Atheists and Humanists: Contribution to Society

Baroness Warnock Excerpts

Thursday 25th July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Warnock]

I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, for having a second go, as it were, at this debate, on what I regard as an increasingly important subject. I shall not say anything that has not been at least suggested already by the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, and my noble friend Lady Meacher.

This is an increasingly important subject because religious belief is, as we have heard, declining so rapidly, and, at the same time, there is an increasing perception that, especially among the young, the idea of morally good or bad behaviour—indeed, the concept of morality itself—is rapidly withering away. It is tempting, therefore, to conclude that these two phenomena are causally connected. I believe that this is a dangerous as well as a false conclusion.

Before explaining why I think that conclusion is dangerous, I should say a bit about where I come from. I am not a member of the British Humanist Association. I consider myself to be a Christian by culture and by tradition. I frequently attend services of the Church of England, and one of my greatest passions is church music, as sustained in the great English cathedrals and colleges, as well as the great oratorios and passions. I do not want the Church of England to be disestablished, and I regard my loyalty to the sovereign as loyalty to the head of the church as well as to the head of the state. Having said that, I suppose I should confess that I am an atheist. I do not believe in the literal truth of the narratives of the Judaeo-Christian religion, nor do I believe that it is sensible or realistic to urge people to “return to faith”, as we are sometimes urged. Nor do I believe that you can be urged, or comply with the urging, to believe something that you simply do not believe.

Much as I admire many of my non-atheistical friends and often envy them, I believe that they sometimes pose a danger if they insist that lack of proper religious belief, by which I mean literal religious belief, is the cause of lack of moral sense. To put it another way, it is dangerous to society to suggest that without religion, or in the aftermath of religion as some people have suggested, there can be no firm moral values and no shared or common ideals that can be universally worth pursuing. Such despair of the possibility of a morality which is other than mere whim is dangerous because we may be forced into a false dichotomy: either a morality based on dogmatic transcendentalism, which can authoritatively dictate on what is right and what is wrong, or no morality at all.

I am not a great lover of the concept of human rights, and certainly not as a foundation for morality because I do not think that they can be that, but at least the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has given us a way of understanding that there are some evils that no human being should be subjected to by another. If we hear of a country which has “an appalling human rights record”, we know what such evils are. We also know that morality demands that we do not perpetrate such evils and that we seek as far as we can to alleviate them when they are suffered.

I hold that the many atheists who live and work in this country can contribute to the moral improvement of society—I insist on that phrase: the moral improvement of society—not necessarily by preaching or forming groups but by all the time being good teachers, whether professionally or as parents and mentors teach. I believe that moral education is the most important and most urgently necessary condition for the improvement of society. I am afraid that I do not altogether share the optimism of the noble Lord, Lord Maxton. Things are in many cases very depressing at the moment, especially among the young, but we do not do good by suggesting that they return to faith. They cannot believe things that they do not believe, but they can understand that there is a morality which can be shared and ideals which can be aspired to by everybody. Therefore, I sincerely hope that the contribution to this moral improvement that we must all hope for is celebrated and acknowledged by atheists and those who believe in God.