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Humanism is a philosophical and ethical alternative to the religious worldview. It is a naturalistic and nontheistic life stance that seeks to promote a more humane society through the instrumentality of reason, science, technology and free inquiry. Humanism opposes all that belittles or enchains the Human while supporting anything that liberates and ennobles. Humanism has no army, no police and no gun-boats. It pursues its ideals through educational and peaceful means.

 

Humanism provides people with an authentic nonreligious worldview that dispenses with religion altogether. It replaces the theistic, supernatural outlook with a naturalistic one. In the moral field, it inculcates moral decency, moral excellence and social responsibility. In the cultural field, it promotes the arts and encourages artistic self-expression and works of creative imagination. In the social field, the humanist blue-print is humane and is drawn from reason and experience, intended to enhance human freedom and human welfare here on earth. Some of the elements of the humanist social programme are Peace, Dialogue and non-violence, Secularism, Democracy and human rights, Freedom of thought and expression, Equality of opportunity, Nondiscrimination, Unimpeded technological progress, Separation of religion and state, Protection of the environment and care for future generations, Global internationalism, Happiness and abundant life for all.

 

The only form of government worthy of the human is democracy, and the buffer against political oppression is human rights. Governments must offer their citizens equal opportunity to attain the good life and freedom to pursue their own legitimate objectives as creatively as possible. Humanism demands a secular state with no element of theocracy or clericalism.

 

The Religious Worldview

 

Humanism and religion are two incompatible worldviews, sharply contrasting with and contradictory

to each other. One may profess either one or the other, never both.

 

Are you curious about the stars, what is holding them in place and why they never collide? How did life begin on earth? Do you wonder about the origin of the sexes and the species, or about how the first human appeared? Do you know the purpose of human life?

 

God is the answer to all these questions! He did it, and for His own purpose. He made the world and keeps it in being. Without Him, the universe would immediately collapse and, in fact, disappear. The riddle of the world is solved! Apart from God, there are also spiritual substances (souls, angels, devils), which exist outside the mind. These substances are also endowed with personality and serve as mediators of good or evil outcomes to the human.

 

This religious or theistic point of view is charming in its simplicity and comforting in its promise, but is completely lacking in empirical evidence. No theist will ever show you God or any direct, observable and incontrovertible evidence of Him. Nobody ever saw anything being created – it all happens in the dark, away from all observation, in the simple minds of pious people. God is a necessary being in the speculative logic of theistic philosophers, never in the laboratories, microscopes or telescopes of empirical researchers.

 

The Alternative Worldview

 

For the empiricist or the skeptic, or simply, for the Humanist, the complete explanation of all that goes on in this world is to be found in this world, through scientific inquiry.

 

To begin with, the world is self-existent for the Humanist. That the world is self-existent means, first of all, that it was not caused by anything outside of itself. Secondly, it means that the world has no beginning and no end. Matter is eternal and indestructible – its non-existence is absurd and unthinkable as there would be no mind to think it. A total vacuum is impossible. If ever there was total vacuum, then, for ever, there would never be anything in existence: for ex nihilo, nihil fit. Nothing comes out of nothing. Therefore, the existence of the universe is an ontological necessity. It cannot notexist. It exists, not from being caused, but from the very nature of existence.

 

Thomas Aquinas made a few attempts to prove the existence of God a posteriori, from the basic characteristics of the universe. But God’s existence cannot be proved from the characteristics of the earth. From the wonders of the world, we can only demonstrate the marvelous, stupendous and ecstatic dimension of the earth itself, the physical, chemical, electrical, geometrical and artistic properties thereof, not the existence of another being.

 

Aquinas assumes that the atheistic posture could only be valid if the universe were motionless, changeless, formless, disorderly and, in fact, chaotic. But who is he to dictate to existence? Existence asserts itself in the form it has, of necessity, to take. Unfortunately for the theists, Existence chose to appear in the form of an organized cosmos, strung in a bundle of ineluctable laws, caught in interminable motion, obedient to Law – the first being the law of order – with design and programming as its existential concomitants, and, above all, indebted to no one for the way it is. To exist is to be powerful, orderly, creative, pregnant with potentiality, subject to evolution.It is to be beautiful, fantastic, complex, marvelous and breathtaking. That is the existence that exists, not Aquinas’ putative chaos.

 

Naturalism

 

In the long run, Nature is self-explanatory. But in the short run, we have not got all the explanations; hence, the need for continuous research and alternative worldviews to the theistic approach. Naturalism is one such worldview.

 

Naturalism is a specific mental outlook based on confidence in the empirical, experimental or scientific method of reaching the truth about the Human and the world, or of guiding action. It is a rejection of faith, revelation, authority, tradition, a priori reasoning, and intuition as sources of truth or guidance. For the naturalist, all meaning originates in experience, and all beliefs must be tested by experience, in accordance with the general cannons of the scientific method. The Human is wholly a part of this natural world in space and time, both as to body and mind and as to origin and destiny. No element of our being is immortal, and we are only an incidental product of the world process, whether considered as individuals or as a species.

 

There are no absolute values or transcendental norms known to us in non-empirical ways. All values and norms are in some sense a function and product of human attitudes, interests, needs, satisfactions, individual and social, or at least, of natural processes and regularities. They have no support of a supernatural or cosmic nature, even if they have some sort of universal validity. Humanism is based on this naturalist outlook. A humanist has chosen the alternative life stance. He has rejected all the trappings of supernaturalism: god, angels, devils, saints, priests, orthodoxy, prophets, holy books, miracles, dogmas, censorship, souls, revelation, salvation, immortality, heaven, hell etc. He has denied them all. He enjoys freedom from religion.

 

Humanists are Atheists

 

"Who made you?" is a loaded rhetorical catechism question. "God made me" is the wrong, invidious answer. The question "Who made the world?" implicitly and fraudulently excludes the correct answer from the start. The world was not made, and, therefore, nobody could have made it. The task remains for man to trace the world back to its true source within Nature, – even beyond the Big Bang.

 

Mere belief cannot make God exist. "Belief" is not the same thing as "knowledge" and belief without objective evidence is gratuitous, and what is gratuitously asserted can be gratuitously denied. The general belief in God is instinctive and intuitive, rather than rational. It arises from a feeling of awe, humility and reverence at the vastness, the complexity, orderliness and beauty of the universe. This instinctive feeling is preserved by custom, handed down by tradition, enforced by the authority of parents, teachers and elders and nurtured by the artifice of priests.

 

Humanism can only flourish in an atheistic ambience. Because there is no God, the human is free, and the human is the greatest being in existence. The only ethics fit for the human is ethics based on man’s reason and experience, based on human dignity, autonomy and freedom, based on the highest ethical values. Without atheism, ethics ends up being authoritarian, oppressive and unacceptable.

 

The Humanist worldview has rightly been defined as "atheism with an ethical programme". One element without the other is untenable. An atheist without a humane moral code is not a humanist.

 

Religionists and atheists cannot follow the same moral code in so far as the former are guided by faith and authority while the latter are led by reason and experience. It is easy to indicate some issues on which the two groups would instantly disagree: divorce, contraception, abortion, sex education, euthanasia, cloning, genetic engineering, bioethics, homosexuality, the death penalty, autocracy, blasphemy laws, fatwas, circumcision, crusades and jihads, gender equality, separation of church and state, etc.

 

Atheism and Ethics

 

Theists fear that if it is established and widely accepted that there is no God, there will immediately be moral anarchy in the world, since God for them is the ultimate basis of moral values: truth, justice and love. Without God, morality loses its anchor and must float adrift on the ocean of human caprices and fallible judgments. Above all, the belief in divine retribution or justice after death, in heaven or hell, meted out by a just and allknowing Judge is the only effective brake on men's arbitrary behaviour here on earth: so they say. But prison yards are full of convicts who believe in God.

 

Humanist ethics is, in fact, superior to theological ethics in so far as the former is based on reason, experience and consensus while the latter is based on authority and revelation. Humanists have moral principles and their own distinctive secular ethics, divorced from religion and grounded in human values. The mission of the International Humanist and Ethical Union should be to wean all men and women from the obfuscation of religion – the Way of the Multitude, – to the light of reason, science and free inquiry.

Humanism in every nation must be built on a solid foundation of atheism and on the foundationmembership of a few convinced and articulate atheists. Only then will it be strong. Only then will it be true.

 

This is the abbreviated text of the June 2004 World Humanist Day Lecture of the Nigerian Humanist Movement and the IHEU-sponsored Tai Solarin Memorial Conference at the Mayflower School in Ikenne, Nigeria.

 

Center for Naturalism

 

Visit the Center for Naturalism at www.naturalism.org This non-profit educational organization focuses on increasing public awareness of naturalism and its implications for social and personal well-being. The

Center seeks to foster the understanding that human beings and their behavior are fully caused, entirely

natural phenomena, and that human flourishing is best achieved in the light of such understanding.

 

Based on knowledge derived from the physical and social sciences, the world view that is naturalism holds that human beings are fully included in nature. The marvelous fact that science tells us is that we are connected and united, in each and every aspect of our being, to the natural world. There is, under naturalism, nothing supernatural about us that places us above or beyond nature, and this is something to be celebrated, not feared. Practically speaking, naturalism holds that an individual’s development and behavior are entirely the result of prior and surrounding conditions, both genetic and environmental.

 

Naturalism as a guiding philosophy can help create a better world by illuminating more precisely the conditions under which individuals and societies flourish, and by providing a tangible, real basis for

connection and community.