believe in the existence of a creator but do not explicitly assert there to be none”.

Some may consider ‘brights’ in the United States as ‘positive atheists’, although technically they represent a rather broader church — the Brights Movement was founded in 2003 to promote “civic understanding and acknowledgment of the naturalistic worldview, which is free of supernatural and mystical elements”.8 But the term has not been widely adopted, not least because many think it suggests that people who profess a ‘naturalistic worldview’ are more intelligent (ie ‘brighter’) than non-naturalists, and this does little to promote tolerance and religious multiculturalism…

Positive atheism appeals to many Humanists because it helps dispel the cold, negative or false image of atheism that is often promulgated by senior clerics or fundamentalist Christians / Muslims. Perhaps the greatest proponent was Goparaju Rao, affectionately known as ‘Gora’. “Atheism is positive”, said Gora, “because the moment faith in god is banished, man’s gaze turns from god to man and he becomes socially conscious.”

Gora propounded the positive atheist position at the inauguration of the First World Atheist Conference which he co-founded in December 1972.9 “The essence of atheism,” he said, “is the freedom of the individual (and) freedom releases the immense potentialities of human imagination, initiative and effort that lay suppressed under theistic faith. The mood of supplication and complaint, inherent in prayers to god and petitions to government, has no place in the atheistic way of life … Atheism liberates humans from all kinds of bondage and restores the lost dignity to the individual to stand on his feet as a free and responsible person.”

Inevitably many (most?) non-believers are uncomfortable with the label ‘atheist’ and would like to do away with the term altogether — as Sam Harris puts it: “We don’t need a word for someone who rejects astrology. We simply do not call people ‘non-astrologers’. All we need are words like ‘reason’ and ‘evidence’ and ‘common sense’ and ‘bullshit’ to put astrologers in their place”. “And so,” he concludes, “it could be with religion”.

1 Rationalists consider science and reason as the best guide for belief and action. Freethinkers are unwilling to accept authority or dogma, especially religious dogma. Skeptics are inclined to question or doubt accepted opinions.Secular denotes attitudes, activities and things that have no religious or spiritual basis, and secularism, strict separation of the state from religious institutions with people of different religions and beliefs being equal before the law.

2 The use of Big G in ‘God’ and little g ‘god’ in this article is entirely deliberate and reflects the use by the original authors.

3 Humanists do not believe in god and prefer the scientific theory of evolution to explain why we are here. We also accept responsibility for our own lives and believe that when we die that is the end; there is no after life.

4 New Atheism is the name given to the ideas promoted by a handful of modern atheist writers who have advocated the view that “religion should not simply be tolerated but should be countered, criticized and exposed by rational argument wherever its influence arises.” The term is commonly associated with Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, who are collectively known as ‘the Four Horsemen of New Atheism’.

5 Morgan Matthew has pointed out that “It’s rare to walk anywhere in public and not see some religious advertisement every few moments. Imagine if the cause of non-belief were promoted to even one hundredth this degree? Theists would be totally outraged.”

6< In his day Rabbi Wine was a highly controversial figure: not only did he coin the term ‘ignostic’ but he went on to found a number of humanistic organizations in the US, including (in 1969) the Society for Humanistic Judaism— a movement within Judaism that emphasizes secular Jewish culture and Jewish history as sources of Jewish identity rather than belief in God.

7 People who believe in the existence of a supreme being / creator that does not intervene in the universe / people’s affairs are usually referred to as ‘deists’. Some people describe themselves as ‘fideists’ — they see faith as independent of reason and that it is superior at arriving at particular truths. They have faith that there is something larger than human consciousness.

8 The other main aims of the Brights Movement are to create an Internet constituency that will: gain public recognition that persons who the ‘naturalistic worldview’ can bring principled actions to bear on matters of civic importance; and educate society toward accepting the full and equitable civic participation of all such individuals. In principle, the Movement encompasses atheists, agnostics, humanists, skeptics, and members of religious traditions (like Rabbi Wine) who observe the cultural practices without believing literally in a deity. We should add here that there is enormous prejudice and bigotry towards atheists in the USA: indeed studies show that “atheists are arguably more distrusted and despised than any other minority”. They “seem to represent everything about modernity which Americans dislike or fear”.

9 Not to be confused with the ‘World Humanist Congress’, also held every three years, but starting much earlier (in Amsterdam in 1952). The next Congress will be in Oxford in August 2014 and hosted by the British Humanist Association.

Mike Flood is Chair of Milton Keynes Humanists. He works on grassroots development in low-income countries.

Why religion is in decline

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By Burt Flannery

According to the latest United Kingdom census, published in 2012, around 25 percent of the population no longer believes in God, an increase of eight percent in only six years.  The European average is higher still.  Scandinavians, for example, with their atheist majorities, have traversed much farther along the road to rejection of observant gods and extravagant ritual.  Their countries are among the most advanced, prosperous, peaceful and co-operative in the world and the people have found new ways to be kind to one another without agonising over a spy in the sky, an ever-watchful and judgemental God.

The large increase in the proportion of the United Kingdom’s unbelievers cannot be appropriated entirely to disaffection with either God or religion.  The other factor is simply this: as members of the older generation die, their unconditional belief is not being conserved by a sceptical younger generation.  The religious baton is not being passed on as unerringly as in yesteryear.  Whatever doubts there may be about the educational standards of today, the young are generally better informed than their forebears ever were.  This is an age of communications the like of which has never been seen before.  Tim Berners-Lee, the British computer scientist and developer of the World Wide Web (WWW), is to be applauded for not seeking to enrich himself by surrounding his invention by a wall of patents.  Instead, the WWW became publicly available and ushered in a new age of enlightenment.  News, debates and opinions are available to everyone, 24 hours a day, and these encourage people, particularly the inquisitive young, to ask just one more question.  This is an entirely different scenario from that pertaining to the Age of Enlightenment that took place in 18th century Europe and America.  As a cultural movement with the aim of reforming society using reason, it rejected the influence of faith, revelation, superstition and tradition believing in the advancement of knowledge through science.  Intellectual interchange was seen as the way forward whilst opposing intolerance and the many abuses perpetrated by both church and state.  It was, however, largely a movement by intellectuals for intellectuals and, despite flourishing for over 100 years, it could not be sustained.  It had not permeated the grass roots of society who remained ignorant of its ideals and noble intent.  In contrast, nowadays, almost everyone is exposed to a thousand times more information than could possibly have been imparted during the Enlightenment.  It is the impact of the age of communications on knowledge, opinion and evidence-based decision making that is pushing religion to the sidelines.  The young are increasingly reluctant to accept traditionally held views and it is, primarily, this that is hastening the move towards secularism.

They are told that Moses parted the waters of the Red Sea and that dead people were brought back to life, that Jesus was able to walk on water and that Mohammed travelled from Mecca to Jerusalem on a winged horse at a speed that would embarrass a Space Shuttle.  The younger generation finds these scriptural tales lacking in credibility simply because they are impossible.  Whilst tales such as these may serve to aggrandise religion for their elders, they serve only to devalue it in the minds of the young.  Why, they ask, despite centuries of repression, bloodshed and forced conversions is only about one half of the world’s population monotheistic?  Why, if only half the world believes in him, hasn’t God ordained a unity of faith?  To be told that it’s because he gave mankind free will is, to them, a particularly feeble answer.

Young people now know that the Earth was formed about 4.5 billion years ago which is emphatically at variance with scriptural accounts.  They are aware that fossil and DNA evidence age the first single-celled organism, a prokaryote, at around 3.6 billion years and that the first creature with a complex cell structure, a eukaryote, did not appear for almost another two billion years.  Such an inordinate length of time, they reason, is irreconcilable with an omnipotent, supernatural creator, namely God.  They also know that the first mammal, tiny and shrew-like, appeared around 225 million years ago after a further elapse time of nearly two billion years.  Surely, of all the arguments that can be arraigned against the existence of God, it is the argument from time that is the most compelling.

It is claimed by creationists that an animal as complex as a horse, for example, must have been designed which implies that there must have been a designer.  It is perfectly true that, constituting billions of cells, the horse is highly complex and if it had suddenly materialised without any historical lineage deep into its      primordial past, one would suspect it was the work of a supernatural deity.  On the contrary, however, scientists have demonstrated that the horse is the product of millions of years of Darwinian evolution and natural selection.  With greater knowledge of the natural world than was ever available to their forebears, young people know that a single design cannot take millions of years to implement.  If one can speak of design at all, such a time lapse would involve countless designs and re-designs simulating evolution in the absence of a supernatural designer.  An omnipotent deity would, after all, get the design right first time and would have no need of continual modification.

Recognition of the world’s imperfections also causes the young to question God’s existence.  In the words of Lucretius, the ancient Roman poet and philosopher:

“Had God designed the world, it would not be

A world so frail and faulty as we see.”

Examples of poor design are illness, disease, predation, natural disasters, evil, cruelty and murder (particularly on religious grounds).  If the Yersinia pestis bacterium, the cause of the Black Death of the Middle Ages, had been just a few percentage points more virulent, the whole of Europe’s population (and possibly the world’s) would have been extirpated.  As it was, 100 million people died.  Today, mosquitos act as a vehicle for many disease-causing viruses, transferring them to humans without themselves exhibiting any symptoms.  They are estimated to transmit disease to more than 700 million people annually resulting in over two million fatalities.  Young people rightly wonder how all of this can be part of a benevolent creator’s design.  Was it really part of God’s plan for man to co-exist with countless micro-organisms endowed with the capacity to wipe him out?  If, for some inexplicable reason, it suited God’s purpose to fill the world with harmful bacteria, wouldn’t it have made sense to equip humans with a prophylactic immune system instead of the delicate one afforded them?

When Sir David Attenborough, our most respected broadcaster, was asked whether his observation of the natural world had given him faith in a divine creator, he responded by making reference to the Loa loa parasitic worm, also known as the eye worm.  He said:

“My response is that when Creationists talk about God creating every individual species as a separate act, they always instance hummingbirds, or orchids, sunflowers and beautiful things.  But I tend to think instead of a parasitic worm that is boring through the eye of a boy sitting on the bank of a river in West Africa, a worm that’s going to make him blind.  And I ask them, ‘Are you telling me that the God you believe in, who you also say is an all-merciful God, who cares for each one of us individually, are you saying that God created this worm that can live in no other way than in an innocent child’s eyeball?’  Because that doesn’t seem to me to coincide with a God who’s full of mercy.”

The only ‘evidence’ for God perceived by young people is based on aberrant holy text.  The more they apply logic and reason, the more they realise that the scriptures are works of fiction: fabricated, abridged and adulterated.  The great Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States, wrote in a letter to John Adams, his friend and  predecessor:

“The whole history of these books (the gospels) is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain to attempt minute enquiry into it.”

He also wrote, in his latter years:

“Fix Reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion.  Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if   there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason than of blindfolded fear.”

The Book of Genesis purports that Adam was created the first man on Earth about 6,000 years ago but it has been scientifically established that modern man (Homo sapiens) first appeared almost 200,000 years earlier.  These early humans were polytheistic in that they ascribed anything they could not understand to a panoply of gods whom they constantly sought to appease.  It is clear that polytheistic religions have existed for many thousands of years and are widespread even today.  However, according to Genesis, seminal events took place around 4,000 years ago during the life of the Hebrew, Abraham, and the advent of monotheism.  It is as if, at this time, God thought to himself:

“Well, thousands of millions of years have elapsed since I created planet Earth.  Polytheism’s had a good run so I think it’s high time the Earthlings knew about me.  I need someone to spread the word.  I don’t think I’ll choose a polymath, a scientist or philosopher; it’s an itinerant tribesman for me.”

One would, of course, have expected God to appear efficaciously before everyone at the same time, communicate his laws and ensure a unified religion but, by opting for the single tribesman route, he ensured that subsequently millions of people would be killed defending their version of the truth.  Is it any wonder that young people have developed a mistrust of religion?

Moreover, it is written that Abraham entered into a covenant with God in which he was promised that his descendants would be made into a great nation.  The covenant was sanctified by the rite of circumcision in accordance with God’s command but why God, after tens of thousands of years of human existence, suddenly decided it was essential that the prepuce of an eight-day old child’s genitalia should be sliced off with the aid of any proximate sharp implement remains a mystery.  The young people of today, however, are not so naïve as to accept this at face value.  They know perfectly well that if God really found a morsel of flesh so offensive, he would not have endowed humanity with it in the first place.

Despite this, around one-third of the world’s male population is circumcised on religious grounds, chiefly according to the directives of Judaism and Islam.  Even in the United States, one of the world’s most medically advanced countries, one in 500 infants suffers acute complications owing to circumcision.  One can only imagine how high the figure might be in more primitive societies and how many children must have died from infection over the course of millennia.  Performing this process to ensure well-being on medical grounds is understandable but to do so because of some misguided religious rite is as preposterous as it is barbaric.

Why are we so conditioned to religion, anyway?  Belief in gods would have originated primarily out of fear and, from early forms of religion, humans would have derived consolation, comfort and a sense of security.  Their religion would have fostered togetherness, binding them to something much greater than their group or tribe and, furthermore, it would have satisfied their innate need for leadership.  The desire for leadership has a long evolutionary history and applies to most species of the animal kingdom: hence, for example, the mammalian alpha male (or female).  For their part, humans look to different kinds of leaders (meritocratic, military, political, spiritual and so on) to keep them safe or maintain a sense of well-being.  Leaders, of course, have their own need for leadership, ultimately in the guise of some divine power.  According to Bertrand Russell, the brilliant British philosopher and mathematician:

“Religion is based primarily upon fear.  It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes.”

After tens of thousands of years of propitiation to supernatural deities, it is quite possible that mankind has evolved to the extent that religion is virtually ‘hard-wired’ into the psyche.  If this is the case, for many people the dependence on some form of religion would be almost impossible to dispel.  To break free of this dependence requires considerable intellectual application.  Bertrand Russell pointed out:

 “This state of mind is rather difficult: it requires a high degree of intellectual culture without emotional atrophy.”

In reference to the scriptures, he added:

“A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men.”

One can attend almost any church service and be told that “God is Love”, a statement unsubstantiated by daily events, both great and small.  There was no evidence of love when Aztec priests plunged their razor-sharp obsidian blades into the breasts of sacrificial victims to remove their hearts in deluded obeisance to the god, Huitzilopochtli.  Nor was there any sign of love when a mother and child were led to the gas chamber during the Holocaust.  There was no evident love when, in 1099, the Crusaders recaptured Jerusalem from Muslim dominion and swept through the streets as a raging torrent of barbaric and indiscriminate slaughter.  No matter, in consolation the ecclesiastical clerisy has assured us that God loved all the victims.  Today’s young people question why God remains unseen and never intervenes even when he is so desperately needed.

For its part, the priesthood has always preferred the laity to be ignorant and, consequently, compliant.  The obscurantism of these servants of God hindered progress through a process of repression and fear for centuries.  Nicolaus Copernicus, one of the great polymaths of the Renaissance, was a Polish astronomer and the first person to formulate a heliocentric cosmology.  His book, On the Revolutions of Celestial Spheres, published just before his death, is often regarded as the starting point of modern astronomy.  He could have published much earlier but was afraid that he would be condemned to death as a heretic by a priesthood that believed unconditionally in the word of the scriptures.  Had not Joshua, after all, commanded and stopped the Sun from moving around the Earth for a period of several hours to provide his army with more daylight?  The cosmos, therefore, was geocentric; there could be no debate.  Some years later, Giordano Bruno, the distinguished Italian mathematician and astronomer, was not so lucky.  Because he held similar views to Copernicus adding that the Sun was actually a star, the holy men drove a metal spike through his tongue before burning him at the stake.  Later still, Galileo, one of the world’s greatest scientists, was hauled before the priesthood and accused of heresy.  Using a telescope of his own invention, he had found conclusive evidence of heliocentrism.   In direct contravention of biblical text and possessing a lesser resolve than Bruno, Galileo recanted, with his tongue stuck firmly in his cheek.  He feigned acceptance when the priests told him he could not have seen what he claimed to have seen, that his eyes had deceived him.  He was spared Bruno’s fate and spent the rest of his life under house arrest, ordered to read seven penitential psalms once a week for three years.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, over a period of 125 years, religious wars in Europe between Catholics and Protestants accounted for the loss of over 11 million lives.  Even the events of the Holocaust of the 1940s (and a further 6 million deaths) have origins rooted in these times and in the exhortations and inflammatory rhetoric of Protestantism’s foremost priest, Martin Luther.  In the cruelest of all ironies, all of those who died had believed in the love of the same God.  Moreover, is it not baffling that benevolent revelation is invariably claimed by the least influential in society when it should be the preserve of the most powerful?  How much is really being achieved when a vagrant believes he hears God’s voice and becomes a born-again Christian?  As far as we can tell, God never commanded Hitler, Stalin or Pol Pot to be kind to their fellow man nor did he ever appear before Martin Luther to convince him to speak well of the Jews.  If God ever appeared as an apparition before despotic leaders, it served only as justification for the atrocities perpetrated in his name.

Another reason for the young to question the authenticity of holy text and God’s existence is that many people they admire have done likewise.  Jonathan Edwards, for example, became the world’s greatest triple jumper and one of Britain’s most decorated athletes.  The son of a vicar, he spent most of his adult life as a devout Christian.  Initially, he even refused to compete on Sundays, his faith costing him a place in the 1991 World Athletics Championships.  He once stated:

“My relationship with Jesus and God is fundamental to everything I do.  I have made a commitment in that relationship to serve God in every area of my life.”

He was a regular presenter of the BBC Christian television show, Songs of Praise, until 2007 when he renounced his faith and his belief in God.  In an interview with The Times, he stated:

“When you think about it rationally, it does seem incredibly improbable that there is a God.”

Countless prominent people agree with him.  Famous atheists from the world of film and theatre include Woody Allen, James Cameron, George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Paul Bettany, Emma Thompson and Daniel Radcliffe.  Political atheists of recent times include Roy Hattersley, Neil Kinnock, Ken Livingstone, Michael Portillo, Alastair Campbell, Nick Clegg and the Miliband brothers, David and Ed.  From literature, we have Kingsley Amis, Douglas Adams, Tariq Ali, Ken Follett, Stephen Fry and Graham Greene.  Those from the scientific community include Stephen Hawking, Brian Cox, Richard Dawkins, Francis Crick and David Attenborough whilst well-known names from entertainment and comedy include Billy Connolly, Alan Davies, Eddie Izzard, Ben Elton, Dave Allen, Terry Wogan and Michael Parkinson.  It was the late Dave Allen who famously said:

“I’m an atheist, thank God.”

Earlier unbelievers include some of history’s greatest minds  such as Epicurus, Baruch Spinoza, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Andrew Carnegie, David Hume, John Stuart Mill, Percy Bysshe Shelley and, more recently, Bertrand Russell and Carl Sagan.  All were profound and erudite thinkers whose opinions are worthy of scholarship and available to everyone in our communications age.

It is, of course, possible that God exists but is not omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent and merciful but, if that were the case, why would you call him ‘God’?  Even though beliefs in the supernatural cannot be falsified empirically, it seems the time will come when science gains dominion over emotion and God will be consigned to mythology alongside Zeus, whilst the prophets will become regarded as unwitting imposters.  By then, the ecclesiastical clerisy will have joined a long line of deluded holy men and the debate about God’s existence would simply be a philosophical one: “Can God exist if nobody believes in him?”  Until then, religion’s influence is likely to decrease exponentially, the decline leading to eventual oblivion.

Extracted from the author’s book, What’s God Got To Do With It?

Divine revelation: not just a fallacy of the faithful

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By George Wilson

Divine revelation: the sermon on the mount

Divine revelation: the sermon on the mount

 

On the 21st November 2012, the day after it had voted against the ordination of female bishops, the then Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams addressed the Synod on the subject. His much-publicized claim that the Church would be seen as “wilfully blind” to the “trends and priorities” of modern society did the rounds in the media for a few days afterwards. As accurate a statement as it was, and brushing aside the questionable use of the word “trends,” there was a far more significant statement to be found hot on the heels of that sound bite:

“It’s perfectly true…that the ultimate credibility of the church does not depend on the goodwill of the wider public. We would not be Christians and believers in Divine Revelation if we held that.”

“This statement, (statement A) I would contend, not only distils a fundamental problem in the collective religious thought process, but also reveals a far more general problem: The blending of evidence and belief, and the mistaken acceptance that the two are similar. In order to explain this, however, we must first answer two questions: What is “Divine Revelation,” and how – if at all – does it justify the ignoring of the public at large?”

Divine Revelation is, at its most basic description, the revealing of knowledge or truth through Divine means. Whether it is perceived in Scripture, the actions of Christ/various prophets or even in the natural world the truth that is revealed by these various divine interventions is considered transcendent. It is knowledge of a higher order, above that which we human beings can discover for ourselves.

Perhaps the most recognizable example – to Westerners at any rate – is the opening sentence of the Gospel according to St. John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” In John I:14-15 the author explicitly identifies Jesus as the physical representation of the Word/Logos: “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (etc) We might also mention the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which claims that the Word of God is “not a written and mute word, but the Word which is incarnate and living.” – i.e. it can be found all around us.

In order to get a perspective from the Lion’s mouth, I contacted Rowan Williams on the subject. Perhaps written in haste, and certainly only meant as a starting point, it would be unfair for me to pounce upon one phrase in his characteristically good-natured response, however the first sentence of his description really does help explain the fundamental problem with this concept. Here is his (abridged) description (Statement B):

“Christian (and Jewish and Muslim) teaching takes it for granted that we can’t know all we need to know for our wellbeing just by what our own activity can uncover…So revelation implies an active God, who can in some way break into a fixed situation…this implies that revelation isn’t necessarily a matter of words or statements: events can trigger this sense of being overtaken – a sense of the world being suddenly bigger or more unmanageable than we suspected. So we can talk about the Exodus in the Old Testament or the Resurrection in the New as events of ‘revelation’… ‘Revealed’ doctrines are the things we find we have to say to make an adequate response to events such as these.  And finally, when we encounter events or people or images in the world that have something of the same quality of enlarging and unsettling, we can speak of them as having something of the same revelatory quality.”

It is of course the “take it for granted” part that presents us with the biggest elephant in the room. No one in their right mind would claim that human beings are definitely capable of finding out all there is to know about life, the universe and everything, but starting with an a priori assumption of such magnitude does present problems.

This then is the problem: the fact that you believe something does not make it so; it is not evidence for anything other than the fact that you believe it. Yet the concept of Divine Revelation – the supposed source of all higher knowledge – does not require any evidence at all, just belief. Religious people will claim that they see the evidence everywhere – the Bible, nature, the life of Christ – but these things do not constitute evidence; they are perceptions of reality made with a vast, presupposed and conveniently un-falsifiable assumption informing them. To put it bluntly: Their perception of these phenomena already has a predefined answer built into it.

As a result, literally anything that can be said to be real – love, war, the sunset, an act of kindness, a Honda Civic – can be said to be a source of divine revelation. Now this isn’t really much of a problem at all when it’s reserved to things that any sensible person would agree with – basic common decency, the golden rule – but it is capable of being a very dangerous form of mental acrobatics when it comes to justifying things that are quite demonstrably false. The dogmatic stance on women, homosexuality, marriage, contraception, assisted suicide, faith schools and their admissions policies – all these issues are informed by that which is divinely revealed in one way or another. This is by no means saying that “all religious people are irrational” because that too is demonstrably false. Neither is it saying that all religious people, by virtue of the fact that they are religious, agree with the Dogmatic stance on these issues. It means that this aspect of dogma, this particular leap of faith, is highly susceptible to, and incredibly useful in, the defence of very bad ideas indeed. It means that denying women the right to be a bishop is possible and can be defended. If you have the creator of the universe on your side, then who can prove you wrong?

Now let us remind ourselves of Statement A and return to it. Williams is right in one respect – the fact that millions think something is the case does not in itself mean that it should be so; and it would be a mistake to do something simply because of that. Countless millions believed that the earth was flat, that it was at the centre of the universe, and that bloodletting was an effective treatment for most ailments. They were all wrong. We can only hope, however, that the irony of that statement isn’t lost on him, especially considering the number of unjust privileges (as opposed to basic rights) enjoyed by the CofE as a result of the same sort of error (i.e., lots of people believe it, so we must accommodate them) being made routinely by Christians, the government, and crucially the public at large. If we were to remove the “Divine Revelation” part of the statement, and replace the word “church” with “an idea” Williams would be completely correct: There is no evidence. Nada. Nothing. Zilch, to say that women are incapable or should not be allowed to be in higher positions of power, just as there is no evidence to back the claim that gay sex is inherently evil  – and yet, a small number of people in the church can argue away at this point by using their own version of “evidence,” mostly stemming from scripture. This is a blatant example of Divine Revelation’s inherent unsustainability.

Many of us can probably list off the top of our head the number of unspeakably discriminatory policies that many religions are free to adopt – in Britain their exemption from aspects of the 2010 Equality Act says more than any article ever could – but I seriously doubt many of us are willing to except a far more unpleasant truth: this inherent problem with Divine Revelation is a phenomenon – albeit under a different guise – that can be found in a secular setting as well.

For example, A 2007 ICM poll indicated that 32% of British people thought that LGBT parenting should not be allowed. Now they may have all been religious, but that is highly improbable. Those 32% were, according to all the available evidence so far, wrong. The Australian Psychological Society’s LGBT Parenting literature review of 2007 found no evidence of negative effects on the children of LGBT parents, nor did the Canadian Psychological Association in 2006, nor the United States Court of Appeal in 2010. The list goes on, and is of considerable length. Yet despite such overwhelming evidence to the contrary, poll after poll indicates either a sizeable minority – or in some countries a large majority – consider LGBT adoption to be a bad idea.

Whether it is Michael Gove’s overruling of expert advice and manipulation of figures in his quest for education reform, the Tory Party’s cynical assault on – and misrepresentation of – the Welfare System, or the arguments against the legalization of Gay marriage, a common thread emerges: in the part of the argument that requires, nay demands, evidence, belief has been placed in it’s stead.

Divine revelation can thus be seen as a dogmatic parallel of a larger, more wide-ranging reality: the tacit acceptance that a belief can justify an action. At the very least common knowledge that the person instigating the action believes in the said action can dilute the range of responses people make to the action itself. Just as many mainstream Christians consider the word of God to have manifested itself in Christ, Holy scripture or even nature, and view such ‘revelation’ as a reason for something to be done; so too do many secular people routinely permit a belief in an idea or method to undermine the truth.

This routine ignorance – whether innocent or not – of the knowable truth, is incredibly damaging, especially when it involves decisions that directly effect other peoples lives in the real world. As Polly Toynbee put it: “Wise atheists make no moral claims, seeing good and bad randomly spread among humanity.” This particular “bad” is everywhere. It is a humanist issue in the truest sense of the word, for it affects us all, constantly. No “wise atheist” disagrees with religion simply because they think a belief in a creator god is misguided, because that belief, in relation to it’s impact on other Humans, pales in comparison to those doctrines and beliefs that can come attached to it which do impact the rest of humanity. Divine Revelation is the mother lode in this respect, for it has the potential to defend concepts that are indefensible.

So what is to be done? Could it be possible to make it a criminal offence either to manipulate statistics for the purposes of your own argument or to misrepresent the facts if you are in a position of power? It would make it incredibly hard for politicians to push through a myriad of social legislation, and it probably would never pass through parliament anyway, but it would be a dramatic step forward. Just imagine a political – and religious – landscape in which only the facts as they stand are argued over, a landscape where ideology is shaped by the truth, and those that lie are brought to task. Consider the impact such a law would have had on the countless number of political decisions that were not backed up by facts over the last 10 years. Just think of what would have happened to Blair.

Perhaps it is I who is now working in the realm of fantasy, as this is unlikely to happen, but it is undeniable: evidence is either routinely manipulated or shunned altogether by many politicians, religious leaders and NGO’s to fit their own agenda or beliefs on a regular basis, and it is a problem that needs to be addressed far more frequently than it has been in the past. As Neil deGrasse Tyson put it: “There is no shame in not knowing, the problem arises when irrational thought and attendant behavior fill the vacuum left by ignorance.”

Music and humanism

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by Josh Kutchinsky

Music Town by Clint McMahon

In one of his famous lectures for children the musician, polymath and educator, Leonard Bernstein, played an extract from The William Tell overture by Rossini and asked his audience what they thought it was about.  They answered and he responded:

“That’s just what I thought you’d say: cowboys, bandits, horses, the wild west.”

He then told his audience that he hated to disappoint them but that it wasn’t about anything like that, “It’s about notes – E Flats and F sharps. You see, no matter how many times people tell you stories about what music means, forget them. Stories are not what the music means at all. Music is never about anything. Music just is.”

Whilst we may not be able to say what music means we can say what it is that music does? Music is a definer of rhythm and of harmony. It is a unique human exploration of memory, time, and anticipation. Sequences of sound with varying or consistent musical pitches, timbres and intensities excite the brain to expectation and when these are thwarted or gratified, we are teased, lulled or excited. The landscape of sound is changed from the familiar to the exotic, from the safe to the dangerous.

There are other performing arts such as drama and poetry which take place in the present moment and involve the manipulation of expectation but employ the currency of common conversation; words. Maybe language is just one particular sort of music.

Here is a story about the power of music.

Some time ago there was an old man. He was ill and in hospital. He had turned away, with a dumb gesture, the offers of pastoral care from strangers. They were not wanted. Then his granddaughter came to visit. She didn’t know what to say. He stared at her with watery eyes and no one was sure whether there was any recognition. She sat; a small black case beside her chair. Someone suggested she play something.

“What?” she asked

“Anything.”

And so she removed her silvern flute from its compact black case and the bright sound from the metallic tube poured into the room like sunlight through a window on a winter’s day. The grandfather smiled. He recognised the tune. Beyond the slightly open door the sound wafted down the corridor, travelling from the geriatric toward the maternity ward across the way. A mother with a babe in arms drew near and stood by the open door and the door was opened further and she smiled and the old man returned her smile. Music had brokered, in a way that only it can, a human interaction between a long dead composer, a man only a few weeks from death, his granddaughter, an unknown woman and a newborn child of less than a week.

But am I now not doing what I had just said could not be done? Am I not imposing a narrative on the music? Not at all. Stories are often imposed on music. Similarly religious meaning is often imposed on certain stories. Language is never religious. It is just sometimes used by people holding religious beliefs. They can no more rightly claim the language for themselves than can a child capture the sea in a bucket. Music in and of itself is never sacred or secular. It is just music.

Human creativity lies at the heart of Humanism. To attempt fully to apprehend the reality of our existence and thereby imbue it with meaning, music, science and the other humanities all have their part to play (science had always, until quite recently, been included as one of the humanities but under its older name of ‘natural philosophy’).

Music is not only a means of entertainment, distraction and mood enhancement. It is not just a partner to words in opera and musicals, to movement in dance and drama, to TV and films. It is not just a signature tune to momentous events in our lives; our romances, our teenage angst, our formal ceremonies which for many, but not all, help mark life’s moments of transition. It is not just a respite for the world weary. It is also a tool of exploration. Our perceptions of our world our altered by it and it has been compared with pure mathematics in terms of its symbolic power. Music has also been compared to architecture. The structure of music can match for complexity and beauty that of the greatest concert halls and cathedrals.

Music is an amazing human achievement. It requires the orchestration of unnatural sounds, sounds which only humans have manufactured. It calls for skill honed by thousands of hours of practice and endeavour. The evolution of musical instruments themselves is a fascinating story of experimental science, technology and skill. Music is a majestic collaboration often spanning centuries and in a strange way echoes the translation of genetic code into the expression of human existence. Scored music encoded on the page lies dormant, awaiting the moment of performance, of expression. Its awakening takes place against a background of silence and every performance punctuates that stillness with an affirmation of meaning and purpose wrought from a wealth of extraordinary human creativity.

Josh Kutchinsky is an organiser of  the Central London Humanist Group and founder and co-ordinator of Hummay an international humanist support egroup. He is a BHA representative to IHEU. He was a director in a publishing company and co-editor of Merely a Matter of Colour – The Ugandan Asian Anthology. He was also director of a laser show company and produced the first comprehensive exhibition of lasers and their applications at the Science Museum. He writes prose and poetry as well as about science and technology.

Homeopathy, celebrities and marketing

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By Lee Turnpenny

Photo by Philippa Willitts

Those who subscribe to the cult of homeopathy tend to be afflicted with a continually confused attitude to the concept of evidence. On Weds 25 November 2009, the House of Commons Science and Technology Sub-Committee convened for an Evidence Check on Homeopathy. Amongst the ‘witnesses’ was Dr Peter Fisher, Clinical Director and Director of Research at the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital (now the Royal London Hospital for Integrated Medicine). Dr Fisher unashamedly described the process of succussion (forward to 11:06). In case you’re not familiar, this is the action of vigorously shaking/striking a vial of liquid in order to activate the memory of a substance (ie, the ‘remedy’) that has been diluted out of it, whilst simultaneously detoxifying the effects of all the other stuff the water will inevitably have come into contact with (because water is promiscuous stuff).

The Government Response to the Committee’s report concluded overall that:

‘By providing homeopathy on the NHS and allowing Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency licensing of products which subsequently appear on pharmacy shelves, the Government runs the risk of endorsing homeopathy as an efficacious system of medicine. To maintain patient trust, choice and safety, the Government should not endorse the use of placebo treatments, including homeopathy. Homeopathy should not be funded on the NHS and the MHRA should stop licensing homeopathic products.’

However, despite this concurrence, the Government then weasel-y left it to Primary Care Trusts to decide whether to continue wasting NHS funds on homeopathy, under the sopping guise of patient ‘choice.’ (Homeopathy enjoys sympathy among MPs – including from the Secretary of State for Health.)

The majority of homeopathic products licensed by the MHRA are registered under a 1992 Simplified Scheme that prohibits ‘indications’ – ie the associated description of disease/conditions, and medical/therapeutic claims thereon. These MHRA regulations on the advertising of medicinal products thus inform the Advertising Standards Authority, which on 1 March 2011 widened its scope to encapsulate marketing/advertising on UK websites. And thereafter received copious complaints about the online claims made by an array of homeopaths/homeopathy organisations (to the extent that it requested abeyance). The ASA contacted the complained-of advertisers – and those UK bodies that represent homeopaths and homeopathy. Its letter explicitly states:

‘You must remove any content from your website that claims directly or indirectly that homeopathy and homeopathic products can diagnose/treat/help health conditions.’

This letter (well worth a read, by the way) also informed addressees that their sites were under surveillance, with three months in which to comply with guidance on the marketing of health-related products and services, as stipulated by the Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP).

During British Homeopathy Awareness Week back in June last year I took umbrage with various homeopathy organisations’ cheap, egregious, fallacious resort to endorsement by celebrity, including (to take just one) the British Homeopathic Association. The British Homeopathic Association’s ‘Celebrity Photography Project’ comprises quite fetching images of partaking celebs ‘… holding the source material of one of the homeopathic medicines that has helped them’ . If I’ve piqued your interest then, rather than take up word space here with quotes, I urge you to peruse for yourself this Goof’s Gallery.

I’m sure these celebrities are being ‘genuine’, in that they believe what they say. (After all, they subscribe to a belief system for people who like to feel all “Speh-shull.”) But I found this puzzling. Doesn’t that ASA letter apply to ‘… those bodies that represent homeopaths and homeopathy in the UK…’? Which must surely, I figured, encapsulate the British Homeopathic Association. Indeed, the Association’s website proudly boasts:

‘The British Homeopathic Association exists to promote homeopathy practised by doctors and other healthcare professionals.’ (My emphasis in bold.)

I therefore decided to flag this up to the ASA, because, to my eye, these celebrities are not only making/implying ‘… claims directly or indirectly that homeopathy and homeopathic products can diagnose/treat/help health conditions’; but they also imply ‘indications’ for these products, the majority of which are listed as registered under the MHRA Simplified Scheme (which prohibits indications). The ASA letter contains a paragraph I find particularly pertinent here:

‘Please note that testimonials from patients (which must be genuine) that imply efficacy for homeopathic treatment do not constitute substantiation but may give a misleading impression that efficacy is proven. Therefore it is essential that any testimonials also only make general references to an improved sense of well-being.’

Clearly, these celebrity statements constitute patient testimonials which imply efficacy for (unsubstantiated) homeopathic treatments. It appears to me that this project overall constitutes website content that (at the very least) ‘… claims directly or indirectly that homeopathy and homeopathic products can diagnose/treat/help health conditions.’ Which, to reiterate, are ‘Claims you cannot make’ under the CAP Code, as applies to advertisers, ‘… as well as those bodies that represent homeopaths and homeopathy…’.

The ASA declined to pursue this apparent anomaly. I had also written to the MHRA, whose guidelines also prohibit celebrity endorsement, but was informed (even though the remedies named by the celebrities marry with product names in its registration listing) that it only concerns itself with direct advertising of ‘specific homeopathic medicinal product.’ As the BHA is not itself selling products, its celebrity endorsement falls outside the MHRA remit, as it constitutes promotional material, and on which it suggested I contact… the ASA. However, the ASA is likewise adamant that this complaint does not come under its remit (in apparent contradiction of its own letter) because the British Homeopathic Association is not itself directly supplying or transferring goods. So much for acting in the public interest.

Why does the British Homeopathic Association (and many other homeopathy-promoting bodies) seek testimonials, or mine for quotes, by celebrities? Just when does ‘raising awareness’ become ‘promotion’ become ‘advertising’? Although NHS support for homeopathy is on the wane (as of the end of last year, only 15% of PCTs were continuing to fund it), public money on this inefficacious ‘rubbish’ continues to be wasted, as chief medical officer Professor Dame Sally Davies recently reminded the CST committee. And in order to circumvent the ASA’s imposition on the advertising of their wares, homeopaths and homeopathy organisations such as the British Homeopathic Association have resorted to the patronising logical fallacy that is the appeal to celebrity (presumed) authority. Although the British Homeopathic Association does not itself (as far as I am aware) supply products and services, it represents – and promotes indirectly on behalf of – those homeopaths/homeopathic product providers who do. As the latter are covered by the ASA remit and can no longer legitimately advertise, the British Homeopathic Association is, it seems to me, exploiting a loophole – through the under-the-radar guise of ‘awareness-raising’ celebrity testimonials, which, in my opinion, are in contravention of the CAP Code.

As if a ‘senior homeopath’ spouting aqueous nonsense without compunction to a parliament committee is not ridiculous enough. What we have here, in effect, is a situation wherein, if you sell or provide certain dubious products and/or services, but are barred from making claims as to their efficacy, you can happily watch your representative umbrella organisation, which does not itself directly supply/sell/provide those products/services, make those claims indirectly on your behalf. Hence this permitted proxy-promotion of indication-prohibited, homeopathy products through a bunch of docile celebrities. A snake-oil-lubricated loophole.

www.leeturnpenny.com
First published in The Leicester Secularist,  (Jan 2013: see: http://www.leicestersecularsociety.org.uk/newsletter/index.php).

Thoughts on Sir Patrick Moore

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By Vaughan Stone

The star dust we all knew as (Sir) Patrick Moore sadly gave up its persona on the 9th December 2012. But Patrick is still with us – his books and legacy of years of BBC broadcasting will continue to inspire.

We will remember Patrick not only for his monthly Sky at Night broadcasts (the longest lived of any BBC TV series) and his astronomy books, but also for his outings as a xylophonist, pianist, composer, children’s Gamesmaster TV program host and, as his friend Brian May (of Queen) reminded us when interviewed, also as an animal rights campaigner and simply a generous person.

This was a man who NASA had consulted to help determine the best lunar landing sites for the Apollo space missions such was the accuracy of his hand-drawn moon maps. In his youth during the Second World War he spent time training as an RAF navigator but was soon invalided out (fortunately for us all) due to a medical condition. He sadly lost his beloved fiancée during this time in a bombing raid, the tragedy of which haunted him for the rest of his life. He never married.

“We just don’t know!” was Patrick’s signature statement at the end of many a Sky At Night episode when little more than speculation could be brought to bear on certain unexplained astronomical phenomena. It seems however that as far as his own fate was concerned he was a little less uncertain.

Patrick, who was every bit the quintessential British gentleman with more than a touch of eccentricity, was by all accounts not a particularly religious man but neither was he an atheist. Recently when asked if this life was all there was, he replied in non-committal jokey fashion: “I’ll report back to you when I get there.”

Patrick had been wheelchair-bound for some years due to an aggravated spinal trauma sustained during his war time RAF training. When pressed on how he perceived his final years and failing health he showed his usual stoicism and expressed the expectation that this life was not all there is: “We go onto the next stage. I shall be interested to see what it is.” For some this attitude might be puzzling coming from a man of science, but insofar as he did not ally himself with a particular religion, nor make this pantheism (if that’s what it was) an issue worthy of publicity, we can surely allow him this.

Though he had no living relatives, Patrick spent his last hours in the company of carers, his cat Ptolemy, and “family” notably his three devoted “sons” who, it was only recently revealed, had been taken under his wing many years previously to provide the father figure they had lost with the untimely passing of their own. How very touching. With the news that doctors had allowed Patrick to return home being unable to do more for him since contracting an infection in his already weakened condition, his sons arrived at his bedside realising that this was the end. Holding his hands and administering brandy to his lips, they witnessed their dear father slide into his last slumber – star dust giving up its precious and unique persona.

We salute you Patrick. Thank you dear man for your legacy and the important role you played in so many people’s lives making it impossible to ignore the wonder of the stars and the excitement of scientific discovery.

Humanist Hero: George Eliot, by Richard Norman

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Philosopher Richard Norman on the broad and generous humanism of novelist George Eliot.

George Eliot, as painted by Samuel Laurence, c. 1860

George Eliot, as painted by Samuel Laurence, c. 1860

George Eliot was a great humanist, and a great English novelist – perhaps the greatest. Born in 1819 in Warwickshire, she was in her teens a fervent evangelical Christian but then reacted strongly against it.  She moved to Coventry in 1841 and increasingly mixed in radical and free-thinking circles.  A voracious reader and self-educator, she was persuaded to translate into English two major works of German sceptical thought, David Friedrich Strauss’s The Life of Jesus, which sought to separate the historical Jesus from the supernatural accretions of miracles and myth, and Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity, which presented religious belief as a human creation and a projection of human qualities.  Her translation of these two books places her at the heart of the nineteenth-century rejection of traditional Christianity.

Several years later, in a letter to friends in 1859, the year of the publication of her first novel Adam Bede, she wrote:

I think I hardly ever spoke to you of the strong hold Evangelical Christianity had on me from the age of fifteen to two and twenty and of the abundant intercourse I had had with earnest people of various religious sects.  When I was at Geneva, I had not yet lost the attitude of antagonism which belongs to the renunciation of any belief – also, I was very unhappy, and in a state of discord and rebellion towards my own lot.  Ten years of experience have wrought great changes in that inward self: I have no longer any antagonism towards any faith in which human sorrow and human longing for purity have expressed themselves; on the contrary, I have a sympathy with it that predominates over all argumentative tendencies.  I have not returned to dogmatic Christianity – to the acceptance of any set of dogmas as a creed, and a superhuman revelation of the Unseen – but I see in it the highest expression of the religious sentiment that has yet found its place in the history of mankind, and I have the profoundest interest in the inward life of sincere Christians in all ages… although my most rooted conviction is, that the immediate object and the proper sphere of all our highest emotions are our struggling fellow-men and this earthly existence.

It is that broad and generous humanism that I admire – one which recognises the impossibility of returning to religious creeds and dogmas but is prepared to sift out what is of value in the religious impulse.

The many and differing faces of Christianity are one of the themes of her novels.  In her greatest novel, Middlemarch, they are represented by the banker Bulstrode, a hypocritical evangelical whose surface piety hides a shameful secret;  the desiccated clergyman-scholar Casaubon, whom Dorothea makes the mistake of marrying; and Mr Farebrother, not really cut out to be a clergyman but with a true and sympathetic heart.

The two central characters of Middlemarch, Dorothea and Lydgate, both start out with high ambitions to do something for their ‘struggling fellow-men’.  Their hopes are frustrated.  At the end of the novel Lydgate, despite being a successful doctor, ‘regarded himself as a failure’ because ‘he had not done what he once meant to do’.  Of Dorothea we are told, in the final paragraph: ‘Her finely-touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible.  Her full nature… spent itself in channels which had no great name on earth.  But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive…’  I love that phrase – ‘incalculably diffusive’.  George Eliot recognised that our lives are interwoven, and though we may not know what effect we will have on others, we can trust that by endeavouring to live well we can all make our contribution to ‘our struggling fellow-men and this earthly existence’.


This post is part of  a series written by members, friends and Distinguished Supporters of the British Humanist Association about their own “humanist heroes”.

Richard Norman is Emeritus Professor of Moral Philosophy, founder-member of the Humanist Philosophers’ Group, and a Vice-President of the BHA. His book On Humanism is available from the BHA Amazon store.

Humanist Hero: Gene Roddenberry

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Star Trek’s wealth of moral and philosophical thought and feeling have led Andrew West and Ellis Collins to name creator Gene Roddenberry a humanist hero.

Andrew West on Gene Roddenberry

Gene_roddenberry

Gene Roddenberry, legendary humanist and creator of Star Trek

My humanist hero is Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek and, I think, the most effective communicator of Humanism there has ever been.

For three decades, the universe of Star Trek brought a humanist viewpoint to mainstream audiences. Countless children watched weekly as the galactic Federation of the future was depicted as a philosophers’ state in which the humanist outlook is paramount. It was never hostile to the godly – religion is simply null, and irrelevant. This was never spelt out, because it somehow seems incredibly obvious that the future would be so. It just makes sense. Of course nationality won’t matter in the future. Of course we’ll make sure everyone gets to live to a decent standard. Of course humanity will eventually grow up and out of superstitious thinking. This was unlike anything that had come before. Critics called it a Marxist vision, but one of Gene Roddenberry’s assistants instead described it as Lennonist: a brotherhood of man.

Roddenberry’s quasi-utopian future was attained through the twin humanist beacons of science and moral development. Science fixed poverty with the ‘replicator’ which can make almost anything almost instantly – surely the most desired device in science fiction – while humanity developed a way to bring the disparate races of the galaxy together without coercion or violence. Key to this was the Prime Directive, probably the most vaunted –and most violated – commandment in television. Always problematic, the Prime Directive stated that the Federation must not interfere with other cultures – except of course the Enterprise was forced to intervene in pretty much every episode. This core humanist message was hammered home over the series and the years: people are free to do as they will, but if they need help, you go help.

This optimistic view of humanity’s possibilities was at the core of Roddenbery’s humanism, a life stance he didn’t have a name for when he began questioning religion in his teens. He kept such opinions to himself for years, but came to recognise the power of television to effect social change – both good and bad – and saw an opportunity with Star Trek to bring a non-religious, human-centric philosophy to the general public. He eventually described the show as his ‘statement to the world’.

But his genius was to wrap up all this philosophy in solid entertainment. Morality plays can make for dull television, so Roddenberry blended endearing characters with fantastical situations, cleverly making the resolution of moral conundrums key to the progression of the plot. And in doing so he quietly built a cultural dictionary of philosophy. Want to discuss the limits of artificial intelligence, and what it means to be human? Skip tracts of dialogue and get everybody onto the same page with the name of ‘Data’. The moral culpability of the soldier? The Borg will do nicely. This was never overt, and plenty (including me) were certainly watching for the phaser battles as much as anything else. But ideas etch, and the behaviour of these exciting and civil characters couldn’t help but have an effect. Star Trek always emphasised decision-making, and actually doing something. Every week the Enterprise crew would argue the rights and wrongs of their predicament, before the Captain took it out of the abstract by committing to one side or another, and acting appropriately. There are worse ways to live your life than to bear in mind, ‘What would Picard do in this situation?’.

The conservative nature of 1960s US television didn’t make this easy for Roddenberry, but he ran rings around network censors by setting the stories in space – it’s not about racial equality, silly, it’s about aliens who happen to be different colours. He refused to put a chaplain on the Enterprise, despite regular pressure, and consistently crafted stories about morality that were devoid of moral outrage. Religion is rarely mentioned outright in the original series or The Next Generation, but turns up subtly in the broad, overall themes. In Star Trek: The Next Generation, the only alien with god-like powers is a jerk who hates humanity. But over time he watches humans solving their problems through reason and compassion, despite his offers of magical intervention, and, by the end, he’s won over. It’s hard to see that particular story arc going down well with US networks, so Roddenberry simply didn’t tell them.

But Star Trek went beyond entertainment and subtle dissemination of humanist ideas – it’s not unreasonable to claim that Gene Roddenberry is partly responsible for accelerated pace of modern scientific progress. It’s impossible to know how many children had their sense of wonder stoked by the show, but you can get an anecdotal impression by asking any science graduate if they’re a fan. They probably are. The remarkable correlation between Star Trek fans and scientists may be because the show built upon established knowledge, but pushed it a bit. The ideas weren’t completely out there, so any children interested enough to investigate for themselves wouldn’t be disappointed. They’d discover that warp drives aren’t real, but impulse engines make sense. So why can’t you just use impulse engines to travel around? Because the distances are too great. Wow – just how big is the universe? And what about those communicators that allow the crew to keep in touch on different sides of the planet? Is that possible? Well, no, but radio waves can do that – we just need to figure out how to generate them in something hand-held…

Gene Roddenberry’s humanism affected forty years of children (and adults!), and continues to do so. Generations were raised on a regular diet of secular decency and resolving crises by weighing evidence and listening to all sides. Star Trek lodged abstract philosophy into the public consciousness, and is a pivot around which modern science turns. And above all this, Roddenberry’s vision was a source of hope. Gene Roddenberry brought a hope for humanity to millions, and is a humanist hero for that.

Ellis Collins on Gene Roddenberry

star trek ship

To boldly go…

As soon as I started watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, I was hooked. I remember being around nine or ten years old at the time. There was really nothing else quite like it. Here, you had all kinds of Humans – black, white, men, women, some strange people called Klingons and even an Android working together aiming toward the goals – ‘to explore strange new worlds and to boldly go where no one has gone before’. Any problems that happened to occur along the way to these goals and the whole staff would sit down and decide the best course of action, based on two things – reason and logic. It’s easy to see now, looking back at this program, that it was a humanist’s dream.

It took me quite a long time to discover what a Humanist was – I would have been about 20 years old at the time. One late night I was looking through pages among pages of internet information, some of it useful, some not. I happened to stumble across Gene Roddenberry’s Wikipedia page. Scrolling down to Gene’s religious beliefs it stated that he was an ‘agnostic’ and ‘humanist’. ‘A humanist?’ I thought. I really had no clue what this was. A simple click of a button and suddenly I knew, I have to say, it made more sense to me than any other world view I had encountered.

I am 29 years old now. I can honestly say that I truly feel I owe my current outlook and views on life to Gene Roddenberry. If it wasn’t for Gene Roddenberry I honestly don’t know whether I would have got involved in the activities that I like and whether or not I would have learned about some of the most interesting people I could ever learn about, people like Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins and James Randi to name a few. Upon further research I discovered that Gene had lots of problems just getting Trek onto TV at all. TV executives were very worried about the original series because Gene wanted to include a certain alien with pointy ears and even worse, he also wanted to include a woman on the show – a black one at that. He had to push and push so that he could get his vision of a future society onto TV. A vision of society where there was no superstition, no people dying from things like hunger, no racial or other prejudices but most importantly a world where there was no war, on Earth at least. Another reason why I think so many people took to Star Trek is because Gene always liked to tackle important social issues in the episodes – issues like Slavery, Welfare and discrimination amongst others were all covered many times. Unfortunately Gene died on October 24th 1991, aged 70.

I just want to say thank you Gene, you are solid proof that just one person can change the world for the better.

These posts are part of a series written by members, friends and Distinguished Supporters of the British Humanist Association about their own ‘humanist heroes’.

Andrew West is photographer-in-residence at the British Humanist Association.

Mr Ellis Collins, is 29 from Nottinghamshire. He is currently re-taking his GCSE’s after 13 years hoping to get out a dead end job. He also enjoys Philosophy and Psychology.