The best I can do this evening is to quote the opening words of a short book on morality and religion that I have just read - "In most long books there is a short book trying to get out. I have tried to liberate the short book ....."
I have had seven months notice of this evening's proceedings so I have had plenty of time to abbreviate ; my two and half thousand word lecture has escaped from the clutches of its ten thousand word jailer. If it has been injured during the escape then your questions and comments will reveal the extent of the wounds.
The title of this paper has been chosen carefully. "ONE Humanist's Faith" carries with it the implication that any given humanist does not necessarily think quite like another. Members of humanist organisations make no binding affirmation of adherence to an explicit, definitive and wide ranging creed. We have no use for 'tablets of stone' which can, at most, be subject to varying interpretation and application.
We humanists are not in the business of wall-to-wall ideology - be it religious, political or whatever; we are deeply sceptical of claimed ideological comprehensiveness.
Fifty-one years ago, when I began my brief membership of the Communist Party, one of the most chilling things said to me was "There is a Marxist Way of making a cheese sandwich; admittedly we have not yet identified this special way but we are working on it". Whether this was an example of Lenin's little-known sense of humour, revealed only when he, metaphorically, let his hair down, I do not know but it worried me a lot.
Humanist organisations resist any sort of totalitarianism; to utter the phrase 'a fundamentalist humanist' is not merely moronic; the phrase itself is oxymoronic.
So the use of the word ONE in my title is not a mere disclaimer; it is an affirmation of the autonomy that we humanists accord one another and which we believe should be accorded by, and to, all people as far as the necessary minimum of decent social cohesion permits.
Modern liberal secular humanism is a minimalist ideology and one of my objects this evening is to try to focus upon that minimal position - not with legalistic precision but so as to make it recognisable to you when you meet it in the saloon bar - or indeed in the Kirk Session. After all, an elephant is not easily defined but it is easily recognised once one has been pointed out to you.
The other key idea in my title - FAITH - is one of the areas in which I sometimes fall foul of fellow humanists. They tend to associate faith exclusively with religion; they are not religious; ergo faith is not an OK word. I think they are wrong tacitly to assume that faith coincides with religious faith; it does not. There is, I claim, a valid use of the word faith in contexts that need go no farther than this life lived in this world. We can, after all, express 'faith in human nature'. But admittedly, I use the word sparingly, mainly on such occasions as this when it would be discourteous to try to ban the word - to tell a multi-faith gathering that its participants are barking up a varied forest of wrong trees .... is not a very constructive way of going on.
The key to understanding the mental furniture of this actual humanist is to relate meaningfully the two main pieces - minimalism and faith.
By minimalism I mean such notions as: never lose sight of the data and never abandon elementary logic; I mean respect for the doctrine attributed to a great churchman, William of Occam, the doctrine of economy of hypothesis, the doctrine that urges us not to multiply entities beyond necessity.
I used to teach my chemistry students that a good theory is both as simple as possible, and as complex as necessary, to account for the data. This is not to say that speculation beyond the data is to be ruled 'out of order'; in thought, as in investment, if you don't speculate you can't accumulate but speculation, in both areas, ought to be informed, disciplined, mindful of likely risks, mindful of likely results and mindful of the possible need for damage limitation if it all goes wrong. It is one thing to build a house of cards; it is quite another to try to live in it.
We all make assumptions; we might call them first principles, axioms, truths held to be self-evident, dogma, articles of faith. One of the reasons for 'doing philosophy' is to unpack our assumptions and to evaluate them critically. Even relentless minimalism can, if we dare to unpack it, be seen to rest upon strictly unverifiable assumptions - and that admission is the point at which, I claim, the word faith has to enter the humanist vocabulary.
I identify my assumptions as including that there is a real material world independent of our consciousness of it, both that our senses give us sufficiently dependable data, and that our brains are sufficiently able to process that data, to provide us with the means of knowing something significant about that world both in the sense of knowhow (how to act effectually in the world) and in the sense of knowthat (that such and such is indeed true of the world). I assume that by using our senses and our brains we can achieve sufficiently and we can comprehend sufficiently.
These assumptions are those that we all, whatever else we may believe, actually make in the practical conduct of daily life. So the special feature of my humanist assumptions is that they are not special at all; they are held, in practice, by almost all other people. It is on this basis that a major figure in contemporary secular humanism - H J Blackham - characterised his humanism as "The Plain View"
Moreover I assume that we do not need, and perhaps cannot aspire to, absolutes either in achievement or in comprehension. Our achievements can crumble, our comprehension can prove to be insufficient but an achievement can be valuable if it does not crumble too quickly or too disastrously and comprehension is not born worthless merely by reason of our observing new data and taking new thought leading to revised updated comprehension. Both our artefacts and our ideas are, or ought to be, undergoing continuous maintenance and running repair. I tend to assume that our absolute 'knowthat' is very slight and that our comprehension is mainly by way of viable conceptual models rather than directly of whatever reality we suppose to be 'out there' somewhere.
Another of my favourite assumptions - to quote from the retired Archbishop of York, Dr John Habgood - is that "the lust for certainty may be a sin"
My assumptions could be termed dogmas or articles of faith. They are strictly unverifiable and attempts to verify them lead almost inevitably to circularity. How can sensed data validate sensed data; how can logic validate logic? As Ms Mandy Rice Davies (most of you look old enough to remember her) said in quite other connections some thirty odd years ago ... "they would, wouldn't they."
We can acquire faith in the reliability of data and the validity of logic by the works we do but, as I may be right in saying in other connections, works do not always entail faith and faith does not always guarantee works. So we cannot authenticate absolutely the dependability of observation and logic merely by citing the spectacular success that science has made so quickly, so recently, in the million or so years of the career of our species.
Our experience of processing data with logic might lead us to an article of humanist faith - that all problems we encounter have solutions within our reach - but that is an article to which we should subscribe only with great caution. Is it not equally a summary of experience that generally solutions beget new problems?
To illustrate this latter point may I digress momentarily into my own experience as a professional scientist. In the late 1940's I was one of a team investigating corrosion problems in power station boiler plant, problems that arose from the presence of sulphur in the coal being burnt to form sulphuric acid. We succeeded to some extent in lessening the trouble but only at the expense of driving more of the acid up out of the smokestack into the atmosphere. We made the boilers a bit more efficient but we made the rain a lot more acidic and nobody cared about it at the time.
So much for the philosophical background. Now for a minimum statement of contemporary humanism as I see and accept it: People like me are people who claim:
Humanists are not justly to be caricatured as 'moral relativists' - people who allegedly equate the right thing with the done thing. The done-thing and the-ought-to-be-done-thing are distinct in principle even if they are often the same in practice. This is where we get back to the evil of conformity to totalitarianism; the done thing does not necessarily come to equal the right thing merely because everybody does it and is certainly not the right thing merely because the rulers enforce it. Paul (Romans 13 1-6) is, in the humanist's opinion, quite wrong to teach, even metaphorically, that government is by-god-ordained and that to disobey it is to disobey god. We prefer the, perhaps metaphorical, teaching of Jesus about rendering unto Caesar ...
Where does all this lead to in the area of humanism vis a vis religion?
There is nothing in the statement of humanism that I made a few moments ago that REQUIRES atheism. It is perfectly coherent to believe that there is a creator-god who made us capable of being effectual humanists and who wills us to be just that and, what is more, is not necessarily a mere creator-spectator god - not necessarily a 'light-the-blue-paper-and-retire-immediately' god. It is coherent humanism to believe not only in a creator but to believe that the creator is active in helping us to be humanists and is ready to be more active if we seek his help. There is, in short, such a thing as religious humanism and there are people who describe themselves quite coherently in those terms. In the USA there is indeed considerable overlap between humanism and unitarianism.
I, it happens, am not a religious humanist. I am an atheist humanist but I am not one who says dogmatically "I pin my faith on the certainty that there is no god". To do that would be to fall into the path of possible sin that John Habgood has drawn attention to. I prefer (with respect to the memory of a notable Christian) to be an Occamite atheist - to think that the god-idea is none other than one of our old foes the 'multiplication of entities beyond necessity'. (One can value the Occam principle without agreeing with William as to its application). I consider the God-idea to raise more problems than it solves so I do not embrace that idea. I am strictly a-theistic.
But I am not just a philosophical Occamite atheist; I am a political atheist - and this is where my deepest suspicion of perceived certainty comes in. Operationally, religions cater for people's "lust for certainty" in a manifestly uncertain world and, offering plausible certainty, religious leaders of the totalitarian tendency manipulate that need in the interest of furthering their own power. The claim that such power may seem, to its possessors, to be used for the good is unfortunately not always credible but is, anyhow, irrelevant. Stendahl is supposed to have said to the effect that 'God perhaps exists but god certainly is used.' Armed with alleged certainties about god, all sorts of people all over the place are sanctimoniously intimidating, killing, maiming and bereaving as hard as they can go. Admittedly belief in god is not necessary as a route to harming one's fellows but, empirically speaking, it does seem to help bring out the worst in people.
That is something of what I mean by saying that I am a political atheist. All too often the god-idea is a template for tyranny, a blue-print for brutalty, an excuse for excesses.
Of course there is a vast difference between insufferable religious totalitarians and valued religious liberals but the more the liberals seem to doubt the less do they cater for the insatiable demand for the reassurance of certainty. The totalitarian believes at the expense of thinking; the liberal thinks at the expense of believing. You can't do business with the one; you can do business with the other and the business in question is the business of survival in a world equipped with the ready means of global destruction.
Finally - a favourite one-liner:
"Humanists are people who have no invisible means of support."