Main Edition
US
FR
God may be dead, but suffering is still with us (SERGEI SUPINSKY/AFP via Getty Images)
“Jesus descends in dread array to judge the scarlet whore”. This was Charles Wesley’s hot take on the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. It was a terrible response even by 18th-century standards. Tens of thousands of people were swallowed up by the earth and drowned by the tsunami that followed. Wesley believed it was God’s punishment for the Inquisition.
Others had a different explanation. Voltaire satirised the Christian idea that the world was being ultimately organised by some benevolent Deity. In seeking to defend God in the face of human suffering, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz had claimed that this was “the best of all possible worlds”. In other words, of all the possible worlds that God could create, this one, with all its pain and suffering, was the best one available. No one really bought this argument. Voltaire took Leibniz’s phrase and turned it into a sarcastic attack on the naively religious. The Lisbon earthquake is often pointed to as the moment the European intelligentsia lost its faith in God. Atheism entered the Enlightenment during the period of its conception. Reason and God were no longer compatible.
But suffering and pain are still with us. Mariupol is being starved and bludgeoned into submission as if it were some medieval siege. The innocent are blown up in their beds, maternity hospitals are targeted with high-tech missiles. And dark talk of nuclear war has returned, with nightmares of a Third World War. Has the age of reason really served us any better than the age of faith?
Back when I used to teach Philosophy of Religion in Oxford, I spent many hours sitting in tutorials with undergraduates discussing the “problem of evil”. If God is all powerful and perfectly good, then why is there great suffering in the world? One can, of course, discuss the difference between natural evil and that caused by human beings. But whatever the cause, great suffering is often cast as the slam dunk of atheism. Now that God is supposed to be dead, and suffering remains, I wonder if humanism could be said to have an evil problem too? It’s not quite the same problem, but it is adjacent: if human beings are good and increasingly powerful, how come there is so much suffering in the world?
Scrolling through humanist websites on Ukraine, one of the interesting things is that you can find a kind of defence of humanity in the face of human evil that is not unlike the defence that Christians sometimes use to defend the existence of God in the face of human evil. Consider this, on Ukraine, from the explicitly “humanist” Gold Foundation website:
“Still, through the scenes of rubble and destruction, we see humanity. Humanity in the healthcare heroes dodging artillery as they work tirelessly on the frontlines of the conflict. Humanity in those rising to defend their homes, their country, and democracy at large. Humanity in the charitable donations and mobilization here in the United States and around the globe.”
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeI am a Christian, but I am not about to start attacking humanists for their choice of unbelief (which nevertheless involves a different set of beliefs – there’s no getting away from it).
This article does seem to be specifically provocative.
On the matter of Good and Evil, I’ll just quote something I’ve recently been reading:
God is not responsible for the horrors which come to pass through man’s misuse of his freedom . . . . man’s freedom is indeed a terrible fact, and that when men misuse that freedom odious and terrible things may happen. But God does not interfere by force to prevent them. He shares all the suffering which they cause – “In all our afflictions He is afflicted” – but He does not take away man’s freedom, because it is our possession of that freedom which gives us the clue to the real meaning of human life. Were freedom gone there would, indeed, be no sinners, but also no saints. There would be no personalities purified, refined, and strengthened by carrying the responsibilities of life – no love, no pity, no heroism, no tenderness and no self-sacrifice. The glory would be gone from life.
I’m a humanist and a philosopher and I think I can take a stab at Giles’s challenge.
I can’t speak for all humanists because we don’t have a single hymn book that we all sing from but it seems to me that Giles is comparing apples to dishwashers.
Christianity says that God is good, not that Christians are good. Are you comparing humanists to God? Or to Christians? Clearly, humanists are not God so there is no expectation that we must be perfect. No problem of evil there. Christians are not perfect either according to Christianity.
i’ve never heard a humanist claim that all humans are good. I have heard them claim that because we are responsible for our own meaning and well being, we **should** be kind to one another if we want to make the world better. But we don’t have any authority to make the rest of you listen.
Speaking for myself now, I think most people in the world are mostly good but it only takes a handful of bad guys (especially a handful of bad guys with tanks and bombs) to screw things up for the rest of us.
No problem of evil that I can see and no great mystery to solve.
No, humanists replace God with a divinized Humanity – hence the transferral from belief in the intrinsic good of an infinite Creator, to the intrinsic good of Humanity, and emphasis on Humanity’s will to shape its own horizons, to gain increasing agency and control over the world & itself.
Humanity however is just another abstraction, which doesn’t exist. There is no unified Humanity which can have a unified goal- or indeed unitary ideas of the Good. There are only disparate groups of people pulling in all directions, conflicting, tormenting one another, etc
In some ways Christian ideas like original sin do carry a clearer and more realistic expression of this – plus the belief that the Good, represented in God, is not worldly – can never be perfectly reflected in the world
You must belong to a different denomination of humanists. Mine does not replace God with a divinized Humanity.
yeh most people who call themselves humanists have a pretty glib understanding of their own beliefs, the history of the enlightenment, and their own Christian inheritance. Something woolly to do with – ”being rational”, being kind to others, some greeting card level shit – but essentially human mastery and empowerment are fundamental to any humanism – the idea of a supposedly omnipotent and omniscient God develops into a focus on a potentially omnipotent and omniscient Humanity. The idea of humans as moral beings playing their parts in a story under the judgment of God develops into the idea of humans creating their own stories in History, subject to the moral judgments of Posterity
“yeh most people who call themselves humanists have a pretty glib understanding of their own beliefs”
Of course! You know what people believe better than they do. What fun you must be at parties.
Christians were always supposed to be the bond slaves of Christ.
To be a bond slave in the ancient world was an unenviable position to be in. It’s no better today where it exists. There’s certainly no freedom in it.
Freedom is a present-day concern, a product of the enlightenment. After all, Jesus declared that he did the Father’s will. He never claimed to have freedom.
If there is any freedom, it is in the offers of the Tempter in the wilderness. These amount to achieving Christ’s purposes but by means other than those set by His Father.
C S Lewis paraphrased Paul by putting it that either we say to God, Thy will be done, or He will say to us, Thy will be done.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but hasn’t war and cold blooded geopolitics existed throughout human history?
Earliest known war graves date to about 14,000 years ago, in Jebel Sahaba on the Egyptian-Sudanese border, at a time when sedentary groups were suffering as the Nile dried up. Of the 3,000 skeletons found around the world that date to between 15,000 and 50,000 years ago, less than a handful show any signs of human violence.
TBH population densities were so low that it likely made no sense to go to war, and there were lots of evolutionary incentives to collaborate for 95% of the time that Sapiens have walked the earth. There is lots of data to support the idea that a rudimentary moral sense is innate, and with the exception of the 1-3% of the population who are sociopathic, nearly all of us have an inner moral voice that makes us feel bad when we do bad things, putting the emotional brakes on ruthless behaviour through cognitive dissonance.
Tragically, we are masters at subverting our own moral sense. Convincing ourselves that we are doing good makes it so much easier to be bad. Violent criminals imprisoned for serious offences believe that they are more honest, moral, trustworthy and kind than an average member of the population, and only marginally less law-abiding. We have an abundance of self-serving cognitive biases that reaffirm that we are the good guys, making it easier for highly educated people to justify everything from slavery to genocide.
In a polarised world, people struggle to see how good people could possibly disagree with them, unless they are too dumb or brainwashed to think for themselves. It takes hard work to challenge our own biases, and it’s more emotionally satisfying to hold ourselves in high esteem. Mindfulness and humility tend to be in short supply.
I have no doubt that many of the Russian leaders who ordered this invasion genuinely believe that they are doing the right thing, and rescuing their fellow Russians from an evil regime. We don’t have to tackle the problem of evil so much as the problem of (self) righteousness.
How is it that our moral sense allows us to ‘subvert it’. If it is moral, how can it produce its opposite? Can figs be gathered from briers?
Is humility in short supply because my concern to be good is really self-concern in a more refined mode?
That violence was impractical in tiny prehistoric populations says nothing about whether the people of those times were more or less moral than those of today.
Our instinctive moral voice that makes us feel bad when we do bad things, and feel good when we do good things, is not bad in itself, but if we dupe ourselves into believing that bad actions are justified, then our wider moral sense has been subverted, undermined, compromised. As Paul/Saul knew, moral zeal can lead to persecution in the absence of a Damascene epiphany. Unfortunately, we are very good at rationalizing our actions, and coming up with sophisticated excuses for our behaviour.
When the colony of Georgia, which includes much of modern-day Alabama and Mississippi, was founded, slavery was illegal. That ban lasted for decades, until the soaring profits from cotton production made the educated, white, Christian planters “stark mad after negroes”. The ban on slavery was overturned in the 1750s. Despite appalling infant mortality, domestic breeding programmes eventually led to an increase in the slave population, which was touted by Senator JC Calhoun as “a positive good”. He compared the treatment of elderly slaves favourably to life in the dark, satanic mills of Dickensian urban slums.
Similarly, the lawyer Bruno Muller, who told a two-year-old Jewish girl that she had to die so that the German people could live, was convinced by the Social Darwinist argument that in a world of scarce resources, there was a moral imperative for the strongest to survive: “Thou shalt preserve the species”. Two thirds of the leaders of the Einsatzkommando killing squads had PhDs.
We have the moral faculties to challenge our behaviour, but we need to overcome our unconscious cognitive biases, and our instinct to shy away from uncomfortable conversations. Humility is challenging because it involves examining our conscience. I don’t see our need to feel good about ourselves as a more refined form of self-concern, and I don’t think that our hunter-gatherer ancestors were any more or less moral than ourselves, but I do think that the inner moral voice we inherited from them has the potential to guide us to a better path, if only we are willing to listen properly.
If I may nitpick, there were Einsatzgruppen or Sonderkommandos but not Einsatzkommandos. The “two thirds were PhDs” is true of those who attended the Wannsee conference. If you have a source showing the same to be true of the Einsatzgruppen/Sonderkommandos I’d be grateful to see it. Thanks in advance.
No problem – the source is Timothy Snyder, and the correct figure was 60%, not two thirds (apologies). See Bloodlands, Chapter 4 – in my 2010 Vintage paperback copy on page 126, referring to the liquidation of the Polish intelligentsia by ideological soldiers: “They were in some sense killing their peers: fifteen of the twenty-five Einsatzgruppe and Einsatzkommando commanders had doctorates.”
Fraser writes as though atheism is a religion rivalling his own. It is not.
It’s a system where the universe operates under natural laws including mathematics and physics, and eventually evolution. It doesn’t require humans to be good to be true, which religion does.
Humanism and atheism are not necessarily the same thing. The ‘problem of evil’ remains as a problem for most religions. There’s no god in atheism to explain or blame for evil. Humanism looks at what humans should do.
Stripped back Giles’ argument is that Faith helps you bear the effects of ‘evil’ but still doesn’t explain why Faith requires you to put up with evil.
Second paragraph is a really good summary of Giles’ points.
But it’s a confused one – just because people have to have an element of faith doesn’t bear anything to do with the God that someone else might believe in. It’s Giles’ God in Giles’ mind – not theirs.
I might have faith about anything – that my football team might avoid relegation, or that my daughter might get into Oxford – doesn’t mean there has to be a deeper explanation or guiding hand behind it.
As you suggest, Atheism and Humanism are not the same thing, and the headline does not represent the article properly.
Christianity doesn’t require humans to be good; it is based on the fact that they are not.
Alright, it requires God to be good. He has to be omniscient, omnipotent and benign. This is difficult to reconcile with the world as it is.
If He doesn’t know that child A has leukemia He’s not omniscient; if He can’t act He’s not omnipotent; if He won’t then He’s not benign.
A humanist does the right thing because it’s right. It contributes to the overall welfare of society. Does the Christian do right for that reason, or because he knows he’ll be punished after death?
D Nemo – you ought to read some Dostoyevsky
There is no punishment after death for a Christian. A Christian does right as a response to Christ’s death. All Christians also sin but they are forgiven sinners because they have accepted Christ’s death as payment for their wrongdoing.
Christianity would not exist if humans were good. It is God’s answer to the fact that they are not!
Giles, whatever the shortcomings, you are correct that at least Christians have attempted to deal with the problem of evil and not ignore it. Fascinating too that in the welfare West God is redundant; but in the First World where suffering is palpable and sometimes daily, God is important.
It’s a fair question to ask whether humanism has the equivalent of original sin or depraved tendency which infuses every person: what is it – “the line dividing good and evil passes through every human heart”! Appealing to evolution isn’t a satisfactory answer, especially if we are meant to be the epitome of its fitness regime. Perhaps one way to test this is to ask what our world would be like without any humans.
Fair comment. To address your point:
No it isn’t in terms of finding meaning – but that’s not what people are trying to do. It’s part of understanding however. I think this is why Religious people find atheists confusing. We have accepted that there most likely isn’t meaning to anything. That doesn’t mean there isn’t value to things. These are separate.
Also that’s a misunderstanding of evolution to suggest we are the epitome of the fitness regime. Most able to survive or most evolved to succeed is not mutually incompatible with destructive tendencies and faults. The whole point of evolution is that it is random. It’s an incomprehensibly large mix of competing and complementary factors that brings each species to where it is.
Again – forget the meaning part – there is no end state or end goal or “best” as such. Just what happens to have been successful so far given the circumstances – good and bad.
It could be argued that evolution selects for ‘evil’ above ‘goodness’ in humanity. The genes of Genghis Khan are apparently ubiquitous still, whilst St Augustine’s influence is less fundamental.
Yeah see what you’re saying. Not sure I’d be so pessimistic.
I would argue that evolution just is. It doesn’t care about good or evil.
And though point taken on evils apparent success at times – but a counter would be we have not been under a perpetual khanate.
There is great evolutionary benefit in cooperation, peace growth. Indeed it’s how humans have been so successful. We are at peace more than we are at war.
Theory has it that, in many ‘primitive’ societies, most men had little chance of passing on their genes; this privilege was reserved for chiefs and rulers (who had multiple wives or harems).
This is perhaps not as detrimental as it sounds, if the top dog was also the most resourceful, intelligent and physically impressive. And every mating is a roll of the dice anyway, so the mother’s genes get to exact their revenge
The reference to Genghis Khan is because I read a study where the genomes of relevant populations were sequenced and a huge proportion were his direct descendants.
Apparently, he raped and pillaged his way across Asia and preferred to do most of the former himself…
As TH Huxley pointed out back in the nineteenth century, a great deal of human behaviour, good and bad, can be explained by natural selection, inherited from our prehuman primate ancestors. What natural selection cannot explain is how we humans come to possess the ability to distinguish (or attempt to distinguish) between one and the other.
Of course natural selection can explain how we can distinguish between good and bad (even my dog knows when it’s been bad).
It’s about identifying how our behaviour is judged in the eyes of other people – more concretely, those people in our ‘in-group’. That’s a combination of instinctual empathy and social learning.
In a process of socialisation, children learn to control their self-centered emotional behaviour (up to the age of 6) and what is good and bad. If this socialisation is stunted, then those children become more at risk of factors like committing felonies where they aren’t adequately able to determine social boundaries.
Note the very great importance of ‘in-group’. If a group is considered an ‘out-group’ or a threat to a treasured truth, then all moral instincts can be suspended, leading to massive unspeakable evil by otherwise rational people. (eg witch burning, inquisition, wars of religion, wars of ideology, slavery).
Social learning then drives our changing moral landscape, in particular expanding our idea of who is in the ‘in-group’. The morality we have evolves as we learn.
The theory that the human moral sense can be accounted for by natural selection doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, as explained in detail in my book The Moral Mind. There is more to it than can be explained here. Huxley was right, but I examine it in a 21st-century context.
I’ve not read your book, but it’s extremely easy to show that there is a balance between the self and the group that establishes emergent patterns akin to morality in most animal species. Humans build on that instinct with learning, language and socialisation. Most human morality is an evolving product of long term social learning. Philosophers incorrectly tried to derive morality from pure logic or, with the religions, try to develop an idea of ‘pure’ morality, but it is more nuanced as it builds on experiences, not just reason. And ‘pure’ moralities never resolve because the act of mapping multi-dimensional actions to a single dimensional good-bad scale places those actions in a complex landscape with hills and valleys which may have multiple disconnected maxima.
You raise many interesting points.
There is much behaviour in other species that humans might choose to describe as good or bad. The moral sense is rather different: it’s making a judgement about my behaviour and that of others, in the past or the future. It involves the concepts of choice and temptation.
Frans de Waal describes early glimmerings of this in chimps. It is better developed in humans, but still inadequately. In making moral judgements we feel we are reaching out for something outside ourselves, but that something remains beyond our understanding.
The foundation of moral thinking is in feelings: the sense that murder, theft, cruelty etc are wrong, that kindness, generosity etc are right. These apply particularly in personal morality. Much moral discussion these days is applied in the political and social realm, and this is where logic comes in: in working out the likely consequences of any particular action. These judgements are, as you say, more complex the the simple kindness-cruelty issue.
I would be interested to know why you think that natural selection can explain the human moral sense.
It’s not just my opinion that the moral sense is only found in humans (apart from slight glimmerings in chimps). This is the judgement of Charles Darwin, Konrad Lorenz, Jane Goodall and Frans de Waal. I know of no better authority. Your dog has learnt that certain actions have consequences, and shows fear.
I think natural selection and evolutionary theory explains everything, although human intelligence, consciousness and the remarkable achievements of mankind make belief in a creator understandable.
Some apes abandoned the trees and forests, began hunting (and fishing – Omega 3s very crucial) and brain size exploded. If our ancestors had been vegetarians, we would still be swinging from trees.
Humans are the only animals who know they are going to die; our ‘religious’, moral and ethical convictions can be explained by this fact. Altruism is about survival, not morals. We are privileged and cursed by self-knowledge, and the knowledge that we are doomed.
The theory that the human moral sense can be accounted for by natural selection doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, as explained in detail in my book The Moral Mind. There is more to it than can be explained here. Huxley was right, but I examine it in a 21st-century context.
As a taster, much of human behaviour can be explained by our instincts, honed by natural selection. When our moral sense tells us to do what our instincts tell us, it is superfluous. When it tells us to behave contrary to those instincts, it is not explained by natural selection. But there’s much more to it than that.
The existence or non-existence of God is irrelevant to this argument.
I would be interested to know why you think that natural selection and evolutionary theory explain everything.
It’s to a matter of either natural selection or God: it’s possible to accept both – or neither.
Jack Weatherford in Ghengis Kahn and the Making of the Modern World argues that he was in fact a great secular leader and far from evil despite the ruthlessness that he displayed in his conquests. I have not read it myself yet.
Yes, I’ve read a bit about him. I think we can deduce that he was highly intelligent, ruthless, but ‘wise’ in his understanding of others. Going back to our present problem, I think we have a ‘leader’ (in Putrid) who is not intelligent, or wise, but is certainly ruthless (and thinks this is a sign of strength). His lack of wisdom and intelligence, and his inability to empathise with others is a fatal combination in a despot.
Thanks, A, I take your point. It’s just that the search for meaning and purpose is so ubiquitous in the human fraternity. I know someone who worked in Burundi for 20 years and only ever met one atheist. It seems to me that living as though life has no meaning is a luxury for the Western world which is cosseted from the harshnesses which the poor experience.
I’m very agnostic that the limited power of mutations, which is readily observable, can explain the complexity of life; and particularly the experience of consciousness or our ability to parse abstract codes or nuance. That’s why I find it unsatisfactory.
“Giles, whatever the shortcomings, you are correct that at least Christians have attempted to deal with the problem of evil and not ignore it. ”
Really … surely Christianity over the centuries has been the source of much evil and exploitation of people?
Far from it, Richard; it’s why Christians were at the forefront of so many innovations to alleviate human suffering which have been taken over by the state: schooling, hospitals, banning the slave trade, raising the age of consent, prison reform, orphanages, trade unions, food banks, etc.
Like any organisation, religious or secular, it has been used to promote political ends and oppressive measures by those who saw it as a means of power. This doesn’t excuse such abusive hijacking, but it needs to be placed in a true historical context.
You are confusing two different things.
Christians, like other humans, are capable of good and bad behaviour.
There have been quite a number of Christian scholars of have wrestled with these problems and though very deeply about them.
A good question: what would the world be like without humans? Charles Darwin (and many others) have maintained that of the all the differences between humans and other species, the moral sense or conscience is the most important. Without humans, there would be good and bad behaviour, but no species to make moral judgements, to distinguish between one and the other, believing that this distinction is important.
This moral sense is extraordinary. It defies all attempts to explain it. It defies all attempts to explain it away. It exists as an important part of the human personality. And yet, it is not a particularly powerful determinant of human behaviour. Our behaviour is more strongly influenced (for good and ill) by our instincts, honed by natural selection.
Humanism is secularised Christianity – Faith goes out of the window, but Hope and Charity remain. I suppose the nearest humanists get to the notion of original sin is in attributing (human) evil to ‘society’, ‘the system’, or even ‘whiteness’, rather than to individual agency and free will.
The alternative to religious belief is not humanism, but nihilism.
Or deism is a projection of humanism. It is so clearly true that there there are non nihilistic alternatives to religion, that your statement comes across as no more profound or accurate than a Coca-cola executive claiming that ‘there’s alternative to ‘The Real Thing‘ (TM). Of course, they don’t really believe that, we ll know they are just trying to sell a product – what’s your excuse?
Not trying to sell a product, and not needing an excuse. Just trying to address Giles’s point about the problem of evil, and why people should need to be ‘good’ in the absence of any religious injunction. The humanist may well agree with the biblical injunction to do unto others as you would have them do unto you; after all, this seems to be a pretty good rule of thumb for anybody. But what does the atheist say to somebody who says no, I’ll do only as I wish, regardless of others?
what does the atheist say to somebody who says no, I’ll do only as I wish, regardless of others?….
The first position is that of a sociopath, somebody who lacks empathy (this is an immutable neurological, psychological reality). There is nothing to be done, aside from locking up the sociopath, or telling the sociopath that they’ll be locked up if they do terrible things to others. However, most sociopaths don’t do terrible things to people. (full stop) Not because they care (are held back by conscience), but because they have no interest in doing those things, and don’t want to risk the hazards (loss of liberty, life chances, useful standing in the community etc).
Is it not clear that everyone only ever does what they think is right in their own terms? We either follow our own conscience, or our own fears – I do it because I feel it is right; I do it because I fear being ostracised/hit. Claiming you do it for God is a fudge, cop-out, possibly disingenuous/manipulative, quite possibly grandiose, and more than a little presumptuous.
why people should need to be ‘good’ in the absence of any religious injunction.
This is even more straightforward – we are social beings, evolved over millions of years to look out for each other. For almost all of us (the non narcissistic/non sociopathic), 80% of what makes us happy and well is family, community, relationships etc. Religious injunctions are not extra-human – they are clearly and merely projections of the human mind, and medieval ones at that.
The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.
Thank you for replying, and so eloquently.
My position is that of a reluctant agnostic, or a devout sceptic. I tried atheism, but had too many doubts. One of those concerned Rousseau’s notion of innate human goodness and the reclassification of evil as anti-social behaviour or, as you put it, that of the sociopath or narcissist. I find the doctrine of original sin much more compelling and realistic, even if only as a poetic/metaphorical (rather than literal) explanation. Not sure if that makes me paleolithic, medieval or just god-like…
Thanks. For all my atheistic sounding words, agnosticism is the only truly sound position – we don’t know. There is enough strangeness out there to make something we now think of as supernatural, possible (quantum physics!). And, it’s true that artistic/poetic/metaphorical stuff is usually more comforting, helpful and interesting than science (though I suspect that turns vice-versa at highest levels – give me Einstein/Dawkins/E O Wilson/Sam Harris etc over ‘how many angels can fit on the head of a pin’ ivory tower worm holers!
There isn’t a god to blame. Evolution is about competition and cooperation to defend the group. These drives are easily used to do violence and our monkey brains still aren’t rational enough. That said, it’s always interesting to watch religion ( in this case Russian Orthodox) co opted into justifying killing others. Same old same old..
Indeed, Patriarch Krill and Pope Francis being in disagreement is somewhat the fly in Giles Fraser’s ointment.
This whole article recalls Hamlet: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
Humans are humans. They do good and bad, but mostly we muddle through. Humanists would see us as striving to do better for our own sake, not chasing the glory of a higher being, or needing a higher being to tell us what to think and do.
I am a church-goer, but my Christian faith is very lacklustre. When I say the creed, it simply serves to remind me of the components of religion that I have never been able to embrace. I often hear Christians say that God is love and, although I always keep my own counsel, I always think the same thought: what if God decided to take the day off from being the God of love? What differences would we obeserve in the world?
I know nothing about the British Humanist Society, but I do not see why non-religious people should be committed to the idea that people are good. In the same vein, I have never bought in to the punk-Calvinism of a sizeable minority of my fellow Scots who are committed to the idea that we are all up to our oxters in sin. Putin is a Christian and the terrorists in Breslan, members of Riyad-us Saliheen, were religious. President Zelensky is not particularly religious by his own accounts, but acquaintances say of him that he has a strong sense of right and wrong. So what serves us better: a secular sense of right and wrong or a religious sense of good and evil?
What if you took the day off from being good?
Of course atheists, humanists and the non-religious can be good. It’s a complete red herring to try to suggest they don’t know what good is. Such an argument only shifts the advantage to the other side.
Rev Fraser is making the point that humanists have not answered the charge they normally make against Christians, one that can be levelled against their own faith in human nature. On what foundation stands that faith?
I think that’s where Giles is raising a bit of a straw man. I think humanists argue that on average – human nature is good.
An atheist might argue that evidence of that is in the fact that most religions have developed morals along the same lines, independently in most cases.
A theist would argue that it comes from God/Gods
But I don’t think anyone is seriously arguing that if we forgot religion we would all be good because all humans are intrinsically good. Not anybody sane anyway.
Humanists believe in the goodness of humanity for the same reason religious people believe in God, the truth is unbearable. No one really wants to believe that existence is meaningless. We evolved to have hope and faith because our ancestors would have jumped off cliffs long ago, and humans would have gone extinct. I am an atheist who believes man’s capacity for evil far outweighs his goodness, but I am glad not everyone holds these beliefs, the world would be far worse if we were all nihilists. They may be fooling themselves, they may have their flaws, but humanists and the religious keep this world from being unbearable.
A poorly justified opinion piece based largely around a contrived fallacy expressed in the sentence “why would you call your belief system after human beings if you didn’t think human beings are in some ways fundamentally good”
Conveniently pretending that non-religious belief systems must exclude the notions of both sides of human behaviour is completely unjustified.
Sadly – this lack of rationality is virtually ubiquitous in faith-based pronunciations.
I’m no Christian but i’m pretty sure Augustine sorted the ‘problem’ out like 1600 years ago.
‘But what I can’t quite figure out, is whether humanists ever experience what might be called a crisis of faith?’
Ian Hislop once wrote that he had tried being an atheist but he kept having doubts.
Well Jim, it’s English, but not as we know it. A large number of familiar individual words follow each other in the correct syntactic order, but miraculously, what emerges on the other side is not meaning, but a Hungarian stew of dubious nutritional merit.
This is unworthy of you. If I can understand Giles’s argument so can you.
Perhaps reading this just past midnight was not the best idea. I will give it another go later, and if I find the piece less turgid, I will withdraw my earlier comment.
I understand the argument as expressed – but it is based on a convenient fallacy.
I tend to be with Prashant. If we acknowledge we’re technologically advanced apes, much of our behaviour is easily explicable without this kind of rhetoric.
It’s possible to follow the argument, but it isn’t really grounded in anything substantive.
I re-read the piece, and it probably doesn’t deserve the acid I poured over it, so I retract that.
That said, there is nothing original or thought provoking in it, but that’s not a big deal in itself. I could shred the arguments it presents very easily – not that I’m going to do that here, because it’s not as though I haven’t argued enough with religious people over the years.
The problem of evil is one exclusive to the sort of belief system of which Christianity is the main proponent. We are required to believe that there is a god who is all-seeing, all-powerful and all-merciful. (the Omni-Omni-Omni model). Under such circumstances the problem of evil is why should an Omni x 3 allow innocent people to suffer? And there is no solution when a blameless person suffers without positing that God is either incompetent or cruel. The Epicureans in ancient Greece simply accepted that the gods were capricious and cruel and, as a result, said we sholud not worry about them as they do not care about us.
A Humanist or Atheist position does not have such a problem. We live in a world where disasters can happen through the workings of nature, through human mistakes or through culpable misdeeds by others. None of these three things require any extra physical explanation, they are simply facts. They are things that humans can attempt to act against and failures to do so can be regarded as misdeeds. However this is not a problem of humanism, it is a problem of the inability of humans to act correctly. We can attempt to correct this, we may never be totally acceptable but this is not a problem of humanism but of humans.
What seest thou, else?
Might we share a common faith, even the humanist and Christian, we accept the world unquestionably, and still choose to believe in something more significant that wishes to refine us? Nurtured on that faith, we, like the brave souls in Ukraine and following writers, are willing to underwrite society, even with our lives.
“In the middle of our life’s journey—
I found myself in a dark wood,”
Although the “I” belongs to Dante, who died in 1321, his journey is also part of “our life.” The line suggests that we will all face evil and find ourselves in a dark wood one day.
In Paradiso 25 Dante seems to regain his voice
“If it should happen . . . If this sacred poem—
this work so shared by heaven and by earth
that it has made me lean through these long years—
can ever overcome the cruelty
that bars me from the fair fold where I slept,
a lamb opposed to wolves that war on it,
by then with other voice, with other fleece,
I shall return as poet and put on,
at my baptismal font, the laurel crown . . .”
Saint James asks:
“do tell what hope is, tell how it has blossomed
within your mind, and from what source it came to you.”
Beatrice answers the second question first:
“There is no child of the Church
who has more hope than he has, as is written within
the Sun whose rays reach all our ranks . . .”
At the end of Dostoevsky’s final novel, the wise father Zossima says to the character representing Dostoevsky himself, “you are purified for the sole reason that you have come to see in fear that, despite your efforts, you have not come nearer the goal but are further away than before – at this moment you will attain the goal and see the mysterious power of God who has guided you with love.”
TS Eliot took the idea saying, we shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring, will be to arrive, where we started, and know the place for the first time.
Hermann Hesse wrote, of the main character in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “but he also learned that a seeking thoughtful man dare not forfeit love, that he must meet the wishes and follies of men halfway, not showing arrogance but also not truckling to them; this it is always only a single step from sage to charlatan, from priest to mountebank, from helpful brother to parasitic drone, and that the people would by far prefer to pay a swindler and be exploited by a quack than accept help given freely and unselfishly. They would much rather pay in money and goods than trust in love. They cheat one another and expect to be cheated themselves. You had to learn to see man as a weak, selfish, and cowardly creature; you also had to realize how many of these evil traits and impulses you shared yourself; and nevertheless, you allowed yourself to believe, and nourished your soul on the faith, that man is also spirit and love, that something dwells in him which is at variance with his instincts and longs to refine them.”
Strange article, and you seem a bit confused – although you answer it all yourself:
For those who don’t believe in a Christian god – they don’t ascribe suffering to him or waste time contemplating it. As you suggest – they are looking for a better answer (for them) to the question, as the Christian God doesn’t do it for them.
For those of other religions, their contemplation will likely revolve around their God/Gods/creed. And that’s fine too.
For atheists (and perhaps agnostics) it’s the same as other religions. Minus just one more God/Gods/creed.
Atheists don’t spend any more time wondering where God fits into evil acts of man any more than I suspect you spend time wondering what sort of imbalance between Vishnu, Shiva and Ganesh caused it. That they may question you about God is neither here nor there in their belief. That’s the distinction.
God can be dethroned, but human beings cannot dethrone themselves. Or rather, their individual Self.
In 1915 the Bishop of Durham wrote a small book intended to help the faithful with such questions of suffering in a time of war. The bishop, being evangelical, proposed that such disasters were attributable to mankind’s dark Adversary. Despite this, he wrote, though the dark cloud is vast, it is not the sky. If it is twilight, it is that before the dawn.
This argument is somewhat like the humanist explanation both of suffering and of human progress towards ever greater good; as well as setting up an entity as a god. Though the bishop quoted the Lord in the parable of the tares, and Paul: We wrestle not against flesh and blood, on this point.
In this Ukrainian war, Putin is made out to be like the Tempter is the wilderness, offering the Russian people good and necessary things in return for their worship. He, as well as his opposite number, might have quoted the poet: How sleep the brave, who sink to rest / with all their country’s wishes blest.
Except Putin is clearly a human being, unexceptional and prone to wishful thinking (what are the western equivalents? The use of diplomatic ambiguity that served Britain so ill in 1914? Or the military help that helps the Ukrainians to avoid losing but not to win: help that Syrianizes the country? If the Ukrainians allege a chemical weapons attack, will the OPCW be tasked to investigate before the NATO further involves itself; and if they do, are they politically independent?).
For the purpose of approaching Easter, the bishop elsewhere delineated the purpose of taking up the cross. Self-denial is commonly thought of as abjuring inferior pleasures for some higher purpose; or control of the lower elements in human nature by the higher; or exchanging present loss for future gain.
If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me.
Every word is weighty with meaning, the bishop declared. Any man. Not just the bad people. The taking up. The true surrender of the will to whatever involvement is meant by burden of the cross. The cross. The dethroning of the Self, with all the attendant humiliation and death-like dread this will raise in the heart, and the setting up of Another on that throne. And then, daily. Without intermission, or holiday; this hour, and then tomorrow. All this is far from what is commonly thought of as self-denial.
And finally, after me. Not just after some theory of human, or even divine, goodness or progress. But after Him, and with Him, wherever and in whomsoever He is to be found. The bishop concluded his consolation for human hearts stricken by loss in the Great War with a quote from St Augustine: they are not lost whom we love in Him whom we cannot lose.
As Gabriel Marcel said, ‘A problem is something which I meet, which I find complete before me but which I can therefore lay siege to and reduce. But a mystery is something in which I am myself involved, and it can therefore only be thought of as a sphere where the distinction between what is in me and what is before me loses its meaning and its initial validity. A genuine problem is subject to an appropriate technique by the exercise of which it is defined: whereas a mystery, by definition, transcends every conceivable technique.’
Humans make decisions based upon their accumulated experiences, strongly biased by the emotions of greed and fear. Not happy with the consequences we have invented religions, ideologies, politics, philosophies etc. to curtail the behaviour of others that does not suit us. It is a bit of a mess and could do with improvement.
Yep.
Genetic re-engineering, coming soon.
The concept of good and evil in human behavior is so malleable as to be almost useless to the historian.
As a student of history, the one universal that I’ve noted is that under the right circumstances people will do literally anything, no matter how horrible, and in so doing feel justified they are on the side of the angels. From the genocide perpetrated on the Canaanites by the children of Israel on orders from Yahweh; to the enslavement of Africans and its justification from the pulpit by practicing Christians; to the secular Führer worship that inspired the Nazis to the industrial-scale savagery of the Holocaust, nothing produces murderous justification like a mandate from heaven.
Do you think Putin’s actions in Ukraine are evil? I do. But do you think Putin thinks he is doing evil? I doubt it; he is, after all, a practicing Christian. He is, with God’s blessings (or at least Patriarch Kirill’s) undoing the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” the breakup of the Soviet Union and the loss of Slavic unity. Himmler said the work of exterminating Jews was “hard and stressful” but work that would nonetheless be justified by history. Putin’s work must also be hard and stressful.
“Putin’s work must also be hard and stressful”.
It is very much to be hoped so, and one hopes it makes him seriously ill.
An interesting piece. I am an agnostic but fed up with the smug worldview of many atheists. Humanist certainties, alleged rationality betray a value system based on faith, an dogma, a faith in humanism.
‘What I find most objectionable about all this is not the atheistic cosmology so much as the kind of detached emotional shrug that accompanies it.’ Yes Shit happens is a very inadequate response to suffering and evil.<
The Ukraine government has caused suffering in the ongoing war in the Donbass and other east Ukraine regions. Yes, the invasion is terrible, Putin is responsible for causing a lot of suffering.. But the suffering of the ethnic Russians before the war started has been overlooked. (eg Odessa incident where neo Nazis trapped people in a building and they were burned alive). you are accused of being a Putin supporter for just pointing out, not downplaying neonazis in the Ukraine military, its right-wing neoliberal slant.
Contrary to the Guardian and most Western press present as a a matter of faith, most Russians are not evil.
I won’t get any ticks of approval for this and good.
Odd article … you seem to view the World as Humanists vs Christians … but of course it’s no such thing.
People are intrinsically good but of course not all of them, people have been brutalised in Christian and Communist Russia for 200 years at least?
And all you can discuss is the difference between humanists and christians … 2 philosophy’s that the vast majority of us don’t subscribe to.
Meanwhile Ukraine burns
Russian people are intrinsically good, but of course not all of them.
Ukrainian people are intrinsically good. Evidently without exception.
I have confused you … all people are intrinsically good including Russians … but of course centuries of brutalisation and poverty have turned them into a hard and brutal society
Indeed Richard. I suspect that, like many an Anglican, at some opaque level of consciousness there lurks a stubborn doubt about Deism: pretty threatening notion to any Christian, let alone one whose career is also at stake. One way of coping with the psychological dissonance is to project the ‘heinous’ thought and then attack it in the external object.
I don’t believe some of us are heinous and others not … with the few exceptions most of us are intrinsically good but upbringing and education are clearly a factor
Although I’m sure it differs between humanists, my experience of humanist thinking is not that they think bad things happen ‘because that’s the way the world is’ but rather that bad things happen ‘because of the religious’
Perhaps if they were to consider some kind of secular-original-sin, it could be that religious belief is a universal human trait, and so evil is in every one of us
The impression I get from them though is a belief that religious thinking could one day be removed from us like Polio
The article hints at the need for a non-religious definition (operationalization?) of original sin. Here’s one that’s hard to refute based on the evidence of thousands of years of war, rape, gluttony (and what have you):
Human beings always and everywhere prefer short-term gain (immediate, easy pleasure) to long-term gain, requiring effort and patience, for a huger reward. As Hume said: we “are always much inclined to prefer present interest to distant and remote, nor is it easy for them to resist temptation of any advantage that they may easily enjoy. “
That is human’s original sin (our animal side), and why the 10 commandments and the “pagan” virtues (temperance, courage, justice, prudence) are needed to achieve eudaimonia (human flourishing) or Heaven.
There are three logical ways of trying to deal with the problem of evil, with a creator who is all good and all-powerful: either the creator is not all good, or not all-powerful, or there is no creator.
What these all have in common is a belief that the words good and evil have meaning, and that the concept of good and evil is important. How strange, therefore, that for much of the twentieth century, there was an influential school of thought that taught that such statements of moral value had no meaning.
Christians (and others) wrestle with the problem. There are no easy answers.
I’d have thought the common sense definition of good as something that benefits people, as opposed to that of evil which harms people.
Without God we can still have acceptable standards of ethical behaviour, I believe, though I admit it would be useful to think that they were divinely inspired.
I wonder if humanism could be said to have an evil problem too?
Err, in a word, no.
To atheists there is no God, so a world with, or without God will look the same; all activities are the result of nature or human culture. God was only ever a projection of human hopes, desires, fears – and apparently we still have those in abundance.
Voltaire’s Candide where Dr Pangloss went through awful things and said it was the best of all possible worlds. The same madness of this author again. Now Jesus has taken the form of Putin so health workers can dodge bullets so they can do their godly work. The older orphans comfort their younger brothers and sisters indeed. How about all this ‘godliness’ being totally unnecessary? How about a proper god ensuring the sniper gets Putin square in the middle of the forehead?
It seems clear that Putin is a reasonably compliant Christian. Why is atheism to blame for his apocalypse in Ukraine?
Quite, and given the international coalition against Russian Orthodox Putin, why isn’t Giles pondering the unified moral wonder of such a secular alliance against a single branch of Christianity?
You know, given that broad brushstrokes define the article to start with.
Putin and his cultish ilk make a debauched mockery of Biblical Christianity. Anyone can mould and press what is spiritual balm into putrid poison for their own ends, and many thousands through the centuries, on these pages and elsewhere have, and will continue to do so. Their interpretation of God’s will is a form of exegetical acrobatics, of which such as russian orthodoxy etc is expert eg incense waving, dressing up, iconography…
The phrase ‘Christian’ is so abused as to mean anything to anyone – from hitler, brevik, putin [insert your own] – virtually anyone can claim to be a christian and shockingly convince naive unknowing others that they actually are. [sigh].
When raising our children, don’t we (when we have the energy) tell them to tackle the difficult duty rather than drift into meaningless activity? To clean their room instead of vegging out in front of the TV? Why do we do this? Because we want them to grow up into dutiful, thoughtful, compassionate human beings rather than narcissistic selfniks.
According to the classic Christian Free Will Defense, that’s what God wants too. But nobility of character does not come cheap. Unless morally challenged, we don’t grow – just as spoiled children don’t mature. God has designed our world to be a moral gymnasium. We are souls in training. Some athletes prefer to play teams they can beat, but others prefer stiffer competition. If we are wise, we will not wilt under the pressure of the “stiffer competition” – the death of a loved one, the rejection by the one we most love love, the being passed over at work, the tumor growing in our breast, or the slaughter of innocents in a brutal war – but will fight on. Trusting in God, we will bear in mind that the greater the suffering, the greater the potential for growth. God has given us a world full of physical and moral challenge, and He *She) hopes that we will use our freedom to choose the good over the bad, and do it habitually, in spite of tremendous temptation to capitulate and give up. To do so is to bring value, excellence, and ultimately joy into the universe, and that is what God wants. It’s what we should want too.
If, like most atheists, you believe that death means extinction, this argument will not do. But if it’s an event leading to another adventure of soul-growing, it works well.
Rather than a moral gymnasium or a world full of physical and moral challenge, perhaps God actually designed the world to be ‘very good’? (Gen1:31)
I agree that we are ‘souls in training’ – the soul being the energy element of the body that makes you, you; me, me. Thermodynamic laws state that energy, once created, doesn’t disappear; just changes. With bodies that will one day perish, will you and I graduate?
There is a streak of dishonesty in those unmoved by the spiritual who suddenly rail against the Almighty for something tragic that they have experienced or witnessed, as if the Almighty has been some kind of minister in government under whose watch the disaster unfolded, as well as someone whom they are aware of but have never been enlightened by.
Yet when times are good, great even, any thoughts about praising the man in charge are far from these kinds of indifferent people.
“we only have ourselves to blame” Really? How about blaming the politicians, or emperors and kings? Of course, we do vote for the politicians so perhaps we are to blame because we give them the power and the money to start wars.
The problem with evil is not that it exists. The mystery is why good people do bad things.
For this is what lies at the centre of Jesus of Nazareth’s confrontation with the religious and political leaders of the time. The latter – members of the leading council of the nation, those of the missionary sect of the religion and the professional classes, and community leaders – were undoubtedly good men by any standards. Paul was one of them before his conversion, a man of unimpeachable moral character, and not just according to his own estimation.
These people – the educated metropolitan elite of their day – didn’t oppose Jesus – the uneducated provincial – because they were bad. They – and this is especially clear with Paul – did so because they were good. They thought that they were doing right in the cause of right. This attitude can be found today particularly among those who could in any way be classed as liberal. But it is common to all.
The ‘bad’ people will be satisfied with stealing some of your property or the occasional adultery, and thereafter will leave you alone. But the good people will want to possess your soul. They have a crusading mind.
Consequently, it’s somewhat unfair to characterise the position of humanists as detached and theoretical. Rather, it is that they have not recognised, never mind fathomed, what good people can do in the cause of right. Furthermore, and more generally, it is the case that my concern to be good can be no more than self-concern in a more refined mode.
And all the above is quite separate from the standard rationalisations that people use to excuse their indulgences. The most notorious of which was the self-justification Saville used to allow himself to perpetrate his wickedness, as if this quid pro quo is all he had learned from the practise of indulgencies of the Catholic church of the past, or from the offers of the Tempter in the account of the wilderness temptation of Christ. He was a wolf in sheep’s clothing. He is no mystery. The mystery and the problem are the ravening sheep.
I will have to read this again too, but am I right in drawing the conclusion that humanism isn’t studied in philosophy of religion courses ? Perhaps it should be.
No mention of Freud? – how odd of you, rector..
Man isn’t inherently good, you know. Our task is to sublimate our base instincts.
There can be no overarching assumption of humanity. Some humans are good. Some are evil. It’s just how it is. The atheist understands this and does not try to attach some philosophic meaning to it. Any attempt to form any kind of belief system (and presumably capital-H Humanism is one) founders on just being another self-delusion system
I read and reread the article in an attempt to tease out GN’s point but answer came there none. All I saw was a prolix posing of the old canard ‘my lot are oddballs but you lot as just as bad’. The assertion, increasingly out of desperation, that Atheists / Humanists (I dont accept any practical distinction) must have a belief system too…… and that really is God. I believe the centre of the sun is hot and I have faith the car will start tomorrow but I dont exist within, let alone recognise, a framework that supervises my daily life, my thoughts, what I eat, what I do naked (thank you CH) and apparently reassures me there is a better afterlife because I am awful today. It is now, and ever will be, nonsense on stilts. For the one brief moment of my existence I live in freedom, stand and fall by my own actions and rejoice in my conscience. I dont need a fellow to come down a mountain to tell me not to murder, torture, steal, drop litter or be rude to others. I do my best, try to observe the self evident rules of the club, and am intensely relaxed that my acts of altruism are actually self interest. So what? Evil and pain are facts of this life. Years ago, emerging from the god of parents and school I read C.S.Lewis’s paean to sophistry The Problem of Pain. Less than persuasive in the whole but it was his disgraceful attempt to justify pain in animals (let alone bone cancer in children) that left me in no doubt there was no god and so, I was free, in a very real sense.
Very good and intellectually stimulating article. Thank you.
Being religious goes a long way towards answering key questions: What happens when I’m dead? What is the point of life? Why shouldn’t I murder my wife/husband when we get bored with each other?
Being religious gives me something to be afraid of if I’m just about to shoot someone for no reason. Will God punish me for my sins?
Being religious does not mean being nice to everybody or not kicking the dog. I know people who are very religious, who never miss a church service, who can see God’s work everywhere (especially when the sun is shining) BUT are not nice to their spouses or neighbours, who are jealous if their friend has better familial relationships, who believe that their own family is special when the opposite is true. Being religious is a front, a sham.
So is God, or fear of God the only reason why you have not murdered your wife? Or to put it another way if suddenly you ceased to believe in God would you then have no compunction about murdering your wife? If that is not the case your argument is meaningless.