Atheists and Humanists: Contribution to Society

Lord Soley Excerpts

Thursday 25th July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Soley]

In his very welcome and detailed introduction to this debate, my noble friend Lord Harrison gave many explanations of what humanists have achieved over the years and I will not add to those details. However, I want to support and expand on the comments made by the noble Baroness, Lady Flather, about religions which claim to be religions of peace ending up fighting among themselves and killing large numbers of people. That problem has to be addressed, but I also want to consider why it happens. One of the reasons is that religion is similar to political ideology. If you lay down a set of assumptions, statements and beliefs that have to be accepted in order to become a member, you inevitably invite conflict and division. I am not a member of any humanist society, but I speak as an atheist and a natural humanist. The basic, underlying assumption of humanism, which is its strength and the reason for its great contribution, is that human problems are best solved by reason. If humanism made the mistake of trying to list the many things that would make you a humanist, it would risk doing exactly what happens with religion and some political ideologies. It would create structures where division and conflict become almost inevitable.

In debates like this it is useful to bear in mind that there is a difference between God and religion. You can believe in God without being a member of a religion. God is an idea: religion is a government structure and a social control structure. Neither of those is bad. I would absolutely agree with the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth, about where religion comes from. To human beings struggling to understand a world with terrifying natural forces like thunder, lightning, earthquakes, volcanoes, the idea of God or gods was a very useful way of achieving social control. You needed social control because, in order to survive, you needed to co-operate. Co-operation needs social control, so you build on it. If you then make the mistake of making all these assumptions things that you have to accept, nobody should be surprised if divisions rapidly occur.

One advantage of humanists is that not only do they not fight and kill each other in large numbers, they do not have problems about the roles of women and men, sexual identity, disability or any other similar thing. Trying to solve human problems by reason is the strength of humanism. I would disagree with my noble friend Lord Morgan that we have not had religious conflict. It may not be as bad as other countries but for a short time during the Civil War women had to cover their hair fully and were stopped in the streets by soldiers if they did not do so. The great advance brought by the Civil War to this country and the rest of the world was that it threw out the idea that the King was the representative of God on Earth. You no longer had the idea that you could not challenge your leader. In Iran at the moment, the Ayatollahs play that exact role. It will fail for similar reasons: ultimately, there will be a dispute about the correct interpretation. We get around that by having elections to throw out the person who thinks they have the right interpretation. If you are using a religious or God-based structure, you cannot do that. You have to rely on other things. It is amazing how we have, over the years, adjusted ourselves to this argument. I am a great fan of the sophisticated, politically astute sovereign, Queen Elizabeth I, who, struggling to prevent more and worse religious wars, came up with the wonderful phrase:

“I have no desire to make windows into men’s souls”.

She was trying to allow people to believe within a political structure which she had to manage but within which she opened up the possibility of tolerance. Such things are terribly important.

The problem for those who have an idea of God is not so much a scientific one. You can always move the boundaries back: the Earth was the centre of the universe at one time until that was disproved; the Earth was considered to be only a few thousand years old until that was disproved; and when we go back beyond the Big Bang, the boundaries will be moved again if you are looking for a scientific argument. The problem for people who believe in God is actually a moral one. The moral issue is that you have to accept that God created life in a form that has to survive off other forms of life. The malaria mosquito that stings the child is not doing it in order that the child can have a better life in future or can somehow rise above it; it is doing it because it has to survive and reproduce.

That was Darwin’s big contribution to us all; he showed that it was actually evolution. A question that has always fascinated me, and this is why I would have loved to have had an interview with Charles Darwin, is: why, when he realised the importance of evolution, did he suddenly go from being a religious person to being a non-religious person, or certainly a person who did not pursue religion, and go quiet about the whole issue? It was probably because he recognised that the survival of the fittest meant that life had been created—if that is what you believe—in a form in which it had to live off other forms of life.

That is the fundamental problem for anyone who believes in God, with or without a religion: it means that you no longer have a way of avoiding the problem that maybe yours is a cruel or, at best, a careless God, or something of that nature. A far better explanation is that in fact there is no God. The great strength of humanism and atheism, to my mind, is that they recognise that we do not need to worry about things like that so long as we recognise that human problems can be solved by reason. Built into that approach is the possibility of tolerance. I put this also to the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries: tolerance is what takes you forward.

I do not share the rather dismal view of young people today; in many ways they are far better than my generation of the 1940s and 1950s. Obviously there are problems in some areas, but there are many good examples, too.