In recent years, there has been no shortage of books arguing against religion. But do any of these address the lived experience of atheism, and how human needs like the desire for meaningfulness can be met in a "godless" life? In his new book, Life After Faith, academic Philip Kitcher sets out the case for secular humanism, and explores potential replacements for the sense of identity and community that religion currently provides for many people.
Your book sets out to establish secular humanism as a “positive position”. Do you think that it has often been negative? In what ways?
I want to distinguish secular humanism from atheism. Atheism is plainly a negative position: it consists in denying the existence of God (or of gods). Many atheists, especially the “new Atheists” (of whom Richard Dawkins is the most prominent) concentrate on amassing arguments for the non-existence of supernatural beings. They believe (correctly) that it’s a bad thing for people to believe false doctrines – and consequently engage in a crusade to eliminate a particular style of false belief from the face of the earth.
I see secular humanism as a positive perspective on life, one that enables people to live full and richly rewarding lives without embracing any religion. So secular humanism has to go beyond atheism in two dimensions. First, it must question those religions that don’t commit themselves to deities, or that don’t conceive their central doctrines as literal truth. Second, it can’t stop when doctrinal beliefs have been swept away, but must offer something to replace the guidance, help, and comfort that many people find in religious life and religious practice.
Believing falsehoods is typically bad. Yet worse things can happen to people. Leaving them adrift and vulnerable may not improve their lot. So secular humanism must go beyond blunt – and often aggressive – atheistic denial.
The argument is often made that a life without religion or a belief in the transcendent has less meaning. What’s your answer to that?
Our lives matter, when they do, because they matter to other human beings. If you reflect on lives that seem thoroughly meaningful, from those of the great leaders and artists and scientists to those whose contributions consist in sustaining a community or a family, you see them as connected to a larger project. They are strands in a great web of human existence. Of course, the life of our species is finite – one day we’ll go extinct. Some religious thinkers suppose that finitude dooms us to meaninglessness. Individual human lives would be meaningful only if they had some permanent impact. In my view that’s wrong. Our lives obtain meaning through their positive linkages to something bigger than ourselves, the things we leave behind to foster the lives of people who come after us. That something larger than ourselves doesn’t have to be eternal or permanent or transcendent.
Our lives are like stones thrown into a pool. As they drop (and we die) there are radiating ripples. Eventually the ripples die away. But that doesn’t matter. Leaving those ripples is enough.
You mention positive aspects of religion that go beyond sentimentality or the aesthetic. What are they?
The best forms of religion, those that are ecumenical (cooperating with other religious and secular forms of life) and that take their doctrines non-literally, reinforce the most important ethical values. They aren’t directed towards saving the believer’s soul or glorifying some nebulous being or (worse) forcefully compelling others to acknowledge their preferred doctrines. Instead, they hope to foster human lives, to promote concern for others, to raise up people who are suffering. Often, religions of this sort provide valuable forms of community. They bring people together on common ventures, aiming to achieve something that’s humanly valuable.
On the approach to the meaningfulness of human life I favor, this type of community is extremely important. It provides people with opportunities to do the kinds of things that make their lives matter – and to make it clear to them that they matter. Unfortunately, in some affluent societies today, there are very few places in which this type of valuable community can be found outside religious institutions. Secular humanism not only faces the intellectual tasks of showing how to replace the doctrines and perspectives that guide the religious believer, but also the thoroughly practical task of building a secular world, one in which valuable community life is widely available.
Are atheists reluctant to acknowledge these positive sides of religion? Why?
Many atheists seem not so much reluctant as blind. Focusing on literalistic religions – which, admittedly, are both most visible and most violent in the contemporary world – they emphasise the tremendous harms caused by the clash of religious doctrines. They also recognise the ways literal readings of scriptures constrain and distort human lives (as in the cruel and ineffective attempts to “straighten out” people who are attracted to others of the same sex). Those forms of religion that don’t quarrel with others, that don’t insist on literal doctrines, and that treat all human lives as valuable slip out of view.
Nor do atheists of this stripe appreciate the role some religions play in fostering valuable community. I suspect that’s a product of the fact that prominent atheists belong to functional and rewarding communities – Dawkins, for example, lives in a rich network of scientists and intellectuals who value his projects and accomplishments. For many people that type of community doesn’t come for free. If they find it at all, they discover it in religious settings. There’s likely no general answer to the question “Would the religious believer’s life go better if religion and religious institutions were eradicated tomorrow?”
You write that an evolution away from religion is now essential. Why?
I see the best forms of religion – the ecumenical, non-literalistic ones – as already having evolved progressively from the cruder, fundamentalist, quarrelsome ones. They’ve given up the false claims about “transcendent beings” and have attempted to reinforce important values by insisting on the importance of human lives. Secular humanism continues this movement in a more thoroughgoing way. It abandons any metaphysics of the transcendent. It declares that values are worked out by us, in response to the difficulties of our lives and our need to be mutually engaged with other people. It recognises that, understood metaphorically, the stories of various religious traditions may offer helpful ways of fostering and promoting those values, but sees these stories as no more privileged than other myths and narratives. It focuses on the value of community, without supposing that community needs to be tied to any particular set of religious beliefs, or rituals or practices.
Secular humanism completes the steps that refined forms of religion have already begun to take. It studies what makes religion valuable, and how best to promote the ends that religion, at its best, has served. Metaphysics is abandoned in favor of reliance on the deepest understanding of the human condition.
How can secular humanism accommodate the needs currently met, for many, by religion?
One important task is to clarify intellectual issues, questions about the status of values and about the meaningfulness of human lives. Life after Faith is my attempt to carry out that task (although I’m sure more needs to be said). But my analysis also points to the practical need of building institutions that can foster valuable community. This, I believe, will take time, and we can surely learn much from the best forms of religion. After all, religious traditions have been refining their structuring of community life for a very long time, for centuries or even millennia. Perhaps by studying their successful versions we can avoid some of the mistakes they made along the way.
There are some initiatives – like the UK’s Godless Congregations – that attempt to give atheists a sense of community. What is your opinion of those?
I have no experience with the UK versions, but I do know something about some secular communities in the USA. There is much to admire in the Unitarian movement, in Jewish Community Centres, and in the Society for Ethical Culture. Yet I sometimes feel that these efforts are pallid imitations of the rituals and ceremonies of religious life. A secular address rarely packs the same punch as a good sermon; in the ceremonial setting, a movement from a Beethoven Sonata doesn’t have the resonances of a beloved hymn (even though the composer of the tune is no Beethoven). Secular humanists will have to experiment to find ways of making their shared experiences more vivid.
The idea that morality/ethics are bound to religious teachings has been with us for centuries. How do you respond?
I see ethics as a permanently unfinished project, revised and refined as we continue to work on how to live valuable lives together. Ethical life is a response to the deep human predicament: we are social beings without psychological adaptations that make social life go smoothly and easily for us. Over hundreds of generations, human societies have elaborated alternative ways of structuring the lives of their members, and we are heir to the most successful versions so far devised. Because the environment in which people interact with one another is constantly changing, we are always facing new version of the underlying difficulty that we aren’t naturally inclined to respond fully to one another.
In my view, the link between ethics and religion was forged when some ancestral groups (implicitly) recognized that the presence of an ever watchful deity, concerned to reinforce the local rules, was a useful idea for ensuring conformity. Once the “transcendent policeman” was in place, however, the collective construction of approved patterns of human behaviour was easily short-circuited. Anyone who could convince the rest of the band of his special access to the policeman’s will could introduce new rules and structures (often introducing idiosyncratic prejudices in the process). Ethics became the province not of the group but of the shaman or the priest. (Even secular thinking is sometimes infected by this shift: instead of collective discussion we turn to the professional ethicist.)
All this is a terrible distortion of the ethical project, which is fundamentally democratic. That distortion is visible in the world today, and with the lack of concern for the plight of the many people who live in poverty and want. Secular Humanism is dedicated to supposing that their lives matter, and that they should have a voice in the articulation of our principles and values.
The idea that what is right is what conforms to the will of the deity was refuted long ago in Plato’s Euthyphro. That idea survives only because we’ve been unwilling to situate ethics as a human project, within a long history of cultural evolution. Chapter 2 of Life after Faith attempts to correct our common – but faulty – approach to these questions.
