A.C. Grayling - Atheism, Secularism, Humanism: Three Zones of Argument

thank you very much indeed I get to talk south noon if I may about the fact that there are several strands in the great debate that we're having about the difference of opinion between people to have a religious outlook and those who don't and to some extent the distinctions I want to draw prefigured by my predecessor at the podium here mr. Potocki and you will notice if you after teatime are alert and stay awake long enough that there will be one or two slightly different approaches to some of the issues that were raised then but one thing that I very much agree with mr. Potocki about is that questions of metaphysics which is about the nature of the universe of what it contains ah importantly different from questions about religion which of course is man-made and sociological phenomenon that is persisted throughout recorded history at very least but there will be one or two differences between us as you'll see on on certain other matters the distinction I want to draw is between those metaphysical questions about the nature of the universe and questions about the place of religion in the public square which is essentially the secularism issue and about which we've heard a good deal this weekend already and those two are again separable from although there are very natural connections with questions about what is now called humanism or secular humanism understood in our contemporary setting as a family of views about ethics and about how we live our lives and how we construct societies that are amenable to the living of good individual lives and it's important to say something about all three of these things although it's possible and significant to take the secularism issue and the humanism issue together it was a very long time ago Aristotle pointed out that questions of ethics as they applied to individuals and questions of society which concern the right construction of a society that conduces to do good individual lives are of course seamlessly can methods and politics run together and when Aristotle wrote his great set of lectures on on ethics he said that the next automatic question that follows is the question about how you construct a society and that was this lectures on the politics but first let me say a little bit about the metaphysical issue it's a significant one not just because it bears on this question that we are largely agreed about here which is that this universe of ours doesn't contain supernatural agencies in it but because there is a another debate or a parallel one to the metaphysical one premise on the use of a certain expression which I want to argue is a very deeply misleading expression or phrase and the phrase in question is religion and science as though somehow or other this denoted a collection or a difference or an opposition or complementarity where significant questions really do arise about the relation of religion in general and science I mean it is being pointed out that there is one science and there are many religions but noticing that fact doesn't stop the debate about the connection or relationship or lack of either between religion and science being debated and raised in ways that are actually inimical to science into science education and therefore this is a very important point this is an important point because there are a number of different views that the people don't very often put into connection with each other about whether science and religion are complementary but non-overlapping this is the stephen jay gould view about non-overlapping magisteria at the natural and Social Sciences address themselves to a phenomena that can be empirically investigated whereas religion addresses itself to matters of the spirit to the transcendent realm to the divine and that this was something which seemed tremendously important to people in the early part of the of our modern year in the 16th and 17th centuries for example Descartes was particularly anxious to try to persuade the Church of which he was a loyal lifelong member of the Catholic Church that they could allow science to go on uninterrupted that they needn't feel anxious about it because science was addressing itself to phenomena that wasn't really the concern of of the religious authorities that their concern was much more immoral and a spiritual one and this was a matter that pressed for people at de cartes time because declares himself Galileo Giordano Bruno various other people were under pressure from the church not to say things about the nature of material reality that conflicted with Scripture famously the pressure point was the adoption or agreement with the Copernican view the Copernican heliocentric view of the universe or not in the year 1600 Giordano Bruno was burnt to death in the Campo de Fiori in Rome because among other things he accepted the Copernican view Cardinal Bellarmine famously wrote to a cleric who had sent him a letter arguing that Scripture was consistent with the Copernicus I'm saying to this errant cleric that all he had to do was to read Psalm 102 which says that the Lord have laid the foundations of the earth that it may not be moved for ever and also citing all the all the fathers and all the theologians who said that the earth doesn't move and stays at the center of the universe and that in his prudence said Carol Cardinal Bellarmine and he should accept this view of the heavens then of course Galileo himself had to acknowledge that the earth had never moved for him which was rather sad reflection and even though of course our on his way out of the Inquisition chamber he did mutter to somebody ever see movie that does move for all that and he'd spend the rest of his life and the house arrest because of it at that time the church itself took the view that religion was a direct competitor with science for the truth it was a direct competitor with good science for an understanding of the physical universe and how it worked of course since then it's given up that view and just very recently less than twenty years ago Rome announced that it had been wrong about Galileo so it's okay to accept the Copernican view so well now we think we think that the the church may itself have at long last agreed with Descartes and with Stephen Jay Gould that these are non-overlapping magisteria that science and religion have quite different spheres of interest and that in that sense they complement one another because where science has a great deal to say there is nothing of moment for the spiritual and moral in our lives and where religion has a great deal to say there is an acceptance that the day or to imagine created a universe which runs according to natural law runs according as Descartes wanted to put it - according to mechanical principles like a clock which had been bound up and let going and that the true therefore could be investigated and discussed separately but the truth is of course that the great religions all have views about the origin and nature of the universe and its destiny which at a number of points do impinge on the scientific worldview and we're therefore there is a direct competition over the truth who which of the of the two general outlooks has the right way of thinking about things and it's important to come back to that because it suggests something uncomfortable for people who who do have a religious outlook namely that if ever they are able to state something about their religious view which is not obscure or equivocation or ambiguous or wrapped in mystery if they could ever say anything clear and direct about what they think about the world that it could in principle be testable by science but as you know there is an escape clause in almost all religions which is that um God will not be tested so you can't conduct scientific investigations to test religious claims I remember once being um asked by somebody who went like this what's this and the answer was it's God moving in a mysterious way and this is what them but the illusions what the theologians will say if you ask them if there is something that could be directly challenged or tested by a scientific investigation however that there is a another difficulty which is illustrated by the work of the Templeton Foundation I don't know whether you've ever heard of this extremely rich foundation which gives a prize every year the Templeton Prize worth more than the Nobel Prize to anybody and this includes and especially if they they especially like scientists and philosophers who will do this who will make noises friendly to religion and they fund got quite a lot of scientific research they also give a great deal of money to theology and to apologetic all work and to religious publications and I thought I might just bring along with me some examples of the things that they fund so that you would see that the question of the relation between science and religion still somewhat presses in our contemporary world and one reason why therefore this metaphysical debate needs to be continued and it goes like this and there's just some examples of a program they have which is called science in dialogue meaning in dialogue with religion science and dialogue and it says here the foundation temperature validation is a strong interest in projects that bring one or more scientific disciplines into a mutually enriching discussion with theology and or philosophy where the first scholarly audience or the public at large so one of the this is a list of their featured grants the ones that they're rather pleased with the evolution and theology of cooperation the emergence of altruistic behavior forgiveness and selfish love and another one is research fellowship in religion spirituality and health another one is science and religion in Islam and another one is Darwin and religion and the sorts of people who are given these grants in the case of the evolution and theology of cooperation a person who is the head of the evolutionary dynamics program at Harvard Divinity School and in the case of spirituality of theology and health a group of people who work in the sociology department at Duke University and at the interdisciplinary University of Paris so these are serious institutions which are getting this money and you notice when you look at the titles of the grants that there is an embankment to use a wonderful term coined by Bishop Berkeley between science and religion trying to implicate or insert into one sphere of activity the scientific the religious and vice-versa and the main reason for this of course is to retain a sense of respectability for religion by association with science and a scientific endeavor the giving of grants to what look like major research projects but they are joint interdisciplinary research projects and so this maintains an aura of respectability for for for religion and so the question does arise and what will be what what are people wanting to mean when they use this phrase religion and and science as though either there is a complementarity or there is a connection between them or something can be learned from one for the other and the argument I want to put is that one can learn something about religion and religious sensibility which is of course a very complex thing because there are many religions and there are many religious phenomena including mystical phenomena and the like and that that can be studied scientifically a neurologist friend of mine once told me that he had a patient come to see him who retired done at University in fact at Edinburgh University and this patient said to him I think I've had a stroke and moreover I think I've had a stroke in the occipital lobe of my brain on the right-hand side and my neurologist friend was very used to people self diagnosing from the internet and coming up with all sorts of very peculiar complaints and he said why do you think that and this retired academics said because there are figures rising up out of the floor and floating up into the sky in my left visual field it turned out when he had a scan that he had had a minor stroke in the visual part of the visual center of the brain and when the little blood clot had resolved after a couple of weeks the Angels that kept floating up out of the floor vanished but the academic knew that they weren't angels he knew that they were symptomatic of some cerebral accidents and brain and minor brain damage but he had if he had not been an academic and if he had lived in another time in history or another place in the world today he would have been having religious visions and if one thinks about the accident in the past or in contemporary life of people getting overtired or having an epileptic fit or a fever or getting drunk or eating a magic mushroom or all the different reasons why people might have encounters with the gods and then interpreted them as real eruptions into a different realm and that they were somehow getting messages from elsewhere maybe george w bush had these sorts of encounters on a regular basis you could see how they would reinforce the sense that there is a reality that is being encountered now science can address this science can look at these sorts of phenomena and very often find really rather good reasons why they occur and psychology empirical psychology can also look at the very well recognized in the tested phenomena of conviction and of joy of exaltation of exhilaration that comes in very large megachurch meetings when they are as was described last night in a very amusing way brought to it by a skilled orator somebody who has marvelous command of rhetoric can lead a group of people a demagogue I mean we've seen it in the film footage with Hitler doing it with tens of thousands of people and it can happen in mega churches as well induced sense of the reality of the of the alleged truths and this again is something that can be studied by empirical science but it is not at all clear what can be offered from religion to science should one you know if one's got a puzzle about elementary particles you know how do they get mass if we if we don't get a energy level sufficiently high at the Large Hadron Collider in CERN and can we find out anything about the Higgs boson by looking at the Rigveda or at the Quran and it's not clear that not clear that we're going to have much success in that direction so so whereas we can expect to learn a great deal about the phenomena of religious experience and religious sensibility by the work of the empirical ins sciences natural and social sciences it's not clear that we're going to get anything in the opposite direction and that leads us to ask some questions really about this alleged relationship which seems to be connoted by the phrase religion and science um because the literal reflection shows that science as a sort of corporate entity itself very various ranging from fundamental physics all the way to geology and meteorology and you know lots of ologies and religion which is also an extremely various set of phenomena as well that's the relationship between them is by no means as simple or straightforward as the the phrase seems to suggest but we know one thing that what is characteristic of scientific inquiry the scientific mindset if you like which asks questions of nature and of human beings and of society in ways that can be tested looks for and the kind of evidence that could support conclusions drawn about nature and society and human beings which is always open to refutation it is intrinsically defeasible it can be met by counter evidence and if you meet with strong counter evidence you either reformulate your hypothesis or you abandon it and look for an alternative there's something about that the scientific mindset which is always questing always open to refutation which is not made anxious by the fact that we don't have all the answers but indeed is infused by that fact to go and look for answers or to try to formulate questions that admit of answers whereas whereas what is characteristic of the religious mindset flows from the fact that we human beings are very eager for stories we want an account an explanation of things that has a beginning a middle and an end and which is explanatory and which is reassuring and it's a very notable fact that whereas most religions can be and the message of salvation for example associated Christianity can be explained very briefly it probably doesn't take as much as half an hour it takes some years to get grips with the basics of physics or the biological sciences and and this is one reason why of course the religions of a attractive it don't take so much thought and also they convey those certainties that we're all very anxious to have so there is no consistency between what is characteristic of the scientific mind certain was characteristic of the religious mindset remember that in the major religions of Christianity in Islam unquestioning faith and obedience that the tenets of the faith and to the ministers of the faith is regarded as a major virtue and suppose said you know the three virtues hope faith that faith was a very important one when doubting Thomas wanted to have proof we wanted to stick his finger into the wound he was sort of told off because all the others had believed but they hadn't seen and Kierkegaard søren kierkegaard makes it a great virtue that faith is sometimes something bond commits oneself to in the very face of evidence that one takes a leap into all the counter arguments and embraces and accepts a certain kind of view and this is very very different indeed from science someone once very aptly said where faith begins science ends so there's no consistency there and therefore the phrase religion and science is one which has a very misleading connotation one thing that one can say about them and you have to remember that the apologists of religion are very keen to say well look you know the natural and Social Sciences emerged from religion just as they're very keen to say that our understanding of the rule of law and human rights emerged from religion great claims are made about Christianity for example as having had this influence in our Western tradition of being the originator of ideas of the Equality of human beings and rights modern you'd only say that Christianity remained consistent for 1,800 years with slavery the attitude that it took to women the fact that it supported the tremendous social hierarchies in fact even had as part of its metaphysic the idea of the great chain of being from the worm to the deity which man was at the center but man was higher than the other animals and woman of course and that there was the hierarchy of angels and archangels of principalities and powers so the idea of hierarchy value of the Divine Right of Kings none of this seems to be very promising from the point of view of a human rights agenda about the Equality of human beings so how they can claim that is very difficult to say but they also claim you know that out of enquiry debate discussion in the church in theology came the kind of discussion and inquiry which gave rise to science and so that makes one take a couple of steps back and ask whether it is really true that science emerged from religion well now there is a story to be told and it's one referred to by mr. Potocki about the origins of religion in animism one of our best understandings of the kind of outlook of our ancestors for many many tens of thousands of years many many tens of thousands of years before the young religions of Judaism and Christianity and Islam emerged just in the last two to three thousand years at a time by the way when monarchical and hierarchical social structures gave us our model of a sort of kingly deity who issues commands now it happens to be quite a separate matter that religion in our last 2,000 years or or perhaps slightly less has in part addressed itself to the emotional needs of people but it's a very unethical view to think that religion was has always been about human emotions in fact it's rather distinctive of versions of Christianity that it preaches an individual relationship between the human being and the deity such that you can have whispered conversations in bed at night and so on most religions in the past were not personal religions think about Roman religion that was a public religion or set of religions the Empire embraced many different views what it wanted was public observance of the rights of the celebrations the feasts for reasons of social cohesion they didn't think that Jupiter and Juno and Mars and the other Roman gods were available for private confession or were interested in private prayer what people had was the Larry's and penalties the gods of the the spirits of the half which were their own you know sort of touch would kind of tutelary deity is that they could appeal to if things are going wrong or they were ill or needed a bit of luck but that's a quite different thing from what is preached by in in Christian moral psychology which is about this possible personal relationship it's by the way if you if you decide that you want a religion for purposes of relationship then I should go for Catholicism because there are loads of beings that you can relate to it's not just Jesus and gods mary or the saints and saint mary the australian one and so on so what one can say is that um that the origin of science and the origin of religion share a common ancestor it's not that that science emerges from religion it's that they have a common ancestor same sort of point you make to creationist it's about monkeys they say human beings not descended from monkeys you say that's dead right they're not monkeys and human beings have a common ancestor and they diverged a long time ago the common ancestor of religion in science is ignorance in the early in the early phases of our of our ancestors development and science has been with serious interruptions and inconveniences from its fellow descendant has been having more success laterally than the religions did you can you can regard the relationship between religion and Sciences they evolved separately from this common ancestor somewhat like the relationship between cro-magnon man which is us and in Neanderthals which is them and in fact you could be a little bit more specific about the the sort of relationship that might come out of traditional and ancient beliefs on the one hand and the sorts of ways of thinking and kinds of theories on the basis of which we operate now and think about for example the tradition of witchcraft which is still very strong in Africa and I don't know whether you sometimes see the news that comes out of Kenya and Nigeria about terrible things that are done to children and having nails knocked into their heads and so on because they believed to be possessed by demons or they believed to be witches that goes on today and it's a human rights candle of quite a major proportion but belief in witches and in demon possession was endemic in European society also for very many centuries now the connection between witchcraft and say modern psychology modern medicine modern botany is an oblique one there is a connection in this sense that psychology explains to satisfaction and to our capacity for management some of the phenomena that were thought to be symptomatic with witchcraft in the past so forms of psychosis or neurosis or just difference or the fact that a woman was wise and knowledgeable and you have to deal with medical complaints branded her as a witch if you know somebody didn't like her and I wouldn't have account of this now and we can explain those phenomena in these terms nowadays I hope a tender age in Australia and the UK and elsewhere we don't think in terms of witchcraft but we do look to our resources in for psychology and in botany for the perb lism and medicine side of things and to modern medicine to address the sort of phenomena that once were thought of or seen through the lens of witchcraft now just the same way you could say that almost everything in the natural and social sciences and in our study of history and in our study of philosophy has this oblique off to the side relationship with religion although religions which in the deep past were almost the only resource that people had for trying to construct some kind of story about the world some framework of understanding some set of concepts through which they could interpret their experience and and talk about the world so it's not that modern science that religion is ancestral to modern science on the contrary if you think that our Rivera motor ancestors had only the resource of projecting their felt sense of agency into the world as a way of explaining the wind and the tides and the silent thunder and that as time went by so the separation occurred between what they were able to make sense of on the basis of experience and enquiry and these other stories that became more and more symbolic and less and less referential to the actual world then one can see something like this one of the great turning points in the development of civilizations was agriculture was settling down to cultivate grains and to look after plants which involved not longer traveling around with the herds but settling down and out of that came the urbanization that of urbanization came all the arts of writing and education and the rest which have been very constitutive of the development of civilization and so it's tremendously interesting to look at the contrast between agriculture as the kind of an applied science or an applied technology again as against religious explanations and religious technologies by means of taboo and prayers Coface you think about our agricultural ancestors who found out about rotation of crops and about that in the soil lie fallow and about fertilizing the soil and about irrigating and about breeding strains of grain that were resistant to disease eventually the discovery of pesticides now all these things came out of direct empirical experience trial and error efforts observation and reason very distinctive of the intelligent intelligence of human beings in solving problems that life posed to them now if you tried sprinkling holy water instead of irrigating well if you've tried prayer instead of fertilizing or if you tried broadcasting the seed just any old where without thinking about the soils and about letting the soils breathe and so on you would have much less success in fact you would have no better success than chance of probably less if you tried something purely on the basis of religion I mean to caricature the difference it's a bit like this you know try lighting your house by prayer instead of by electricity and you see which one works so the the true that the strands of thinking the one that developed ultimately into an organized disciplined way of inquiring into natural phenomena in which we now call science is very different from the other which is trying to make sense of the world in terms of of traditions of revelations of teachings by people who take on themselves the role of prophet or teacher and the sort of technologies they offer the technologies of obedience and prayer and sacrifice and duress now that should I think give a great deal of starting material they're just really starting points for thinking about and investigating this question of how different science and religion really are they're quite separate from one another they're not they're not in the business of of competing or complimenting or anything else they're very like the difference between a ham sandwich and a bicycle and you can't say that they're sort of alternatives to one another but if you didn't have a bicycle you could make do with a ham sandwich and the country they just they're just so so remote from one another that at most of the best get some energy to ride the bicycle you need the sandwich this is the the scientific investigation of some religious phenomena but there is as I say nothing at all that or very little indeed that religion could say that would help science remember the Templeton example remember that there are wealthy organizations Templeton is not alone there's the Discovery Institute in Seattle there are many well-funded organizations that continue to want to try and implicate science and religion with one another want to introduce religious constraints or religious questions or religious dimensions to the pursuit of natural science and they sometimes do it by saying science doesn't solve our problems for us morally or politically or deal with those matters of the heart and mind of human beings which concern the most questions about love and their relationships and their response to the beauty and the answer is no they don't because that's what not what science is about you know if you said to the botanist use examining some some dicotyledons somewhere what is the meaning of life war you know how should I best love my wife or something the biologists botanists should properly say well let me just put my botany to one side and respond to you as another human being but to think that that that the Natural Sciences are somehow going to you know answer everything would be to be scientistic and no responsible scientists is scientistic no responsible scientist thinks that science is going to have all the answers that is why we have such a rich resource in the arts in music in drama in the novel in philosophy in history in the conversation we have with one another at that dinner party that mr. Hitchens is talking about when the possibilities for these things arise it's certainly true that most of our fellow human beings today as throughout history have been impoverished and oppressed in ways that make it very difficult for them even to have a chance to address these questions a long time ago again Aristotle said the possibility of good lies with people does involve an element of luck where you were born when you were born and what circumstances whether your family has wealth whether you can have an education and it behooves us all I think is as being sensitive to the plight of our fellow human beings around the world and that we should strive to ensure that they do have the chance to think in these terms about what would make you a good life rather than mere survival and of course one of the things that we would have to do is to reduce the oppressive effect of religions on them well all those points some I've just been making concern the the sort of metaphysical question what kind of places the universities and what sorts of things are relevant to understanding it into inquiring into it we still know very very very little which is great news for people in the sciences because it means they got plenty of work to do and it's a absolutely thrilling adventure trying to find these things out I've had the great privilege of visiting the Large Hadron Collider in CERN on a couple of occasions and talking to the people who are conducting the experiments there and it's so so beautiful intellectually beautiful let let alone scientifically exciting to think that here is an endeavor to try to understand the structural properties of matter involving such tremendous ingenuity such such brainpower such insight and profiting so much from the accumulated knowledge in the Natural Sciences that it is quite breathtaking it just simply does take the breath away and I have to say that it's remarkable also that there at CERN you have an Indian next to a Pakistani you have an Israeli next to a Palestinian you have a an Iranian next to an American all working away at something jointly some objective inquiry and there are fellows in this enterprise and just two miles away free miles away in the center of Geneva there is the Human Rights Council where the representatives of their different countries are all of one other's fruits constantly that makes you want to take all those representatives at the UN and take them downstairs in the Large Hadron Collider it actually makes you want to want to fire them around the ring of the laws but but it makes you wanted to take them there to see what an objective inquiry is and how it brings people together science really does bring people together in a way that religion or politics never can so that that addresses that question that the sort of metaphysical question now the other question the question that I described this of secularism humanism question we've had a good deal of debate about secularism and it's quite right absolutely right that the major issue today is trying to diminish the presence of religion in the public square of policy decisions and in education this is a priority and yet the tendencies of the moment are in the opposite direction my own country in the UK the government in the last 10 15 years has been giving more and more tax money to faith-based schooling this is they've done you know on the basis of the wonderful experiment in faith-based schooling which is called Northern Ireland and it seems you've learned absolutely nothing from that and and in and in many different ways including medical research and and medical services the negative influence of the over amplified religious voice in the public square is a serious problem and it does have to be diminished but what I'd like to focus on that just in in concluding is what what I called contemporary humanism or secular humanism as we understand it today and I want to say about it that humanism as we understand today which is a family of views about ethics really and about the can and also about politics in the sense that Aristotle uses that term that is thinking about the construction of a society which is very friendly to very encouraging to the development of good and flourishing individual lives at the heart of which would be good relationships with people you care about and with your fellows in society and which gives to individuals a margin a space in which they can develop themselves according to their gifts for living good lives and to tremendously important point this one well recognized in the Enlightenment for example it's a sense to the Enlightenment argument that society should be in principle pluralistic because we all of us have very different needs and interests and desires very different talents there are lots and lots of different things that are valuable in the course of human life lots of important things that can be made and and pursued and realized in the course of human life and it's there and it's wrong to expect people to conform with one another and with some one ideal imposed on them top-down and this of course is the model of the great religions there's one great truth everybody has to sign up for it everybody's got to obey on pain of punishment and this monolithic structure of the great religions is precisely the monolithic structure of Stalinism or Nazism there's one great truth and everybody's got to obey on pain of punishment it's the same thing it's no surprise to me that Joseph Stalin was bred up in a seminary and that that all fit there was a Catholic I mean there must have done something from those experiences and applied them and you get this canard that you know the totalitarian isms of the 20th century were products of the Enlightenment no they are wonderful examples of the counter enlightenment just as the negative aspects of romanticism which privileges the crime the blood of the people you're an ethnicity or the importance of emotion and sentiment over reason and so on was a cause of problems in the 19th or 20th century especially in the form of nationalism one has to recognize them as counter Enlightenment movements but the idea of pluralism the idea of a broad domain in which lots of different interests can perish consistently always of course with the good of all in that domain and John Stuart Mill stated in his great essay or on Liberty that the one central rule here in thinking about the plurality of interests and desires is that the pursuit of them by us should never harm other people in their pursuit of what they want to do and what they see is they're good and under the government of this principle the harm principle Mill wanted to see as wide a range of human experiments as possible and this indeed is a directly enlightenment insight the possibility of human flourishing once individuals have been liberated from the prison houses of Orthodoxy the hegemony over the mind of religious teachings and the possession of the human individual by an absolute monarch and so it's a it's a powerful enlightenment ideal but it's one which has an antecedent it didn't come out of anywhere out of nowhere came out of true former enlightenment and the earlier one was in the Renaissance period when you look at medieval conceptions of what the life of human beings is when you look at the what's called the contemptuous Mundi literature the literature about what an awful place the world is full of disease and darkness life is short and difficult and bitter and we are surrounded by demons want to steal away our immortal souls we've got to hang in there somehow without teeth if we've got any and you know get to heaven in the end and everything everything was focused on even even the great buildings great Gothic cathedrals representing stone this idea of rocketing away from Earth and getting up into the heaven heavens away from this awful dispensation here on the on the surface but the Renaissance it's fully poetry about love and paintings of our picnics in the countryside and beautiful music a refocusing in other words on human life in this world now and it's called the Renaissance was called the ray sauce by some of the leaders of the relations like Petra itself who coined the term the Middle Ages to denote a rediscovery of something which was the classical and Hellenic attitude to life which was about the good that is to be found and enjoyed here in this world in this life now that was the rediscovery and that tips us off to the fact that the first great enlightenment and the source of our humanistic principles was classical antiquity was the the world of of Athens the Athens of Pericles the Hellenic world that followed that was an attempt if you look at the great technical schools of classical antiquity you see that was an attempt to provide people with the way of thinking and acting in this world in this lifetime with no reference to divinities no divine command from outside no great beliefs about the after life and in fact that the Greeks universally thought that the afterlife was a very dismal place you went underground and unless you were a tremendous hero you just listed about rather dismally and in the shadows of the asphodel meadows where the souls of the departed this week and Twitter like Beth's the Shakespeare tells us and they forget everything you know once they've crossed the the river Lethe they forget everything and it's a very miserable place so they weren't interested in the afterlife they were much more interested not getting there and they were very keen to leave a reputation behind them in the the world of the living this is why Pindar wrote ODEs to the great athletes this is why Achilles and other great heroes wanted to leave a mark on the minds of people of the living in this world now and it's the focus on this world which the Renaissance rediscovered in which the Enlightenment we rediscovered and what they have in common is this thought that it is the human individual it is the human experience it is our best understanding of the human condition and of human nature on which we supremists our thinking about the good about the good life and the good society about the sorts of things that are valuable and worth pursuing and that is why we use the word humanism I mean it's a bit sort of obliquely connected with the idea in the Renaissance period of the humanities the study of the humane letters that have been rediscovered and and we appreciate it at that time but of course there isn't a connection namely that those humane letters that were being studied were about human beings not about the afterlife not about angels and archangels not about what human beings have to do to get into into heaven but how one should live and what the dignity of the human individual is in this life hence titles of works like Pico della Mirandola the essay on that on the eraser on the digit of men well what's important about this for us now is that the point is very often made that it is the religions that offer emotional satisfaction or spirituality or an experience of the transcendent your going to a great Cathedral and the organ is playing in this incense and you can be captured by psychologically by this atmosphere and feel that you've stepped to a place apart from the ordinary demands of life sunday became just such a place if you went to church it was a place apart from the rigors and exigencies of daily life and that this was a refreshment to the soul and there's why very often you see outside churches the phrase from the Bible come on to me all ye who are burdened heavy laden and I will refresh you this idea of the refreshment offered by the spiritual and this is a fantastic achievement on the part of the religions to have absorbed and monopolized the idea of the spiritual the idea of refreshment I mean the words Persian in an entirely secular way to do with our complicated emotions and our emotional responses and our emotional needs and the way that they can sometimes connect with our intellects which is why sometimes you can enjoy if you're a mathematician the beauty of a proof or why you can look at the painting and marvel that the technical skilled as well as the the story told by a fool as well as the striking character of the painting aesthetically visually so this complex of emotional and intellectual responses to things and our sense of connection with this world of ours which in so many ways is an extraordinarily beautiful one and our the tenderest aspects of our relationships to other people these are things which are part of human experience a part of the human condition they belong to us and therefore humanism recognizes them and and embodies the minutes thinking about the good about ethics doesn't belong solely to religion in fact religion is hijacked these things it's so hijacked them that people now don't think that a walk in the country or listening to music or being with friends or just twiddling your toes and looking at the sky aren't forms of refreshments of the Spirit in the secular sense of human beings but so they are why should it just belong to religion to be able to speak to those aspects of ourselves humanism is perfectly capable of alerting people to the fact that there are all sorts of different ways in which we can be nourished intellectually and emotionally as human beings without having to appeal to anything transcendent order by now what [Applause] the churches until very recently have taken a monopoly of birth marriage and death and these great moments these of transition these rites of passage in our lives which seemed the demand of us that we do something special tomorrow and as you know organized humanist societies with a capital H now do do things like humanists marriages and and humanists funerals but in the general public there is a you know kind of anxiety about wicker caskets and open-toed sandals and beards and things and they they're visited quite the same thing it doesn't all the bells and smells of the church which seems to be you know more more appropriate when you've lost somebody very dear to you and so the humanist thing seems to be a slightly poor substitute for it in the minds of some people in fact it isn't at all and some of these ceremonies can be very uplifting but it is true that people need ceremonies they do need rites of passage and I minded of them some examples given in literature of the choices that people make themselves to mark something very important like a berth welcoming a child into the family into the community or people deciding to live together pooling their resources and building a life together raising children together or what we do when somebody we care about dies there are lots of different imaginative things that we do which we've been stopped from thinking about and making up because there is this convention there is this tradition of baptism and the marriage ceremony in church and the church funeral you don't need a humanist ceremony you just need you you just need you in some imagination you just need you and the recovery of the sense that we are each of us perfectly capable of finding ways of marking these great moments of transition in lives and indeed of refreshing ourselves every day or every week as it might be in more satisfying and more honest than this I think is the fundamental point much more honest ways than offered by the religions when they address these needs in our society sometimes people say how can you attack religion when you consider the comfort it gives you somebody old and alone and afraid and I say how much better it would be if we the neighbors of such a person could give that person love thank you very much [Applause] thank you very much [Applause] all right we have about five seven minutes here for a couple questions so do we have some questions lined up here we have one gentleman in green down here who has a question come here Thank You professor for beautiful speech thank you so much and thank you for lovely people here I want explain for you my name is Leon before professor University the Iran when before I gave a lecture about Darwin or about this is stuff I have been many years and torture me and I had my sister opposite my eyes and shoot my brother my brother - brother up my eyes I live for my life never never not give up and I come here today I am so happy I see professor and I one see mr. Richard oak and also I have bought for signature I have different question from you one we are here we are here not food only a struggle we are here not for only explain we are here for change I have cushion from you I gave beautiful friend a paper but I not when you broke receive my cushion philosopher what do you think professor about nature of mind and nature biology how can you see these people I see these people I see you in the screen I see you in the picture I see what different nature of mind and what different nature colony this one question second question why nature of mankind always selfishness always love they love each other why like that one nature mankind like that opposite each other one hand who love one hand who killed one of the selfishness one other side you interest yourself to question what is nature name nature month why selfishness other question whether nature morality and mine thank you thank you very much indeed thank you for that question well I'll answer the second of the two questions we'll try to answer the second of the two questions you asked there and then I'll try to answer this one but you've written down and the second of the two questions you asked was how is it that human beings can be such an alloy that we can be full of kindness and and tenderness to other people you would also have this capacity for cruelty and for unkindness and for treating the other as something less than ourselves and the last this is a fact about us obviously history thrills horribly with examples of the inhumanity of human beings to one another no question about it and when we talk about humanism and we talk about trying to base our ethics on our best understanding of human nature that understanding has to include this fact about us it's a very troubling fact because if you think about Nazism in Germany in the 30s and 40s and what very many ordinary Germans did to their fellow human beings and you ask yourself what does this mean does it mean that there is a streak of malice or evil in that people know is the answer does that mean that all of us are capable of this and alas yes is the answer circumstances can make us behave in ways that are you know deeply deeply wrong so the task that we face is in the education of sensibilities really we do this to ourselves in our schooling of course but much much more richly we do it through our literature through our arts through our reflection through our encounter with one another or trying to promote mutual understanding and tolerance and often point out that we all think we're very tolerant it's because we don't really mind but when we do mind then that's when the work of tolerance begins if we recognize the right of other people to think and act differently from ourselves subject of course to the harm principle but it's a work to be done it's a job of work trying to diminish the but we're all capable of doing and enhancing the good and the good news is that we'll know how newspapers are full of terrible news about atrocities and disasters and conflicts and punishments and hangings and the rest every day in every human community all around the world there are tens of thousands of acts of kindness and I can't help feeling that on the whole that the very evidence of human societies and human cities of the rest is evidence far more of cooperation than of conflict far more of the bonds that human beings feel for one another than of opposition's there's one little little example that one can use in this connection if you were walking down the street behind somebody and that that person was underneath a teetering pile of bricks just about fall on their head what would you do you wouldn't stand back and say this is going to be interesting get your camera out in the hope of getting a nice shot you would spontaneously and instinctively shout out call out to them look out and it wouldn't matter who that person was what religion they were what gender what anything but you would call out instinctively to a fellow human being in such a situation and that is a very positive and hopeful sign about ourselves and that's the one of course that we have to work to enhance the second the second question that our friend from me around asked and I read it actually said we know religion and politics are married this is an international problem in the Middle East the system is dogmatic and hypocritical and hypocritical in the name of God how can we solve this it might be that the question says is dogmatic and hypocritical in the name of God how can we solve this I'm not sure where the emphasis is like but I think it ought to be the first one Hey well this this this adverts to a theme which has recurred and recurred all throughout our discussion so far this weekend and it really is very central because the primary task is to reduce reduce the footprint of religions in our public square I've said elsewhere and I really hold to this view that in a liberal society even though you know in a open liberal pluralistic society even though it's the great paradox of such societies is that we find ourselves tolerating the intolerant and they rise up in our midst and then they threaten our tolerance and our openness you know one of the most tragic modern examples is the Netherlands the Dutch people of warmest hearted most open-armed most welcoming people in the world rational tolerant and they welcomed in lots of immigrants and one result has been a serious threat to the stability of their society as a result it's a tragic thing and it is a difficulty but what we have to do is to say of course people are entitled to believe what they like if you believe that there are fairies at the bottom of your garden and just so long as it doesn't bother anybody else you don't believe what you like and moreover all all groups and all individuals of course are entitled to be part of the conversation and to have their say and we tend to listen to them more when they have some competence it's not clear that mainly that's always the case even with the churches in our society but when it's something on which they have a an interest or a claim let's hear them but the trouble of course is that the religions have a vast the over inflated presence in our society for historical and other reasons and that is now the real target we've got to diminish that the the size of the religious presence we've got to turn their volume down a little bit and we've got to persuade them to recognize that lust that there are self selected interest groups on a par with all others in society and they're not entitled any more than any of the others are to our tax money or to an amplifier or to a special place there in society one more question the middle while noting this might take a little while but not too long I'll try and keep it brief one of the things that I wanted to state is that I have a question and our possible idea and that idea I'm happy to have criticized actually I want as much criticism as I can but the the idea and the thing that bothers me and I have sent emails to various different types of groups and I was looking for an answer and I suppose that might not be the best way to approach things okay yep I'm going I'm gonna get there okay one there's there's a group in medical system in the medical system at the moment which are known in Greek as healers of the Spirit and I know you define spirit as something that you know walk in the park and things like that but they can't be defined so how can you fix something you can't define and the petite particular people aren't talking about is psychiatrists actually that's what it means in Greek healer of the Spirit now if I'm correct and I am willing for a lot of discussion on this about being healers of the Spirit then shouldn't there be a scientific alternative an alternative that accepts criticism complete criticism of its ideas and comes up with an empirical model I'm a secular humanist so I don't believe in the supernatural and thus I don't believe in psychiatry so essentially say I've got some good news for you which is that psychiatry doesn't send longer mean healing the spirit well that's what it means in great and that's the answer I'm afraid [Applause] you

Channel: Atheist Foundation of Australia Inc

Views: 47,585

Keywords: ac grayling, atheist, atheist foundation, Global Atheist Convention, GAC

Id: pXP05Nsr6wg

Length: 61min 2sec (3662 seconds)

Published: Mon May 02 2011