Atheists and Humanists: Contribution to Society

Baroness Whitaker Excerpts

Thursday 25th July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Whitaker]

My Lords, I intend to go rather farther back than my noble friend’s powerful speech. I congratulate him on giving us this opportunity to go a little wider and deeper than our usual deliberations. My thesis is that our idea of the good society has its roots in many traditions, some of which are humanism and atheism, and that the contribution of humanist thought is significantly underrated and denied its status in our education and our social policy. I declare an unremunerated interest as a vice-president of the British Humanist Association, whose causes my noble friend has so eloquently described.

By “humanism” I do not mean the Christian Platonism of Erasmus and his followers, although it is perfectly reasonable to call them humanists because that is what he called himself. For the purposes of this debate, I mean people whose ethical framework is unattached to religious belief. Strictly, I leave out later thinkers whose ideas chimed with humanism such as Montaigne, who would have courted death if they spoke in those terms. However, rather as early Christians thought Virgil was one of them, I hope that I can count Montaigne as sympathetic to the values of humanism.

Democritus, from fifth century Greece, was clearly an atheist. For our debate, perhaps his most significant contribution was his idea that there were systems which controlled how materials behaved—in effect, physics and chemistry. He also had a clear picture of the difference between subjective and objective perception. Both these extraordinarily modern-seeming theories offered an alternative to the supernatural and shamanic versions of the world available at the time. Bertrand Russell thought Democritus was simply lucky in his conclusions, but Lucretius, Democritus’s much later Roman disciple, gave a series of empirical arguments for the same beliefs. The great beauty of De Rerum Natura is its idea of a world determined by natural laws. It was astonishingly prescient—and, incidentally, was saved for our post-classical world by a Christian scholar. We do not acknowledge these two giants much as we go about our lives but we still stand on their shoulders, in Isaac Newton’s graphic phrase.

I should also like to claim the sceptics of the Enlightenment such as Voltaire, but more exactly he and some of his contemporaries were deists, so perhaps I may call them fellow travellers. There were certainly avowed atheists among them, such as Diderot and the German Matthias Knutzen, who proposed conscience and reason as the only guides to behaviour. We could also claim Spinoza, with his idea of the human mind. To jump a couple of centuries, we teach George Eliot and Thomas Hardy as civilised and penetrating writers, but do we acknowledge equally their atheist values? I think we could with advantage put John Stuart Mill’s pellucid Three Essays on Religion, which is actually about morality, on the sixth-form reading list.

Why does it matter to give humanism its due? After all, world views come and go. Who today respects the truths of Zoroaster—apart from the folk my noble friend referred to? Before some eminent Parsee Member of your Lordships’ House gets up to say, “Ahura Mazda lives”, perhaps I may hastily say that we should respect humanism, at least, because of the enduring nature of its tenets and, above all, their capacity to unite people of different faiths and none in common values.

What would this greater contribution produce? It would strengthen the part played in ethics by conduct. It might give some credit to a tradition that goes back even earlier than the Abrahamic religions—much earlier even than classical Greece—to the religious tolerance of Ashoka, the great Indian king of the sixth century BCE, or to the idea of human rights in the Code of Hammurabi three centuries earlier. It might draw a continuum from those milestones to the atheist inventors of the United Nations and its founding charter of human rights. I wish that this Government respected what human rights are really about, as their founders down the centuries have. Acknowledgment of humanist traditions of thought would help to put that in proper perspective. More emphasis on conduct rather than faith or revealed axioms would be beneficial in the education of our diverse society. It would make a better way to educate our children together to form one society, whatever their affiliation to a particular religion or belief.

I personally would not like to see too much downgrading of the status of religion in a secular society. The values of the great religions of the world are inestimable and it would be foolish to deny the fundamental role of Christianity in our culture, or of the one I am closest to: Judaism. The influence of Islam, especially from the Andalusian period, is underrated. The great religious patrons financed some of the greatest art the world has seen.

What I hope for is an understanding of the importance of ethics and morality that allows non-religious systems equal respect. I am heartened in this by occasional references by right reverend Prelates to those of faith and of none. I ask for an equal place in our counsels and advisory bodies, and, most of all, in the education of our children. It should be the primacy of an ethical framework in our public policy, not the primacy of religion, that matters.

Of course people are entitled to draw a religious conclusion from the awe-inspiring features, and the challenges of evil, in our world. Those of us who grew up in the 20th century will have noticed the need for redemption. If some people over centuries, even millennia, have not found it right to fit that into a religious framework but have nevertheless developed the values that we honour, we should make sure that we know all of the shoulders we are standing on.