The true meaning of humanism: religion and human values

By this point, I think any fair-minded humanist would have to concede that religion is a very big category, that it includes not only anti-humanist but also humanist forms, and that the historical tradition of religious humanism deepened and advanced the most important thing of all, human dignity.

By the last third of the nineteenth century, the religious roots of humanism had been largely severed. Earlier I referred to Marx's identification of humanism with naturalism or atheism. There were also more openly hideous forms of atheism, such as Social Darwinism and the new, so-called scientific racism, which culminated in Nazism. Modern forms of religious fundamentalism emerged in response to atheism, though in some important respects they are its mirror image. Together, all these anti-humanistic ideologies, including those like Communism that called themselves humanism, made the twentieth century the most murderous one in human history. With that tragic recognition, let me turn to the next part of my paper.

Several times I have described the “image of God” as the ideal in “ideal selfdetermination”. But is the image of God real, or, more precisely, is God, reflected in the image, real? That is the question at stake in the epistemic case against belief in God, advanced by the new atheists who claim that there are no rational grounds for theism. I will turn briefly to that argument now. Let me begin with Kant's approach to the rationality of theism. The idea that human dignity consists in the capacity for ideal self-determination is a Kantian argument, as I noted above in connection with Pico. The argument has been vastly influential ever since Kant advanced it in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785). For Kant the ideal that drives our self-determination is not directly the “image of God” but rather what he calls the “moral law”. Right away that is confusing, because “law” implies something externally imposed, while self-determination has to come from within. But in fact Kant's moral law is a pure, intrinsic ideal of reason. It functions just like the “image of God”. Essentially, the moral law is given inwardly by conscience. Now, the upshot is that Kant thinks that the capacity for ideal selfdetermination is not only the source of human dignity, but that it is also a rational basis for belief in God, because it cannot be reduced to naturalistic explanation. It is type of ideal causation that overrides natural causation and refutes determinism in the ordinary meaning of the term. Therefore the distinctive human capacity for ideal self-determination has metaphysical or theistic implications.

Already we have found rational grounds for theism, and we have found them in human nature itself, which is why Pico called human beings a “great miracle”.

The new atheists take a much different approach to the problem of the rationality of theism. They understand the word “God” to mean a being who created the universe. Proceeding from that understanding, they then correctly state that there is no convincing scientific evidence for such a being, and that, moreover, such a being itself would require a scientific explanation. But in this they have fundamentally misunderstood the concept of God. Theism, if philosophically formulated, does not maintain that God is a being, but rather that God is the necessary ground or source of being, and in that sense the creator. Theists also use the terms “necessary being”, “eternal being”, and “infinite being”, but in a wholly different sense than “a being”. The new atheists do not to understand the true idea of God - the Absolute. They write long books attacking straw menFor a trenchant critique in a highly commendable book, see Hart, D.B. The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss. New Haven, 2013, esp. Chs. 1 and 3..

The theistic concept of God crucially involves the distinction between contingent and necessary existence. The natural universe in space and time is contingent, which means it exists, but not of necessity. Nothing in or about it entails or requires its existence. One can easily imagine its non-existence. In fact, its contingency is the most basic and striking fact about the universe, taken on its own. The big bang does not affect this fact, nor does any conceivable natural origin of the universe. Even if the universe has always existed, as the now generally discarded steady-state theory maintained, still it would be contingent. The fact that the universe does exist, but that obviously its existence does not come from itself or, in other words, is not its essence, entails a transcendent ground of being, necessary being, God. This is the cosmological proof, in roughly the version presented by St. Thomas Aquinas in the third of his five ways or arguments for God. Though it is referred to as an argument or proof, it might also be called the cosmological or metaphysical experience, because it follows from human experience of the contingency of existence. The great creation myths are rooted in this experience. It is expressed in Leibniz's famous question, “Why is there something rather than nothing”? Though the cosmological experience is a basic human experience, not everyone opens him or herself to it, especially in recent times.

The cosmological or metaphysical experience is one indication that it is the very nature of human consciousness to transcend the empirical world. It does so by ideals such as truth, beauty, and the good. These ideals are intrinsic to reason, yet their reality cannot be empirically demonstrated. That is their very nature as ideals, which is why they belong to both faith and reason. They coalesce in one supreme ideal, the image of God.

Earlier I remarked that recognition of the sacred value of human persons was itself a source of Genesis 1:26. This ancient Judaic insight has often been rediscovered anew, once, for example, in the perhaps unlikely context of the early twentieth-century philosophical method known as phenomenology. In Weimar Germany, after the First World War, there was a brilliant, young phenomenologist struggling for an academic career. Edith Stein was born in 1891 on Yom Kippur into an observant Jewish family. In 1917 she defended, with great distinction, her doctoral dissertation, On the Problem of Empathy. She converted to Catholicism in 1922, began teaching at St. Magdalen College for Women in the town of Speyer, lived with the Dominican sisters there, and pursued scholarship as service to God, as she put it. In April 1933, soon after Hitler took power, she sent a letter to Pope Pius XI asking him to denounce the regime. Referring to herself as “a child of the Jewish people who, by the grace of God, for the past eleven years has also been a child of the Catholic Church”, she wrote the Pope that responsibility for the Nazis must fall, “after all, on those who brought them to this point and it also falls on those who keep silent” Available at the website of the Council of Centers on Jewish-Christian Relations: https://www. ccjr.us/dialogika-resources.. Later that year she became a Carmelite sister, taking the religious name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. In 1936 she completed one of her most important books, Finite and Eternal Being. On New Year's Eve 1938, after the Kristallnacht pogrom against German Jews, the Carmelites transferred Sister Teresa Benedicta to one of their monasteries in the Netherlands to help her escape the Nazis, ultimately to no avail. In August 1942 she and her sister Rosa, also serving with the Carmelites, were deported to Auschwitz and killed. Stein left a very rich spiritual and philosophical legacy. In 1998 she was canonized by Pope John Paul II. In Nazi Germany and in the occupied Netherlands, she witnessed human beings at their worst and confronted in its starkest form what philosophers call the problem of evil. It must have been an extraordinary faith, both in God and humanity, that enabled her, throughout these years, to maintain that Christ was still, as she said, “the ideal of human perfection”, and that “we hold the image of the Lord continually before our eyes in order to make ourselves like him” The two quotes are from her essays “The Separate Vocations of Man and Woman According to Nature and Grace” and “On the History and Spirit of Carmel” in The Collected Works of Edith Stein. Washington, D.C., 1986-2017, Vol. 2, pp. 59-85 and Vol. 4, pp. 1-6 respectively..

Could there be a more powerful testimony to the true meaning of humanism?

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