Alice Roberts and Andrew Copson on humanist thought through the ages

we'll make a start because there's the the people are trickling and they're still coming in one by one but um we should now begin to say hello everybody and welcome to this event um my name is andrew copson i'm the chief executive of humanist uk which has organized this uh book launch and it is a book launch event albeit a few months later than expected um for the little book of humanism and i'm delighted to be joined by alice roberts the co-author of the little book of uh humanism we're going to talk a little bit about the book and then there's a possibility to in fact not just the possibility but the necessity of people to ask questions and have engagement about the book but before we get to questions although that will be the main aspect of this evening we just have some introductory remarks um and i'm delighted to say that the introductory introductory remarks will be from alice um say hello alice hello everybody and um she uh will be known to you all um president of humanist uk and a very excellent president too if i might say say and of course one of the authors of the little book of humanism so alice tell us all about why remind me why we did this book well we've been talking about it for a while haven't we andrew and it's so amazing to see it here as a as a physical reality and i'm just really pleased we've been able to do that this year as well because it's been difficult to to get things off the ground this year i'm sure everybody's phone that but we've had a really overwhelming response to it in terms of um both people buying it i mean it's you know went in straight into the sunday times bestseller list and um was up there on amazon and uh yeah it's just it's amazing the response the publishers were quite taken by surprise actually quite overwhelmed by obviously andrew and i knew that there would be a huge appetite for it and we've had some really lovely comments from people on social media as well which i think are really heartening because you you know you put a book together and and write it and edit it and and you hope that it's going to have the the particular impact that that was your ambition for it and i think some of the comments coming back show me that that it really is having that impact so i became president of humanist uk two years ago and i immediately started thinking about what we could do to really broaden humanism out and reach a much much wider audience and there's lots of stuff that humanist uk is already doing um in that regard obviously there are there's a whole series of public lectures that go on um and this year some of that has moved online and there's the annual convention which i would like to be revised as a festival but never mind um and there's also things like um the the fantastic um moocs as well so those of those have had a great response but when it comes to the literature around humanism i was um i kind of i kind of looked at what was out there and i was i was doing a lot of reading around humanism as i became president i mean i did know a bit about humanism before i became president but i was doing more and more reading around and thinking gosh this you know there's such a rich uh tradition of of literature which is humanist and and i think that um there aren't many books that bring all that together and and make it that visible um it's it's kind of scattered because it's because it's everywhere and because it because it's very ancient as well so um there are some you know absolutely fantastic books about humanism out there and great books about secularism as well it's rather lovely one back here i don't know who wrote that but it's really nice what a beautiful cover very lovely cover isn't it andrea and um and i thought well it i'd really like there to be something which is just really accessible the kind of book that you could just you could pick up and you could leaf through the kind of book where you know you might want you might be feeling in a philosophical mood and and you just want to indulge yourself in a bit of thinking about the world around you or living a good life all of those things and i started talking to andrew about it and we came up with the idea of little book of humanism and really from the beginning the idea was to mine that very deep and rich tradition of humanism that goes right right back to to ancient philosophers and i think some sometimes people you know people say to me oh you know humanism newfangled thing it's a new religion it's like no but it's the whole point is it's not a religion and it's utterly not newfangled it's been it's been going on for um for thousands of years and it is just this way of thinking which combines i think the best of being human the sort of the rationality with the with the empathy and the kindness together so i i think that humanism is a good thing obviously as president of humanist uk and i think that scientific literacy and critical thinking help us to make better decisions both individually and as a society as well and by better i very much mean decisions that really promote human flourishing so that's that's what we have in our sites i think as humanists and also i i do believe that science is the most powerful tool that we have not only for understanding the world around us but for actually helping us to to live in that world um to improve our own lives and to and to look after our planet too so some people have this misconception about humanism that it's um it's almost sort of it sets humans apart because it has human in the title um i didn't see it like that at all as a biologist i very much see humans as part of biology and humanism you know really means using using the best of what it is to be human to look after ourselves but i think to look after the planet as well and i also um see science as a fundamental cornerstone of of culture too so um you know mythology's fantastic but science is much better it's an amazing source of wonder and inspiration and creativity and i feel the same way about humanism so i've got this i've got this um i suppose philosophy about about science as a human endeavor which should be used to promote human flourishing as much as possible and i think that humanism is also something which has the power to change lives for the better to change societies for the better and i think there's a an enormous potential for humanism to do that and i i don't mean that in a wishy-washy way at all and i and i you know even though it's called the little book of humanism and it is beautiful and small and you know it's a little gem-like thing it's not the spiritual descendant of the little book of calm it's something much much more profound than that um of course which i would say is one of its authors and i wanted to another reason for writing it i suppose was to not just not just make the subjects accessible but to raise the visibility of of of humanism as an idea and a philosophy i mean i became a humanist pretty late in life or at least started attaching that label to myself pretty late in life i started off um being quite thoroughly indoctrinated as a child and grew up as an anglican or at least i was a you know child of devout anglican parents which is kind of the same thing and they were very keen that i towed the line in terms of my personal beliefs and then as a teenager when i was um really focusing on studying science and asking asking questions i think i found as many people who start off religious and then and then lose religion or reject religion find that if you ask enough questions there aren't any answers and i felt i couldn't place belief in um any sort of deity so for me that turned into quite a frank atheism but i know that amongst humanists there's there are agnostics all the way through to more kind of staunch atheists i don't know if i'd describe myself as a staunch atheist um but i don't find that the idea of a of a god because i can't see any evidence for god i don't find the idea of a god has any relevance um and actually it's up to us to um to meet the challenges that are there in front of us so i decided when i was a teenager that was atheist and i always had a bit of an issue with that because i felt it was um as though i was having to define myself in terms of an absence and define myself in terms of something that was missing and i think that um that that's often that often something that comes out in conversation with with religious people actually that they say oh you know but there's this thing that's missing from you that you're somehow deficient and so when i found out about humanism i thought no actually this is what this is what i believe i believe that the source of goodness is within us as humans and that we can make good decisions about our lives and that it's up to us to make our make our societies better so i think i was trying to work it out andrew i think i probably properly started thinking about humanism um when i met um jim alkali and i've known jim for for many years we've worked together on all sorts of science outreach as you can imagine we're both passionate about public engagement with science um and so um i think you know i probably met him in the late 90s early naughties somewhere like cheltenham science festival it would have been and talking to him about humanism i suddenly then realized that actually this was something that i very much identified with and so many people have expressed that in response to the little book of humanism so you know we get lots and lots and lots of responses on social media saying ah you know i've wondered what to call my outlook on life and it seems like a very natural outlook on life and this perfectly captures it and at the heart of it is an approach to the world and the self that's rational and there's no cooked up mystery there's no smoker mirrors we looked at natural causes and explanations rather than looking for supernatural explanations including deities of course um so whether whether that ends up being atheism or agnosticism um the deities are um part of that kind of more supernatural way of looking at the world and combined with that rational focus there's there's also a a really strong focus on this idea that this is the life we have because we can't see any evidence for an afterlife and um in in an absence of that evidence you think well you you can't you can't bet your life on there being something after death and so we focus on this life and not the life here after because as far as we know there isn't one and humanism you know i've mentioned human flourishing it has a really really strong humanitarian basis that's the reason i'm particularly passionate about it that you know we bring together rationality and logical thinking with empathy and kindness um what stephen pinker called the better angels of our of our nature and and humanists share the belief that we have the power to make good choices to to lead a good life and hate for a better future really depends on the choices that we make and our own human capacities our capacities for reason love and empathy and i i discussed i've told andrew this story before but i discussed humanism with a a local vicar who never really heard of humanism before um and she was a vicar that you know went into school to teach children about religion but um wasn't aware of humanism as a thing um and and was sort of curious and and started off the conversation thinking that perhaps there would be some kind of emptiness within me i think and i told her a bit about what humanism was and um we found um a lot of common ground which obviously ended at the point where um there were supernatural beliefs that that i don't describe to and we tried to we tried to kind of nail down the difference in in what we really believed and and stripping out the kind of rationality and the um belief in belief in god and you know sort of thinking you know in terms of in terms of what we believe about humans and our capacity to um to make the world a better place for ourselves and for others so what is the difference then you know is there a difference between us and i think that we got down to the the nub of it in a way the crux of it in that and she agreed with me that i suggested that i thought that the source of goodness came from within people whereas she thought it was external so that somehow humans needed to be saved by some kind of external force or at least helped by some external force to be good whereas as a humanist i believe we have that power within us so going back to i suppose me as a teenager i felt that leaving behind a religion for me was was less that less about cutting something out of my philosophy and leaving a hole behind and it was more like decluttering it was it was more like i had to be brave about it but if i if i removed myself from that particular worldview and that philosophy i was clearing away ways of thinking that that were actually unnecessary and unhelpful constraints and what i was left with was a clarity of thinking so rather than relying on scripture for moral guidance i could depend on my own moral sense and i could develop that sense through experience learning from others and turning to the whole of the rest of literature to find you to find human wisdom so you know that's the wonderful thing about humanism is we're not dependent on you know a particular set of scripture we can we can look to um all of literature and find humanist wisdom there it's really diverse i've already mentioned some of the books that um focus specifically on on humanism like that little book of secularism which is which is allied and the lovely handbook of humanism um and uh yes that's edited by andrew and ac grading of course and there's a there's a nice small short introduction to humanism but again quite academic so i wanted to work on something with andrew which was which was a bit wider and a bit more accessible than that and and also going right back to very early humanistic thinkers because the roots go right back to philosophy in ancient china india and greece and we've and we've got that in the little book of humanism and then going all the way through of course you've got fantastic enlightenment philosophers humanism really starts to emerge and take hold as an idea in the enlightenment um which i very much see is a as a time when people were returning to these um pre-monotheistic ideas in a way going back to that those ancient ways of thinking um and again decluttering so those kind of ideas about the world being natural not infused with supernatural forces or divinity um that humans have it within themselves through better people and make a work make the world a better place and you just realize when you start looking at the literature that so many people through history have had those thoughts and i think it is useful to try and collect them together and i suspect that that way of thinking actually which which i think once you arrive at it does seem so natural and obvious i suspect that it was much more prevalent in the past than than we can even um see today because of course what happened with the hegemony of religion was that you kind of you kind of had to ascribe to it even if it wasn't what you believe deep down and um it was very i think it was very difficult for a very long time for for people to express any dates about a particular religion especially if it was tied up of course with state and and government um and then of course religions themselves have they know they've known um through time the the power that comes with knowledge and so they've been very very close guardians of of that knowledge um they've kept that knowledge very very very close to them um and we we kind of see that as well in history you know we see the you know the ferrari that within a religion uh translating the bible into english had you know the idea that you would make it accessible it wasn't meant to be accessible it's meant to be knowledge which is which is closely guarded so i think there's probably a lot of that i think there's i think there's probably been a lot of humanist thinking that's just gone we haven't had it written down because religion had so much control over what was written down so what about today then more and more people are discovering humanism or or perhaps a better way of putting it is that they're discovering that humanism is as a as hesitate to cause a label andrew but as a description the scripture yeah describes how they're already thinking um and i think sometimes that idea or that realization comes along um when they're standing back and they've got time to reflect and think about life and death and say that might come along at a time when you're uh wanting to mark a life event so thinking about how you mark the birth of a new child um the new partnership or indeed a death so when people are thinking about the the social ceremonies that that mark those life events that's when they might start thinking about thinking about humanism and certainly i found that amongst my own family um that they're members of my sort of wider family that haven't really thought about humanism at all but when it comes to planning a funeral have suddenly been faced with the fact that the person that has just died certainly wasn't religious and they're not religious either and what do they do i put them in touch with humanist uk of course um so i think for a lot of people humanism does encapsulate what they already think about the world but there's there's so much more to read of course um so you know that's my own personal experience that i was a humanist before i before i even realized it so andrew and i talked about it and um and came up with this sort of hair brain scheme that has turned into turned into reality and um you know we wanted to raise awareness we wanted to do something about this wonderful diverse wellspring of literature uh and and show how it's all bound together by this by this underlying theme of humanism so um andrew i think you were immediately enthusiastic about this idea but i suggest you i was delightful always delightful when you suggest something to somebody and they go yeah yeah let's do it so we um we talked to different publishers and found found a home for it was little brain um and and right from the beginning we wanted it to be a book where we would write some of it um and um explain um or you know write biographies of of key people uh write a little bit about um certain philosophical traditions that sort of thing but there are also a lot of quotes in it and so it was a it was a real joy to put together because we both um did a lot of reading and we learned i think we learned a lot from each other because and i was bringing more of the kind of sciencey uh quaits and and excerpts to andrew um and he was opening me up a bit to um well some rather wonderful novels and history which is which has been fantastic and philosophy so i'm really pleased um to be here officially launching it although of course we have already soft-launched it um into the world and it's and it's doing this is the real night this is the real night yeah but it's real i hadn't dared to believe in it until today and we've always see we also decided when we did it that um i don't think the publishers wanted to say i don't know why they didn't want to say this but we've decided that we are whatever the publishers are doing we are donating um the royalties um back to humanist uk and they're being used to um particularly train up new humanist celebrants uh we thought that was very apt indeed so i'm really pleased to be here this evening with my co-author um and with all of you as well and we've got lots of lots of questions coming in already we've got some great questions coming in um it's it's it's interesting that you should say that about um how people realize that humanism describes what they believe i remember that the first president first person in your role the first president of human uk that i knew was claire rayner when i first started at uh and she said exactly the same thing you know for decades she'd had a humanist view um and it wasn't until she she um you know heard the word and learned about as it then was the british humanist association that she uh realized what it was that described what she believed and she she said two other things as well though um which i think is two of the things that we wanted to achieve with this book is that when she found that it was also when she found you know there was a word humanist she said it also felt in a sense like coming home she found that she had a had a conversation an ongoing conversation that she was part of you know she had a sort of sense of belonging and i think that's very interesting because we said in the introduction to this book you know humanism is an ongoing conversation down the centuries you know a dynamic and developing exchange of views and ideas you know and you're welcome to it you know come come to it and and and and take part in it and i think that that's a lot of people reflect that that has been very beneficial for them and the second thing that she said in in relation to that in addition to just realizing that humanist described what she believed and being very pleased to at last have a word to describe and what it believed is that it also helped her develop her beliefs it also helped her think more about it you know the moment when she she was able to say oh it's a humanist view i've got is a humanist approach life at that moment it sort of came into focus it had had greater coherence and so she was able to think about her beliefs how they related to each other do a bit of mental spring cleaning you know if i believe this do i really believe that and you know just give a framework for thinking about it and i think that's that's not going to be everyone's experience but i think it's a very valuable experience so it was yeah i mean that does i mean that really changed me because it is that kind of clarity and suddenly going right there was this there was this all this kind of clutter that was there that was getting in the way and actually can be much clearer about it now and like and also they're kind of permission to approach everything critically which is which is that kind of scientific perspective in that rational perspective um but i think that yeah i mean it's it's really interesting that it's such a such a common common theme one of the things which really frustrates me and we will get onto questions uh but one of the things that really frustrates me is when you get religious people kind of going oh but you know are you some kind of moral vacuum because you don't believe in god or you know but what about morals and i don't even understand that i don't understand it i mean you know what about teaching children we need religion in order to teach children morals and ethics and you just go no that's abs you know that's crazy and also i find it i find it really quite offensive because there's this kind of suggestion that you're not thinking deeply enough and that um you know you only if you're religious can you think deeply enough to start really engaging with those moral and ethical questions in life um and i think that yeah given that most people in britain are not religious i think there are many deep deeply moral and ethical people here that's right and that most people who've ever lived have not been members of the religions currently available no i mean that's also what do people think of the majority of human ancestors that they were you know moral vacuums this is such a strange um point of view it's like you said i mean there's a there's a this is a really important thing about the humanist approach life i think is that we we don't think that there are you know that that you need an external source of value and commandment um to be good like you say it's actually based built in part on our social instincts it comes from inside us both individually and together you know the sort of conversations we're having now i think it was really good that we managed to get thinkers who were saying that in the little book not just recently but for example mencius from china you know two thousand six hundred years ago saying you know this is in you it's it's like a spark you just need to kindle you used to bring out these these feelings and and you will know um you know how to be moral how to be good it doesn't come from outside you're not a fallen broken thing you are an entity that has that in them just bring it out kindle it you know you're not a fallen thing that's a what's the lovely ratchet quote oh yes that's right i'd rather be a rising eighth than a fallen angel yeah that's a brilliant one with a great picture right let's do some questions let's do some questions john the first question comes from john white odd question if someone believes in god they can express gratitude for the benefits of life how do humanists express gratitude and who too oh gratitude gratitude that's yeah i think gratitude is a is a an emotion that um is i think it's quite general and i think that when um good things happen to us because i think humans are very we we just see cause and effect basically and and it's a good survival instinct you know you you look for if if something bad happens you look for the instigator of that bad thing and run away from them it's happening again and if something good happens you gravitate towards the agent so you look for agency in the in the world so i think that you know as a humanist i would say um we accept oh i accept that there is no agency behind you know if if something happens to me which is you know a chance event but it turns out well for me that's that's lovely but it's difficult not to feel grateful so i just feel grateful in a very vague way to the universe but not in a kind of not in a kind of um new agey i think the universe really cares about me uh i think it's i think it's better to try and feel lucky i think that's how i like thinking gratitude implies that you've got yeah let you say some something to be grateful to but it also sort of i think always implies that somehow you're special that you've been granted a given a a benefit or a gift and i think that can sort of confuse the issue of um of of desserts you know if somehow it can sometimes make you think i'm grateful for it for this gift or for this reward whereas if we think about good luck that we've had to whatever we might attribute it i you and i have discussed this before because i know you feel very strongly about contingency in life and how it's important point of view to realize and recognize that what you know your good fortune is is just fortune you know it's just luck it's you can't feel that you've overly um that you're a terribly splendid person for having that landed in this in this particular position or that or that you're a bad person turpitudinous person to have landed in in this bad position so i think an attitude of gratitude can actually be quite um uh harmful morally harmful and and as you say the the corollary of it is that um there has to be an attitude of guilt or you know exactly something if something bad people could be like that it must be your fault yeah yeah yeah to feel bad for it did you decide to not include thoughts and inspiration from secular buddhist teachings from peter and taunton actually i did look at some quotes from the buddha because i think that ac grayling is quite right in that actually buddha himself was probably pretty close to a humanist and it's quite quite different from the sort of structure of religion that's been built on him since but we did we didn't it never we never actually discussed that did we there are things we could have said from books oh there are but honestly um so we didn't yeah we didn't we didn't go no we're definitely not having secular buddhist teachings uh there was so much to put in um and you know we do have we do have a lot of uh philosophy from around the world in there um so we tried not to have this kind of exclusive focus on western philosophy um i think we did that quite deliberately i mean it was very important to us to demonstrate the global and long history of of humanism there's lots of books on buddhism i suppose as well aren't there i mean there's lots of books about the sayings of the buddha or not so many about mencius john stuart mill bertrand russell and married curie you know yes it's brilliant john in a secular society is a national religion actually an advantage because it drowns out the noise and distraction of the religions competing altogether for a say saying how society is wrong well no because that's not a secular society then is it because the principle of secularism is that you don't have a national religion um and i i feel really strongly about that i feel i feel really strongly that we shouldn't have the state religion um for all sorts of reasons um but i think the principle one is that uh we are um a diverse plural society and that and and also that i mean that secularist principle that you shouldn't have the state telling you what you should believe and um and and putting up one particular religion as being the answer um or indeed one particular worldview so equally i wouldn't want um i think i don't know i'm gonna say this and and andrew's going to frown at me no you're right i wouldn't want the state to be a humanist state i want the state to be a secular state i want to respect all religions and none i want everybody to be free to pursue their own beliefs and worldview without interference from the state and we've got this dreadful situation at the moment where um you know particular religions interfere hugely in our politics um and with much more weight than than actually they should have in terms of their representation society yeah and we have all these faith schools you know a third of which schools are faith schools and i do actually think that is um it is against it stands against children's human rights that's not respecting their freedom of belief if you're forcing them to say prayers in the classroom and that's what's happening in this state in these state funded taxpayer-funded faith schools entirely taxpayer-funded exactly 100 john's question is is a common one though because it's it it sort of suggests that a national religion can be a sort of stabilizing influence um and i don't i don't personally think there is actually much evidence for that i think secular states are as stable and so are multi-confessional states like the netherlands you know that's that's not a secular state either um but and always um you know there are other examples like that of states that are i mean i don't think that that's that multi-faith approach to state is the right one i think the secular approach is the right one but i don't think there's any evidence that a national religion is per se a stabilizing influence and in fact in history it's been quite the opposite you know it's fought for its dominance it's prevented people from gaining public office or going to university or like you say even today from getting into some state schools by its dominant position so i think it's pretty pernicious actually um i think sometimes we don't realize how egregious our own situation is in england i mean we're the only state in the world where the law requires daily christian worship in our state schools no other state in the world requires that we're one of only four states that allow beating well we'll get here world beating and and um only you know two two countries in the entire world that where clerics have automatic seats in government iran and the uk with our automatic seats of bishops in the in the house of lords clive asks is there a difference between secularism and humanism and we've sort of covered that is that i mean it obviously depends what you mean by those words but i think that we both use use the word secularism as you pointed out in in the book that i did three years ago the secularism very short introduction to sexualism one as secularism describes an attitude by the state towards religions and beliefs which you know doesn't take a view doesn't take a side um tries to give everyone the maximum freedom possible that's compatible with the rights of others and and holds the line on that say you know um humanism obviously as we as we're discussing is not that it's a word to describe an approach to life a world view that's based on the sort of things we've been talking about but i think most humanists are probably secularists the vast majority i mean i think there are i think there are some humanists who say things a bit like john's question implied although i'm not saying whoever you are john i'm not saying this is what you believe but as john's question implied there are some humans there are very few that i've met who think that a sort of a national church doesn't do too much harm and you might as well keep it as it is you know that sort of um view i don't think that's right i think that's wrong but um i think there are the vast majority of humanists i think we're going to be want a secular state and a secular government and a secular approach for sure and aren't we just about to have some kind of anniversary of the um disestablishment of the welsh in wales that's right yeah it's a hundred years since the dis-establishment of the church in wales which was passed into law in 1914 but didn't come into effect until 1920 because of the first world war um and so yeah a hundred years of disestablishment in wales and the church of course was just established in ireland in 1870 and was never established in scotland the church of scotland has a sort of national claims or sort of national church status yes it's just it's just sorry old england i'm afraid he's left with this uh with this establishment yeah we seem to be lagging don't we um england and wales lagging together in terms of humanist marriages experience weddings humanist weddings legal in scotland legal in northern ireland northern ireland islands the the disestablishment in wales was quite radical and because it was not only a dis establishment it was a disendowment so they took their money away as well which is quite a yes quite a good thing to do um because they are extremely wealthy as you know yeah of course hillary um wants us to suggest a good answer to the question posed to her by her son isn't humanism just a belief in humans why should i put my faith in such an obviously flawed creature well i think it's a misnomer isn't it like you saying about other animals you know because of the word humanist some people get the mistaken impression that the humanist view of the world is exclusively human-centered or you know um worshiping humans or something um but but obviously it's not it's it does describe a contrast it's humanness human in contrast with something else but what it's in contrast was continuing to contrast with is those extra human non-human you know divine or other inhumane principles to which people appeal for knowledge or um morals or or meaning it certainly doesn't set up humans in place of gods no no and i know that someone else here actually asks a question a similar question um saying that perhaps um with reference to this is neil bartlett who asks a similar question to the one that hillary said which is that does this does humanism seem exclusive of other living things given where the point of human-made climate chaos and a long history of human destruction is thinking of yuval noah herrera's sapiens i mean yuval no hara is whatever you think of his books not good at all um he um he has done a lot of harm with his rather eccentric use of the word humanism to describe sort of negative uh human-centered philosophers i think we would both say wouldn't we just that that's not what we mean by humanism no absolutely not and um we have a whole um chapter in the little book of humanism about that um which is called children of earth children of earth i think that's so good i like that i like that i like that we try to do that with the titles because the one of the things that we didn't i think mentioned introduction is that we were absolutely convinced that the book should be relentlessly positive you know so often humanism is described as being you know a non-religious not believing in god's not following this not following that and so we looked for positive chapter titles i think children of earth was a yeah it's lovely and also when you say humanism is described in that way that's the way that others describe being human so we had an opportunity to go actually this is what it is exactly i'm not quite from george eliot we could never have loved the earth so well if we'd had no childhood in it if it were not the earth where the same flowers came up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass i mean it's just lovely and you know as a as a biologist i think one of the crucial crucial lessons of modern biology is that humans are exceptional in many ways um so you know we have cognition which as far as we know um is uh far in advance of of any other animal or they you know perhaps whales and dolphins are thinking just as profound thoughts as we are they just don't have hands to hold pens and write it down or type it um but that biology says it knocks us off a pedestal we've always wanted to put ourselves on a pedestal at the center of the universe at the center of the universe where god is interested in us um and and all other all other species are put at our disposal and that just you know scientifically does not stack up our species is a twig on the tree of life and i love that because it's humbling um however much you know we think we're clever or produce amazing culture and all of that and we do we also have the capability for massive destruction which we have to be aware of and we have the ability to be aware of that t so that that um i think that awareness brings a huge responsibility with it um but you know ultimately we are just another evolved uh species on this on on this earth and and i like not being on a pedestal i like the fact that uh you know it it it imposes that responsibility on us but it also gives us context it gives us a context where you know you are part of life on this earth you're part of the story of the planet there is a god and her name is george earlier that's my view i think that if i had if i had to make a little temple am i going to be a temple enjoyed earlier um alison stone asked if we would consider a children's version of the book no because there is already the excellent michael rosen and anne marie waters book on humanism for children which is available again in all good bookshops or on the uh humanist uk um uh website i believe um having said that my kids uh my kids i mean i've got a few copies lying about the house and they yes they rather like it and they like the pictures in it as well and um you know i think it's pretty age appropriate actually i think it would probably i mean i know that's when we did the an event about the book in eden virtually in parliament last week with the parliamentary humanist group someone suggested that we raise money to send it to schools because it is quite a good dipper for i think you'd have to be you'd have to be very very young not to get anything out of it yeah i think there's a lot in there i mean my children are based like key stage two so he's like older primary and and they're kind of reading little bits of it so they probably might be bits of it that they don't get but it still should go in every child's stocking that's definitely yeah definitely definitely the case oh we've got a question about the audio book um oh yeah we're having fun with that aren't we so we're hoping that a great um diverse range of humanists are gonna help us with that um so it should be it should be really fun um and we'll both contribute to it but we'll have lots of other people lots of other hatefully quite familiar voices in there i hope so um anonymous attendee um this is about well this is a very interesting question so this is someone whose wife is a deacon and is religious they want to bring up uh an anonymous attendee wants to bring up the question of their lack of religion um without threatening their her his wife her wife's um uh own depression i think this is such an interesting question because this is about sort of what what they used to call mixed marriages really isn't it where you where you've got someone who's um very religious and someone who's really not and of course very religious people do worry about the people they love um not being religious because of course they think bad things are going to happen to them and i think that's really a very um a very difficult question to to deal with how do we how do we deal with that you and i have talked before i think we're being interviewed for something when we were was it robin it's asking us about um you know sometimes shouldn't we just give comfort by through falsehood sometimes could it be justified um to just say well no of course you know uh to pretend um especially with vulnerable people possibly dying people but in this case people who are vulnerable for other reasons is it sometimes right to pretend um that uh that you believe things that you don't or that think things are true that you don't think are true i think this is generally tricky i think it's incredibly tricky it's a very very personal question isn't it because it depends on the kind of relationship you've got with that person it depends on um how much you can discuss what you've got in common and then start to talk about what you what you um what you believe that's different from that other person um and also when you've got somebody here isn't that a vulnerable situation of course as a humanist i would say one of the important things is to be kind you know that's got to be that's got to be part of it um so it's a very yeah this is one of those very very difficult conundrums that had to be a very difficult yeah and i think the context really matters i mean that is obviously a humanist principle is it no two moral questions are identical no two moral dilemmas are identical they're all different there's all context and i remember giving example when we were discussing it before that you know um if my dying grandmother and this isn't fortunately something i had to deal with because all of my dying grandmothers were humanists but if my dying grandmother who was you know a believer had said to me on her deathbed you do believe that i'll see your grandfather again won't you do you believe you know and do you believe too and um because she was worried about my soul or about her future and she was minutes from death as and death i would say yes i do i would i think i would i think i would have said you know yes absolutely i i believe it um and that would have been that context but if it had been a child you know a six-year-old child asking me for my beliefs about these things because she was worried that about something like that um i would probably have given a different answer i probably said no i don't believe that because of the context there is that um she's got her whole life ahead of her it's a different situation and i want her to feel that there are different beliefs that she could challenge and investigate you know it's all about context isn't it um i think that quite yeah definitely and you know that thing about children i think a lot of people feel uncomfortable about talking to children about um religion or lack of religion um and and again you know i think that in faith schools um the children presented with this idea that everybody everybody has some kind of religion um and you know the the idea of well i you know the fact that more than half the british population is not religious is not discussed in a lot of primary schools it's like you know you everyone believes in something so children are being given this very strange idea i think of of the diversity of views out there and and i think you know when when a child asks us if we believe in god we should be absolutely honest with them and um and also you know i think sometimes we're probably protecting ourselves from difficult conversations around death and it's easier to say to children they're in a better place than to actually be honest with them and start talking to them about mortality and what death i think that's really useful point and i think there's it raises another point which is that sometimes you can turn this around and ask you know am i just making myself comfortable um but equally you can ask like if you're asking yourself the question should i fraudulently express belief to this person in order to make them feel better you should then ask yourself the question well would i like that to done to me you know would i like someone to lie to me to make me feel better and i think that's a different way of looking at the question as well and that that might help joe we've got 80 questions now hardly 12 minutes um i i don't think we can answer them yes or no no then it's yes or no exactly we have to do them in order um alice fuller um one of our former trustees and coordinator of young humanists um who has child care who wants this read out um do you think it's important alice that we reveal ourselves as humanists to friends family colleagues and strangers and explain about it do you do it and what's the reaction you get i say i think it is and and you know for that reason which um kind of encapsulates um the the the whole kind of idea of doing the little book of humanism that i think it's a really helpful philosophy and i think that um again it's a philosophy which um a lot of people are naturally forming um without being aware that there is this kind of coherence to what they think and and deep deep kind of history to it um and i and i also think that you know we've had our society still i think allows religious people to be much more open um about their faith than um and and and tends to be quite disinterested in in people who are um non-faith and i think we need to change that and we need to be um you know we need to be happy about our views and prayed about um saying what we believe in and why we believe in it you know we i think when you believe something is it comes from deep principles um so yeah i think definitely and i do i mean i it's it's kind of hard not to as president of humanist uk and it's quite a good um you know that that is quite a good thing to be able to say to people when they get are you religious and you gave one president so but it is a way in then isn't it yeah yeah yeah um julie's asking for any more books in the pipeline i'm sure alice is working on lots of books but there is in fact uh something else we're hoping to work on together so yeah yeah there's another another another something another little something coming along in the in the humanist vein um i'm just finishing a book about uh ancestors say a book about prehistory and burials which will be out in the spring um which is good but i say it's got a bit about burials and a preach to death in it at the end um because and that's really interesting to take the long view on it and look at how people have uh how people have come together to make sense of death socially and differing funerary practices over time yeah that is interesting isn't it because there's often somehow an implication with humanist ceremonies that somehow we're trying to replace religious ceremonies and i always think if you take the long view you know religion's diminishing importance somewhat in this whole question of of human ceremony the fact is that we are quite sort of we do ceremonies all the time we're always like marking things and ritualizing things and it's true that religion has been in some places at some times one sometimes very important way of doing that um but it's not as if there was somehow a religious past and now there's a humanist presence there's always been human beings making sense of things through actions yeah and when you take the long view on it i mean that that kind of human need to um to to create the narrative i suppose in our own lives and to make sense of life and death and the way that we do that through ritual and through ceremony that's the enduring thing the thing which comes and goes is religion yeah and and very often religions would just pick up on whatever rituals were there already i mean christmas is such a fantastic example of that isn't it you know when when so many people say to me do you say do you celebrate christmas and i'm like well there's a question here and it's called christmas in there oh good so i'm answering that name yeah yeah celebrate christmas um uh and you know in the sense that in in britain what we tend to call this midwinter festival is christmas and you could call it you or you could call it whatever you want really but there's been a midwinter festival for a very very long time uh before um the romans decided that that's when they were gonna start celebrating christmas um so you know it's the the 25th of december was the festival of the unconquered sun before it became uh the apparently the day that jesus was born on although there's no documentary evidence of course but there you go oh yes that's right and you don't feel bad about celebrating christmas for that reason do you and i always think of like well it's the midwinter festival that we do in this country just as thursday is the is that day of the week and yes it's named after thor but you know i don't object to thursday as a result i do the thing that that we do in our in our cultures and we light fire and gather for warmth and give give reaffirm our humor not every thursday i mean every christmas thor's hammer you're married yeah not because i worship thor but because i rather like it well i know that's what you say okay like a viking john plimson says you've dedicated the book to a lot of people what made you decide to give this lovely dedication this is because we dedicated it to all those who think for themselves and act for others and i think that's an old humanist uk motto actually it is lovely and you know it's just basically to whoever opens that book um picks it up and looks at it it's for them yeah that's right tommy warburton um says on wikipedia um oh dangerous place to go um on wikipedia it suggests that you missed a this but um some tommy uh tommy tommy is an agnostic um and um i don't think this is a question really no he's just saying that he's actually because you know god may or may not exist yeah absolutely um and yeah lots of you know humanists tend to be as i said either atheists or agnostics and and agnosticism is a is a perfectly sensible you know point of view that you just gave well there's no evidence but if somebody turned up with evidence tomorrow then then i'd take a look at it um i suppose i go a bit further than that towards atheism because we've been looking for a god for a long time yes and there's still no evidence and it's an incoherent concept i think yeah and also the way that um the the gods of um current religions are clearly made up and all borrow off each other um and are also stuffed into the interstices of science at the moment so and and increasingly smaller interest disease so you know that that whole god of the gaps thing where you're kind of going oh but you can't explain this so this must be god and then you go well actually we can explain that and they go but there's a smaller bit that you can't explain so that must be good and then god gets squeezing squeeze and squeeze but i don't believe in the in god in the same way that i don't believe in unicorns and fairies so if somebody comes up to me and shows me absolutely incontrovertible proof that a i'm not mad and b there is a unicorn in the front garden i'll believe in it equally as a deity standing there but you know that's a good point because also illustrates like you another reason why you don't believe in unicorns is you know that unicorn how unicorns came to be they're a human imagination there's a horse and there's there's horns you know animals with horns and at some point a human being had an imaginative leap and created in his or her mind this this idea and that's god's as well isn't it you can see god what what gods are yeah oh it's fascinating they look like us and you can trace that you can chase the historical connections between different religions and all of that and that i think is strong evidence against the existence of of gods yes i think it is that you can increase the development of these ideas yeah um paul godwin asks what would you say is the fundamental belief i assume um paul means of of a humanist approach um for example is it a belief in creating the greatest happiness or something similar i distrust all fundamental beliefs actually i think i do it's a kind of it's a mixture of things isn't it i think so i i didn't even like sort of great ethical systems really i think sometimes sometimes you're doing one thing sometimes you're doing another you're thinking about the consequences so maybe you're a bit utilitarian but at the same time you don't want to be that person that everybody you know um will hate because you've done this harm so are you actually a bit of a virtue ethicist as well you know you're doing different things i think all the time and then you're moderating and judging things according to your own experience and your own conscience and your own values big big big systems scare me a little bit actually yeah if it's anything it's probably questions it's probably yes it's probably a process rather than a rather than a thing so it's probably that process of critical thinking which brings you to approach the world rationally but also makes you critique your own morals and ethics in a certain way as well so i would say asking questions constant reflection constant asking of questions so lesser belief more more a process a commitment more of a way of life yeah yeah that's good isn't it it was one of the things that we said about the book is that we wanted the the humanist approach to life to be to to appear through this book not as just a philosophical set of of beliefs but as a way of living as a you know a worldview yes but also an approach to life and i think that's that's right rachel wants to know if we're going to build on the book to raise awareness of humanist uk um yes absolutely human issue k is um firmly advertised of course in the last last page of the book very very important so it's not just sort of 30 000 copies of the book going out there it's thirty thousand adverts for humanist uk as well which is a nice way of and all the amazing work that humanity does i mean sometimes people say to me you know why is it you know why is it some kind of club is it some kind of organization do i have to belong to humanist uk to be humanism of course you don't but we are in a um in a society where we can clearly see that many things should change um and need to be changed for the better and that it's fantastic to have an organization which is basically working towards that um which is which is looking at you know everything from um the the complete anachronism of faith schools in in british society to international human rights issues i think it you know that's that's the purpose of the organization is is to enshrine humanist principles and to um and to help humanists to move the world into a into that better place and also all the lovely you know the fantastic work that humanist uk does training um all those celebrants that are that are there to help people um uh put those rituals in place naming ceremonies weddings and and funerals as well so it's a really important strand of what humanist uk does as well i mean i think that and that's the same in humanist organizations all over the world i mean it's obvious that the the the the model of a humanist organization is onto something you know we in relation to genuine human needs because everywhere in the world where there are humanist organizations they do those things they they they do advocacy and and try to fight for social change but they also provide that fellowship and um connection to humanism for people and community services to outside society so i think it's quite a you know i think that actually speaks to genuine human needs um because it's everywhere okay now we there is absolutely no way that in the next one minute we are going to get through 70 questions i don't know whether these questions all disappear when this when this webinar ends i hope they don't because then we could maybe address them in some other in some other way um i'm afraid i think we should defer the question about humanist sami to a humanist celebrant um who i uh your name isn't here it's just your email address but i can tell you that every humanist element is so impeccably trained and is themselves such a fountain of excellent ideas and suggestions that they will be able to answer your question um better than we can um were we influenced by ac grayling's good book i read it and was very i enjoyed ac grain's good book very much in particular yeah yeah yeah he compiled it what we did really apart from he didn't attribute the quote so he took cumulus quotes from all traditions all over the world and then just sort of assembled them without attributing them into the good book and his point obviously was that's what the bible is by the way you know the bible is a collection of things from all over the place that just got codified together by accident his bible was by design um which i think makes it better than the bible but but we wanted to add some of our own views didn't we to this book we didn't want to just do a book of quotes yeah yeah um and and the biographies i think are lovely too yeah yeah i think that brings it to life actually people um look we we can't get through it all or not and our time is is is over um unless you want to extend it by five minutes alice i know that we have to we've got a hard stop hard i think we can extend it for five minutes we've got a hard stop at 7 40 haven't we but um i i will i will randomly select a question out of them oh can i can i select paul vargas yeah uh saying as an anthropologist have we found any evidence i haven't found any evidence for characteristics we associate with goodness such as empathy and self-sacrifice emerging as a survival advantage in early humans or their ancestors that's a really interesting question because when we look at the emergence of modern human behavior which is taken to be indicative of human human cognition then you know one of the things we look at is whether we can see any evidence of uh individuals caring for other other individuals so if we see evidence of horrendous healed fractures that obviously show that that person was looked after for instance and you know we do see that in very very early human societies but very much i see you know the human the human capacities we've been talking about those those better angels of our nature they are of our nature they are evolved and i think that all of this comes from the fact that we are social animals and we're better when we're working together we're better when we're collaborating and it's a it's a i suppose it's a theme in biology which is often overlooked i think we rather relish the red in tooth and claw in biology and the idea that everything in evolution is forged through competition um well you know lynne margulis who who was the um proponent of the and the originator the amazing endosymbiont theory in in biology um who should be much better known than than she is her partner carl sagan is it tends to be the famous one and she kind of is in his shadow and she shouldn't be um and she wrote a beautiful book about symbiosis in in biology and uh you know cooperation collaboration and and humans take that to it to a new level uh because of because of our culture and our society so again i think it's in us but it's very natural there's so many questions i think we have to it would be invidious now to choose um only only one and i think that was such a detail and interesting answer that you gave to the last question that we might as well make that the last question unless any any oh this is this is a good one just to show um uh i'm interested in the answer to this do you do either of us have any superstitions do you have any superstitions because i once asked philip pullman this when we were doing some interviews phillip pullman obviously a good human uk patron um and he then confessed at the end of the interview he had a lucky pen oh and asked did that make him a bad humanist after all and i thought no i don't think it did actually it depended what he meant by lucky pen you know i think that the i don't think i think an acceptance of our own characters to some extent and the fact that we have you know ways of doing things that give us comfort is as long he didn't really believe it's a lucky pen you know he didn't he didn't really believe that that pen would you know from that pen and that pen only would good words flow you know for his uh for his plotting he he was expressing a sort of human feeling of connection with an ob to an object and it's history and it's it's it's meaning and i think that those sorts of feelings that are not strictly rational they're not superstitious because you don't believe that necessarily that the object will do anything um you feel a connection to it for other reasons sentimentals fascinating i think cognitively because you you then go okay so you say that kind of feeling of attachment that you have with that object does that then engender superstition does that again kind of lead into superstition i'm just thinking about it i don't i don't think i do have any superstitions i'm wracking my brains to try and work out if i don't you scientist you're such a scientist you see there you go to you andrew don't you ever well i don't i don't think so i mean sometimes i think that if i can get the bit of paper into the bin three times i might win the lottery no i don't think that i know i don't but i do feel i do feel a non-rational attachment to to certain objects and rituals i think um but i i feel like i do or maybe that's just how i make my cup of tea you know i'm not sure i'm not sure if i do that's habit yeah is it is it a suit is it maybe i don't know what superstition is i do think that if i i think maybe in the back of my head i think i might think that if i put my cup of tea on the left of the kettle rather than the right of the kettle it won't be as good because i always put my cup of tea on the right one it's the traps that are there in our brain and i think they've been in our brain for a long time i think that's you know that's part of why we need to critique ourselves all the time um my very good friend ben garrett he spent a long time hanging out with chimpanzees is convinced that chimpanzees are superstitious um and there are some there's there's some very good evidence that chimpanzees do you know very odd rituals which don't seem to be at all linked to survival they definitely do cultural things like going around sticking bits of grass in their ears and thinking that looks rather nice and then all of them do it but they would also do strange things there's a great chimpanzees that started laying stones at the bottom of trees and you know the researchers watched them going what the hell are they doing and they all started to do it and they carried on doing it for a bit and it was like a little religion that they'd invented well of course it must come from somewhere i think yeah i think the tendencies to do those things to do those repeated acts and then probably to make sense of them afterwards is very very ancient yeah something to watch out for anyway andrew next time you make it it is you know what i'm going to do that's what i'm going to do in the morning when i make my cup of tea it's too late for tina when i make my cup of tea in the morning i'm going to put my cup on the left of the left of the kettle and if you don't hear from me again that's that that's why i know exactly it was right all along so many questions so many other questions um available in all good bookshops the little book of humanism some questions have been where can i get it from you can get it from everywhere um here it is um it's available in all good bookshops um please uh uh fill stockings with it this christmas we absolutely want to get the message out there um thank you for for coming thank you for the questions even if we couldn't answer them we'll try and save them and deal with them in some other way in a bigger in a bigger way and maybe we'll try an event like this again sometime next year so thank you so much it's lovely to have so much engagement and so many questions i do feel awful um that we can't get around to them all so we will go through and have a look at them and absolutely if you follow humanist uk on twitter or follow me on twitter we might we might um make it obvious where we're going to answer all these questions yeah yeah definitely definitely all right thank you very much everyone good evening goodbye enjoy reading happy stay safe keep well stay safe bye-bye get the vaccine

Channel: Humanists UK

Views: 20,884

Keywords: Humanism, Secularism, Atheism, Agnosticism, Education, Talks, Lectures, BritishHumanistAssociation, Non-religious, Science, Philosophy, Humanists UK, Ethics, alice roberts, andrew copson

Id: P2yS_bZlS4s

Length: 63min 28sec (3808 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 08 2020