It is perhaps not surprising that the worldwide rise in religious antipathies – particularly among the Abrahamic religions: Zionism and evangelical Christianity versus radical Islam – is now being reflected in a growing stridency in the West among atheists and rationalists. On 5 November 2006, what is regarded as the first New Atheist conference, 'Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason and Survival', was held at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California. In April 2007, possibly as a counterpoint to the conference in California, a New Humanism Conference was held at Harvard. According to Doug Muder, who reported on the conference (Does humanism need to be new?, UU World Magazine, 6 Apr 2007), New Humanism sought to project itself as different from the new atheism: “Positive. Friendlier. Less threatening.” “New atheism, of course, is its own new product.” he says ” It rejects the meekness and tolerance of old atheism, which was content to let the advance of science whittle God down to size. Having witnessed the rise of fundamentalism, new atheists see religion as a dragon to be slain, not a senile giant they can allow to die in peace. In old atheist books, the quintessence of religion was the superstitious peasant or the charlatan cleric. In new atheist books it's the suicide bomber.” Writers like Richard Dawkins (“The God Delusion”), Daniel Dennett of Tufts University (“Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon”), and Sam Harris (“The End of Faith” and “Letter to a Christian Nation”) are popularising a provocative and militant form of anti-theism and potraying religion as an unmitigated evil.

Humanist position on atheism

Although it is perhaps true that a large proportion of humanists would describe themselves as atheists, the Humanist movement has never considered atheism (construed as a rejection of all concepts of God) as a necessary part of the humanist outlook. According to the Minimum Statement adopted by the IHEU: “Humanism is a democratic and ethical life stance, which affirms that human beings have the right and responsibility to give meaning and shape tho their own lives. It stands for the building of a more humane society through an ethic based on human and other natural values in the spirit of reason and free enquiry through human capabilities. It is not theistic. It does not accept a supernatural view of reality.” The sentence “It is not theistic.” needs elaboration, and it has been suggested that it should be recast thus: “It is not theistic, in the sense that it ignores the various claims about the existence of God as having no relevance to the practical conduct of human affairs, except that it categorically rejects the idea of a rewarding and punishing God who intervenes in human affairs.” In other words, the Humanist movement, as such, rejects the God of the moralists, while it ignores the God of of the philosophers as having no relevance to the conduct of human affairs. As declared in the Manifesto of the Indian Humanist Union in 1966, “Belief in an anthropomorphic God, who listens to prayers, grants boons and gives rewards and punishments; and belief in revelation, prophets and incarnations are inconsistent with the Humanist outlook. Theism not accompanied by such beliefs, as well as atheism and agnosticism, are consistent with Humanism.”

Hermann Bondi's advice

In an interview in 2002, Bondi cautioned against making atheism a: central issue: “I think in this country we are too impressed by the concept of God. Many religions, like Buddhism and Confucianism, don't have a God at all. On the other hand, Communism in its heyday had a 'sacred text' which were the writings of Marx and Lenin, and you justified an argument by referring to these writings. So it seems to me that the important thing is not the concept of God – indeed we cannot quarrel with an undefined God, for how can we disagree with a concept that is undefined. No, what makes a religion is a “revelation”. And it is the belief in a revealed truth that is the source of religious problems – that the Koran is the word of God, or the Holy Bible is the judge of everything. So in arguments with Christians, when you come to the word God you have already lost the battle. You must stress the revelation, that's where the real disagreement lies, because if you are driven to a position where you have to deny the existence of an undefined quantity you are in a logical absurdity.” (Sir Hermann Bondi, talking to BHA News in Spring 2002. Emphasis added.) Surprisingly this sensible advice has largely been ignored.

Some advocates of atheism have devised elaborate arguments and definitions to avoid (perhaps not deliberately) falling into the trap mentioned by Bondi. For example, Ramendra quotes Hiorth as saying : “Atheism is characterized by a deliberate (that is, chosen) absence of belief in the existence of gods. Some atheists go further, and believe that particular gods, or all gods, do not exist. Lacking belief in Gods is often referred to as the “weak atheist” position. Believing that gods do not (or cannot) exist is known as “strong atheism”. ” (See page 263) The distinction here is clearly between the absence of belief and the denial (or rejection) of a belief. There can be no question of a logical inconsistency where the absence of belief is involved; and what has been described as 'weak atheism' is better described as non-theism. The so-called 'strong atheism' which involves the proposition: “I do not know, or care, what your concept of God is, I hold it to be false.”, apart from getting into the logical absurdity against which Bondi had warned us, smacks of a dogmatism quite alien to the humanist ethos. As Williams wrote in Wired magazine: “Unfortunately, the New Atheism seems to illustrate the adage that we are in danger of becoming what we hate, with an attention-grabbing rhetorical superstructure that far outstrips the scholarship and philosophical substance of its intellectual foundations.” This can perhaps best be described as aggressive atheism.

Pragmatic approach

It is perhaps true that the most influential thinkers in the Humanist movement are also modernist philosophers; making it difficult for them not to take issue with the God of the philosophers. There is an element of truth in Roger Scruton's observation: “Modern people are frequently puzzled by the idea of God; and for the modernist this puzzlement becomes a god. (Hence the barely-concealed passion of the modernist when he addresses those questions which were once pre-empted by religion. It is this cryptoreligious passion that draws people to modernism: let us at least believe in our unbelief!)”

Pragmatic Humanism is concerned with only those beliefs and attitudes which have a bearing on the conduct of human affairs. Belief in the existence of an anthropomorphic God who rewards and punishes, and responds to prayers, strikes at the very roots of the Humanist worldview, which is based on the autonomous nature of morality. The God of Spinoza, Whitehead or Einstein is of no interest to Humanists qua humanists. A total rejection of all concepts of God, being advocated so fervently by the 'new atheists', is not only logically untenable, but also unnecessary – and essentially counter-productive – from the humanist point of view.

“Rejecting rejection and denouncing denunciation are necessary steps, but will something bloom in this freshly plowed garden?” asks Doug Muder as he eloquently closes his report on the Harvard Conference. “Inside the encrustations of hostilit

y, pride, and other generic human weaknesses, humanism's positive core presents the same challenge as ever: to combine sophisticated reason with naïve goodness, to celebrate the world as it stands before us, and to (gently and lovingly) coax it to be better than it ever has been. The what of humanism isn't new and doesn't need to be. But the how is something we have never gotten right. How do we unite communities without enemies? How do we organize without coercion? How do we love what is and yet strive for what can be? How do we dream without giving our loyalty to fantasy worlds and betraying the only world we can live in? And if a few people here or there manage to answer those questions in their own lives, how do we capture those answers in words and stories and images that anyone can understand? Maybe soon we'll start seeing new answers to those questions. That would really be a new humanism.”

But Humanism is not a matter of fluctuating fashions. Perhaps what we need is to go back to the large and tolerant vision of its founders.
Vir Narain

I offer one possibility that we may not have fully considered – that there really are no Humanists, just atheists representing themselves as Humanists because they are intellectual social climbers. My recommendation for anybody seeking to understand what Humanism really stands for to simply look up “Humanism” in the online Encyclopedia Britannica, and the summary there written by Robert Grudin.

There is hardly a word about atheism in its origins and history, instead it speaks to Man's awareness of his own role in Life and our Universe, outside the envelope of orthodox religion, for or against, and its revival of the Greek and Roman classics in support of this new understanding.

It is very evident that Humanism must be re-invented once more, because we are poor descendants of the men who rescued it in the first place (the 14th to 16th centuries).

Your comments are much appreciated, Vir.