"The Plain View"

"Humanism claims to be distinctively the lay view of the world. It is the ordinary way of taking hold of the world, straightforwardly, by contrast with the mysteries, the far-fetched, the ancestral and the immemorial. Contrary to what many suspect or complain of, Humanism not only has no mumbo-jumbo, it has no experts. Intellectuals and the man in the street speak the same language here. Humanism is the Plain View." H J BLACKHAM.

The principle of Occam's Razor is the principle of conceptual minimalism - that "entities should not be multiplied except from necessity". This means that axioms and consequent beliefs, theories, suppositions, guesses, should be as simple as possible, but as complex as necessary, to accommodate the accepted data. If ideas are constructed other than as dictated by the data then there is no sufficient control over them; the salutary discipline of correspondence is lost and the seductiveness of runaway coherence is allowed free rein. Ideas degenerate into merely plausible fantasy perhaps needing the sustenance of further plausible fantasy. This rescue of fantasy by resort to further fantasy is termed rationalisation. "Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive" is no less true when the practised deception is tacit self-deception.

The irony of this principle being attributed to a fourteenth century cleric, when classic Christian theism was at its magnificent zenith, is that it does much to demolish latter-day religion, as ordinarily understood, while it tends to reinforce sceptical liberal secular humanism and to rescue such humanism from lapsing into yet another pseudo-religion. It has been, ideologically speaking, 'downhill all the way' for Christianity since the days of the putatively wise William. Secularists should take heed.

Wielding the famous razor, it is claimed that the minimum necessary secular liberal humanist assumptions (that can be wrong but which humanists gamble on being right) can be expressed as follows:

THOUGHT IS NOT FUTILE.

This may seem at first sight to be a resounding platitude but when we look around us we see people, time after time, getting into difficulties for want of taking a little fairly obvious thought on what they are doing. Humanists, not claiming to be in receipt of any 'revelation' from outwith human life, simply have to respect logic and use their limited human brains - informed as best as may be by the human senses.

So, 1) Humanism is intellectual.

WE LIVE IN A REAL WORLD ACCESIBLE TO US VIA OUR SENSES.

This may seem at first sight to be another resounding platitude but when we look around us we see people, time after time, getting into difficulties because they choose, it often seems perversely, to ignore what is actually going on around them while, instead, seeming to assume that they can rely upon wishful thinking, 'gut feelings' and such formulae as 'it stands to reason that xyz is the case'.

So, 2) Humanism is realist, materialist and empiricist.

NECESSARY DISTINCTIONS ARE TO BE DRAWN BETWEEN FACT, PROBABILITY, OPINION, BELIEF, DISCIPLINED HYPOTHESIS AND RUNAWAY FANTASY.

This may seem at first sight to be another resounding platitude but when we look around us we see people, time after time, confounding these categories. All manner of propositions are presented as fact when they actually amount to no more than examples of one of the other categories. The most far-fetched opinions are often, in defiance of Occam's Razor, presented as ultimate beliefs for which the believer is prepared to make trouble, is prepared even to kill or to be killed.

Humanists see the need to resist the temptation to place a proposition higher up the scale of 'racing certainty' than is strictly necessary in the light of empirical data. We depend ultimately upon empirical data but blind faith in such data is itself a trap. 'It has always been so, so it will always be so' is the fallacy of the absolute dependability of induction (inferring general truths from particular cases). We even have to be wary of that. We have to act as though induction were dependable but, paradoxically, we have to accept that it is not absolutely dependable - induction, we recognise, is a necessary risk. (The parable of Russell's Chicken is noteworthy at this point - a certain chicken was fed daily by the same man at the same time and the bird assumed, on blind faith in the absolute dependability of experience, that this would go on for ever; one day the man came, as usual, and wrung its neck).

So, 3) Humanism is sceptical both in face of ideas and in face of data.

HUMANISTS DENY AND DSICLAIM INFALLIBLE AUTHORITY, FORBIDDEN SUBJECTS, PRESCRIBED OR PROSCRIBED PREMISES AND PRE-EMPTED CONCLISIONS.

This may seem at first sight to be a string of resounding platitudes but when we look around us we see people, time after time, getting into difficulties for want of recognition of these seemingly obvious things. Advances have often been made by thinking the supposedly unthinkable.

So, 4) Humanism is freethinking and open minded.

HUMANISTS SEE NO SHARP DISTINCTION BETWEEN 'BODY' AND 'SPIRIT'.

They see no reason to postulate a distinct entity called the soul - an entity that is supposed to have an eternal 'life' of some kind independently of the body but cohabiting with it in 'this life'. Such dualist models have no basis; they are prime examples of 'anti-Occamism' - the multiplication of entities beyond the dictates of necessity. There is no a priori ground for supposing that I, simply as my living, conscious and humanly functioning body, cannot enjoy a warm bath, a supporting friendship or a Schubert piano sonata; there is no sufficient reason for supposing that my living functioning body has to be considered as equipped to enjoy the first of these things but not the other two. The perceived need to postulate a spirit or soul to enable the 'higher things' to be part of our lives arises simply from a tacit a priori assumption that material systems cannot do other than function at a 'lower' level. This tacit assumption is often encapsulated in the use of such phrases as 'mere matter'. This usage is tacit circularity. What material systems can and cannot do is shown by empirical observation, not a conclusion to be pre-empted .

It is no accident that dualism presents the unsolved 'mind-body' problem. There is, in principle, no such problem; it is the price of dualism - not a first-order problem at all.

So, 5) Humanists are, philosophically, monists and materialists.

HUMAN BEINGS ARE NECESSARILY SOCIAL BEINGS ......

..... not from 'contracting' to bargain freedom for security but because of the way we are; we cannot choose to be not-social any more than we can choose to be not-vertebrate. We assume on the lack of evidence to the contrary (vide William of Occam) that we are collectively 'on our own' and individually limited. So, to be a viable species, we have to work together pooling our thoughts and our resources with the maximum feasible tolerance, self-discipline and mutual respect. And, in so far as 'this' life is the only life we know we have, we have to respect our shared home - this planet.

So, 6) Humanism is liberal, democratic and 'green'.

[This is not to say that the Liberal, Democratic, or Liberal-Democratic or Green Parties are necessarily humanist or that humanists are necessarily attracted to such parties in practice; parties and humanists are not always what they are cracked up to be!]

HUMAN BEHAVIOUR IS NOT PURELY INSTINCTIVE.

Unlike the behaviour patterns of some social species (the social insects for example) human behaviour is evidently not governed entirely by instinct. Our suite of instincts is not only incomplete as a determinant of behaviour; we have some instincts that are essentially destructive and anti-social. This fact is the basis of our need for morality. It is the IS that underlies our need for the OUGHT. (The question can OUGHT be related to IS as a matter of logical necessity is a scholastic question. Morality is, practically, a shared need).

Most human beings subscribe to the basic moral values of truth, kindliness and respect for other people, for their personal autonomy. (Or, to be more precise, few people would admit to making virtues of the opposites of these values).

Since we enjoy no revelation and admit of no a priori certainties, our humanist ethics is not heavily prescriptive.. Ethical inquiry is the means whereby these values can be actualised in practice - including, if necessary, the means whereby these values can be reconciled with one another.

So, 7) Humanist ethics leans towards rule-utilitarianism rather than to absolute rules.

COMMON GROUND WITH LIBERAL NON-HUMANISTS.

It will be apparent that many of these axioms are acceptable to non-humanists - explicitly acceptable or implicitly acceptable but acceptable just the same. Were this not so there could be no grounds for common action by humanists and non-humanists. In fact there are such grounds in many areas of endeavour.

There are however basic differences between modern humanism and traditional religion (and in what follows the adjectives 'traditional' and 'modern' are to be taken as understood; there are many minority religious attitudes to which the following remarks do not necessarily apply).

Humanists properly regard their axioms as for ever questionable; mostly, those axioms cannot be proved without circularity. The senses cannot validate sense data - we have to assume that our senses give us dependable guidance as to a real 'out there'. Likewise, logic cannot validate logic - "it would wouldn't it."

Religious believers rest upon the perceived absolute truth of their axioms, their dogmas.

So, 8) the humanist's axioms are perceived as his Achilles' Heel; the religionist's dogmas are perceived as his Citadel of Truth. A corollary of this is that Humanists accumulate a body of revisable experience while religionists accumulate a deposit of faith.

BOTH DEDUCTION AND INDUCTION ARE TO BE USED WITH CAUTION.

Religionists and humanists alike accept that - to quote from an earlier paragraph - "induction . . . is a necessary risk." But humanists, placing no absolute trust in a priori assertions, insist also that . . .

9) deduction (arguing from the general to the particular) is a risk.

THE "LUST FOR CERTAINTY".

If William of Occam, putatively, set us on the right road then a contemporary Christian, Dr John Habgood, (formerly Archbishop of York) reminds us to stay on it by telling us that "the lust for certainty may be sin."

Humanists cannot 'do business' with those dogmatic religionists who pin their faith to absolutes - any more than the different kinds of absolute dogmatists can, honestly, do business with one another. But there are other religious believers who pin their faith in honest inquiry - even if humanists do not necessarily agree with the answers they suggest and see fit to believe. Humanists are not religious as ordinarily understood; humanism and religions (of both the dogmatic and the inquiring kinds) necessarily interact in respect of epistemology, ethics and the perennial question what does it actually mean to be human?

So 10) Humanists can and should maintain dialogue with the more questioning religious believers and to do so is to mutual advantage.