PHIL 3310. Exploring the philosophical, ethical, spiritual, existential, social, and personal implications of a godless universe, and supporting their study at Middle Tennessee State University & beyond.
During this course, we'll provide you with a deeper understanding of the humanist approach to life and how humanists tackle life’s big questions. We’ll explore some of the tensions and dilemmas contained within the humanist worldview, as well as the arguments against it, and the responses humanists give to those arguments. You’ll find contributions from academics, humanist campaigners, celebrants, pastoral carers, and members of the public to widen your awareness of what it means to be one of the millions of humanists living around the world today. The course will also allow you the opportunity to reflect on life’s bigger questions for yourself.
We’ll begin with an introduction to humanist beliefs, values, and goals, before investigating the humanist understanding of human nature. This should help to ground the humanist responses to many of the questions covered later in the course.
In Part 2, we’ll explore a humanist approach to knowledge about the world and the consequences for a humanist understanding of reality. We’ll follow this by tackling the question of how we ought to live, approaching it with three distinct but connected focuses: ourselves, our relationships with others, and society and the planet as a whole (Parts 3-5). Finally, in Part 6, we will draw together what we have learned throughout the course in an attempt to reflect upon what conclusions we can reach about humanism.
What is ‘humanism?’ Is it just another word for atheism?
It’s not just another word for atheism. The word ‘humanism’, like all words with long histories, has had lots of meanings at different times in different places. In English, it started being used in the 19th century. Since then, it’s had two uses. One is a historical one, to refer back to the culture and scholarship of the Renaissance. We usually call that ‘Renaissance humanism’.
The second use of the word has been to refer to a non-religious worldview: a set of beliefs and values that together constitute a certain approach to life. The precise content of those beliefs and values is up for debate and up for negotiation—just like any idea in the history of ideas. But, broadly speaking, humanists are people who don’t look outside of reality for moral guidance or ways to understand the universe. They try to understand the world that we live in by the use of reason, evidence, and experience all bundled together in the scientific method.
Humanists are people who think that morality is not some unnatural thing that comes from outside, but something that’s in us, having its basis in biology and then built on by culture. Morality doesn’t come from outside, from tablets of stone, but is inside us. It’s generated by humanity itself. When we think about questions like right and wrong, we don’t need to look for rules and commandments and authorities; we need to think for ourselves, about the consequences of our actions, and have a this-world, contextual approach to morality... (continues)
"It was not a punishment but a privilege to be perched midway between microcosm and macrocosm, between the fleeting moment and fathomless eternity. Small enough to stand in awe of our infinite cosmos, yet large enough to enjoy the little things; conscious enough to contemplate our own mortality, and yet long-lived enough to feel a tender appreciation for a flower’s ephemeral existence—truly, we found ourselves inhabiting a magical middle ground."
"I Am a Part of Infinity: The Spiritual Journey of Albert Einstein" by Kieran Fox: https://a.co/dMsYwSS
Deists' vision of a god who's left the building was decidedly not Einstein's god...
"...pantheism is often confused with more traditional creeds that accept some kind of Creator. The easiest mistake to make is to conflate pantheism with Deism. Deism rose to prominence during the Age of Enlightenment as a kind of comforting compromise that made Christian faith compatible with the more critical modern mentality. Easily mocked ideas like miracles, divine revelation, and the literal truth of the Bible were dismissed in deference to the discoveries of science. But the basic belief persisted that a Creator God fashioned our universe with a purpose and a plan. From the Deist perspective, the orderly laws of physical existence and the miraculous organization of living beings provided incontrovertible evidence for God’s existence and His goodness.134 You don’t hear the word Deism much these days, but the idea lives on among its intellectual descendants: creationism and intelligent design.
Although Einstein was often accused of atheism, it doesn’t seem like anyone thought of him as a Deist during his own lifetime. But over the last couple of decades, this has become the dominant narrative defining his spirituality. One biographer has suggested that Einstein “settled into a deism” in later life and embraced a “middle-age deistic faith.”135 Time magazine, celebrating Einstein as its “Person of the Century,” hailed him as “a philosopher with faith both in science and in the beauty of God’s handiwork.”136 And Einstein has even been (mis)quoted as saying, “I believe in God; I have a very deep faith.… There’s a spirit manifest in the laws of the universe… and to me that explains my faith in a Creator and a faith in God.”"
"I Am a Part of Infinity: The Spiritual Journey of Albert Einstein" by Kieran Fox: https://a.co/0l7smwE
🧠💛 What is a humanist?
A humanist is a non-religious person who believes this is the one life we have — and that we should use it to make the world a kinder, fairer place.
We base our decisions on reason, empathy, and a concern for humanity, other living beings, and our shared planet. 🌍
"But as Einstein once said, “mere unbelief in a personal God is no philosophy at all,” and Spinoza likewise had no intention of stopping at skepticism.21 Although he was denounced by the orthodox as “an atheist, a scoffer at religion,” Spinoza’s dream was not to denigrate the divine but rather to demonstrate that it was disseminated everywhere.22 And in his subsequent works, the immanent divine became Spinoza’s central theme. He argued that a single inscrutable Substance was the substrate of all things—everything around us and everything within, matter and mind alike.23 For Spinoza, this Substance was “conceived through itself” and consisted of “infinite attributes,” all of which were simply expressions of an “eternal and infinite essence.”24 We could call it whatever we wanted—Substance, Nature, or even God—but as far as Spinoza was concerned, “it is the same, or not very different, to assert that all things emanate necessarily from God’s nature and that the universe is God.”25 From this seemingly simple assertion, he concluded that “all things are united through Nature, and they are united into one, namely, God.”26
Spinoza’s contemporaries were convinced that this made him an atheist..."
"I Am a Part of Infinity: The Spiritual Journey of Albert Einstein" by Kieran Fox: https://a.co/eZtQYsn
"In emphasizing awe, Einstein was parting ways with most past religious teachers, but he still had plenty of predecessors. Socrates said some twenty-five hundred years ago that “wonder is the mark of the philosopher.”6 Schopenhauer saw “the sense of the sublime” as a sure sign of a higher mind.7 And one of Lao Tzu’s last lessons in the Tao Te Ching is “Let not your consciousness of life become shallow, and never allow yourself to become weary of existence.”8
Aligning himself with all these first-rate philosophers, Einstein maintained that mere existence was marvelous. “Every thinking person,” he felt, “must be filled with wonder and awe just by looking up at the stars.”"
"I Am a Part of Infinity: The Spiritual Journey of Albert Einstein" by Kieran Fox : https://a.co/6Tqi73c
"“By virtue of its simplicity,” Einstein realized, the idea of a personal God was “accessible to the most undeveloped mind,” and accessibility had its advantages. “But on the other hand,” he continued, “there are decisive weaknesses attached to this idea in itself, which have been painfully felt since the beginning of history.”103 Einstein’s acceptance of traditional faith was not a matter of tolerance, then, or even agnosticism, but rather resignation. In a letter written in 1920, he lamented that “even nowadays, eliminating the sacred traditions would still mean spiritual and moral impoverishment—as gross and ugly as the attitude and actions of the clergy may be in many respects.”104 And so, although he rejected monotheism in principle, he accepted people’s faith in a personal God as a necessary evil (or expedient) in practice. Some scholars, such as Max Jammer and the theologian Alister McGrath, have interpreted this stance as tacit support for traditional religion, but “better than nothing” is pretty faint praise.105
Ultimately, what worried Einstein wasn’t unbelief in God, but the absence of any big-picture perspective at all. He abhorred nihilism, not atheism. For him, a life lived without a sense of wonder and purpose was no life at all. “What is the meaning of human life, or for that matter, of the life of any creature?” he once asked. “To know an answer to this question means to be religious.… The man who regards his own life and that of his fellow creatures as meaningless is not merely unhappy but hardly fit for life.”106
As a culture, we might feel that we’ve adequately assimilated the hard lessons of physics and philosophy over the last few hundred years: God is dead, Nature is probabilistic, nothing is true, everything is permitted. And perhaps we have become sufficiently skeptical, secular, and cynical. But a naïve, rather nasty nihilism was not the endgame Einstein had in mind. His third-phase spirituality was more than just “sexed-up atheism” or “watered-down theism.”107 Einstein saw that a genuine sense of awe was in short supply among complacent believers and fanatical atheists alike. And this ephemeral feeling was so important to him that he would make wonder the central axis around which his entire spirituality revolved."
"I Am a Part of Infinity: The Spiritual Journey of Albert Einstein" by Kieran Fox: https://a.co/1GGNLcf
Humbling, clarifying… but, "terrifying"? Perhaps in the same way being responsible for your children's well-being can be terrifying: an awesome responsibility, but profoundly meaningful and purpose-giving.
Brian Cox shares some Sagan-esque cosmic philosophy with Colbert:
@profbriancox explores the wonder of human life set against the vast backdrop of galaxies captured by the James Webb Space Telescope.
"However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you think. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, difficult as it is...
You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this." - Henry Thoreau
"…the eternal forces of dehumanization are blowing strong right now: concentrated power; authoritarianism; materialism; runaway technology; a presidential administration at war with the arts, universities and sciences; a president who guts Christianity while pretending to govern in its name.
On the other hand, there are millions of humanists — secular and religious — repulsed by what they see. History is often driven by those people who are quietly repulsed for a while and then find their voice. I suspect different kinds of humanists will gather and invent other cultural movements. They will ask the eternal humanistic questions: What does it mean to be human? What is the best way to live? What is the nature of the common humanity that binds us together?
Maybe talk to some actual Humanists? Not just Dawkins?
"…A few weeks ago, I called Mr. Dawkins, the famous atheist whose book had so shaken me all those years ago. I wanted to know what he made of the fact that America's secularization had stagnated.
He remained hopeful that secularism can replace religion. "It seems to me, should be reasonably easy to sort out," he said. For ethics, he encouraged people to take civics classes and host a weekly discussion club. For community? "Play golf."
He said he understood that churches in particular could provide moral instruction (and he said he valued the ethical teachings of Jesus as a man). But he insisted people should be able to fulfill their spiritual desires outside of faith: "It should be quite easy to show documentary films: David Attenborough films, Carl Sagan films, Neil deGrasse Tyson. There are lots of substitutes to spirituality that those can provide."
But many of the people I have spoken to say those kinds of alternatives aren't enough..."
Richard Dawkins is not wrong to note that many of us do indeed find profound spiritual insight in David Attenborough's naturalism, Carl Sagan's cosmic philosophy, and even Neil deGrasse Tyson's "personal" astro-physicism.
But his glib suggestion that seekers of community just try golf misses the green.
Even the most reductively scientistic of inquirers should understand the deep and humane sources of community to be found in the trans-generational pursuit of rational understanding through scientific investigation. Scientists themselves participate in their respective communities of inquiry, obviously, but so do all of us who feel stirred and enlightened by a growing comprehension of our place in the natural cosmos. We feel ever more at home in a natural universe that could only mystify our pre-scientific ancestors, and can only befuddle those steeped in superstition.
As Sagan said, “Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality... The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.” Sagan was a true humanist. Dawkins evidently is not.
…Defining consolation as "an argument about why life is the way it is and why we must keep going," Michael Ignatieff writes:
Console. It's from the Latin consolor, to find solace together. Consolation is what we do, or try to do, when we share each other's suffering or seek to bear our own. What we are searching for is how to go on, how to keep going, how to recover the belief that life is worth living.
For millennia, that belief was the domain of religion, with its promises of salvation in another world to recompense our suffering in this one. But because belief, unlike truth, is not something for which the test of reality can provide binary verification or falsification, there are many true paths to the same belief. To find consolation "we do not have to believe in God," Ignatieff writes, "but we do need faith in human beings and the chain of meanings we have inherited." Tracing that chain from the Roman Stoics ("who promised that life would hurt less if we could learn how to renounce the vanity of human wishes") to Montaigne and Hume ("who questioned whether we could ever discern any grand meaning for our suffering") to us, he contrasts the consolations of philosophy with those of religion to offer a foothold amid the quicksand of despair:
These thinkers also gave voice to a passionate belief that religious faith had missed the most crucial source of consolation of all. The meaning of life was not to be found in the promise of paradise, nor in the mastery of the appetites, but in living to the full every day. To be consoled, simply, was to hold on to one's love of life as it is, here and now...
—Maria Popova
On Consolation: Notes on Our Search for Meaning and the Antidote to Resignation – The Marginalian
Humanists are non-religious people who shape their own lives in the here and now because we believe it's the only life we have. A lot of people share humanist values without even knowing the term. Maybe you're a humanist! Find out by taking our quiz! https://humanists.uk/humanism/how-humanist-are-you/
My preferred version:
Some humanists (Spinoza, Einstein, John Dewey for example,) are natural pietists who revere nature and the cosmos, regard life as precious and sacred, and are vitally concerned for the future of life (while harboring no fantasy of a supernatural afterlife for themselves personally).
Ross Douthat's arguments for a god based on "fine tuning" and human consciousness, while impressive coming from the "precocious undergraduate" he cites, do not finally compel assent. Undergraduate conversations about the possible existence of a god are fun, sometimes. But insisting, at this moment of political blitzkrieg in Washington, that they should make us all religious believers flirts insensibly with theocratic intolerance. We don't all need to be religious, any more than we all need to be Republican.
James Phil Oliver Nashville The writer is an associate professor of philosophy at Middle Tennessee State University.
Feb 15, 2025 online [Sunday Feb 16 print edition]
(They lopped off my first two paragraphs but it felt good to push back against Ross's over-reach.)
Many people are humanists without knowing it. If you are non-religious and look to science, reason, empathy, and compassion in order to live an ethical and meaningful life, consider doing our quiz to see if you're a humanist too.
"One thing that drives me nuts about the terrible new world we’re in is that religious people accept Trump as their champion on little else than his oily proclamations. It’s just foul that so many who gather as Christians could accept that man for any reason, any rationale..." Jennifer Michael Hecht, continues
4. The universe cannot be the cause of itself (from 3).
5. Something outside the universe must have caused the universe (from 2 & 4).
6. God is the only thing that is outside of the universe.
7. God caused the universe (from 5 & 6).
8. God exists.
FLAW 1:can be crudely put: Who caused God? The Cosmological Argument is a prime example of the Fallacy of Passing the Buck: invoking God to solve some problem, but then leaving unanswered that very same problem when applied to God himself. The proponent of the Cosmological Argument must admit a contradiction to either his first premise — and say that though God exists, he doesn't have a cause — or else a contradiction to his third premise — and say that God is self-caused. Either way, the theist is saying that his premises have at least one exception, but is not explaining whyGod must be the unique exception, otherwise than asserting his unique mystery (the Fallacy of Using One Mystery To Pseudo-Explain Another). Once you admit of exceptions, you can ask why the universe itself, which is also unique, can't be the exception. The universe itself can either exist without a cause, or else can be self-caused . Since the buck has to stop somewhere, why not with the universe?
FLAW 2: The notion of "cause" is by no means clear, but our best definition is a relation that holds between events that are connected by physical laws. Knocking the vase off the table caused it to crash to the floor; smoking three packs a day caused his lung cancer. To apply this concept to the universe itself is to misuse the concept of cause, extending it into a realm in which we have no idea how to use it. This line of skeptical reasoning, based on the incoherent demands we make of the concept of cause, was developed by David Hume.
COMMENT:The Cosmological Argument, like the Argument from the Big Bang, and The Argument from the Intelligibility of the Universe, are expressions of our cosmic befuddlement at the question: why is there something rather than nothing? The late philosopher Sydney Morgenbesser had a classic response to this question: "And if there were nothing? You'd still be complaining!"
2. The Ontological Argument
1. Nothing greater than God can be conceived (this is stipulated as part of the definition of "God").
2. It is greater to exist than not to exist.
3 . If we conceive of God as not existing, then we can conceive of something greater than God (from 2).
4. To conceive of God as not existing is not to conceive of God (from 1 and 3).
5. It is inconceivable that God not exist (from 4).
6. God exists.
This argument, first articulated by Saint Anselm (1033-1109), the Archbishop of Canterbury, is unlike any other, proceeding purely on the conceptual level. Everyone agrees that the mere existence of a concept does not entail that there are examples of that concept; after all, we can know what a unicorn is and at the same time say "unicorns don't exist." The claim of the Ontological Argument is that the concept of God is the one exception to this rule. The very concept of God, when defined correctly, entails that there is something that satisfies that concept. Although most people suspect that there is something wrong with this argument, it's not so easy to figure out what it is.
FLAW:It was Immanuel Kant who pinpointed the fallacy in the Ontological Argument: it is to treat "existence" as a property, like "being fat" or "having ten fingers." The Ontological Argument relies on a bit of wordplay, assuming that "existence" is just another property, but logically it is completely different. If you really could treat "existence" as just part of the definition of the concept of God, then you could just as easily build it into the definition of any other concept. We could, with the wave of our verbal magic wand, define a trunicorn as "a horse that (a) has a single horn on its head, and (b) exists." So if you think about a trunicorn, you're thinking about something that must, by definition, exist; therefore trunicorns exist. This is clearly absurd: we could use this line of reasoning to prove that any figment of our imagination exists.
COMMENT: Once again, Sydney Morgenbesser had a pertinent remark, this one offered as an Ontological Argument for God's Non-Existence: Existence is such a lousy thing, how could God go and do it?
... (34 more arguments summarized here, including all the famous ones and some truly novel inventions)
== Ross Douthat's favorite...
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been recording conversations about my new book, “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious,” and one of the striking things — not unexpected, but still interesting — is how different people react to different arguments for being religious or believing in God.
You’ll get one very smart interlocutor for whom it seems perfectly reasonable to consider religious possibilities in light of the evidence for order and design at the deepest level of the universe, but who just can’t swallow the idea that there might be supernatural realities — visions, encounters, literal miracles — that inherently evade the capacities of modern science to measure and dissect. Then you’ll get another person for whom it’s the reverse, for whom the primary case for religion is experiential, while attempts to discover God in, say, the cosmological constant leave them cold.
My own view is more promiscuous: I think that the most compelling case for being religious — for a default view, before you get to the specifics of creeds and doctrines, that the universe was made for a reason and we’re part of that reason — is found at the convergence of multiple different lines of argument, the analysis of multiple different aspects of the existence in which we find ourselves.
Consider three big examples: the evidence for cosmic design in the fundamental laws and structure of the universe; the unusual place of human consciousness within the larger whole; and the persistence and plausibility of religious and supernatural experience even under supposedly disenchanted conditions... (nyt, continues)
My reply to Ross:
Re: Ross Douthat, Feb.7--
Ross Douthat's convergent arguments for a god based on "Fine Tuning" (aka the "anthropic principle") and human consciousness, while impressive coming from a "precocious undergraduate," do not finally compel assent. As Carl Sagan put it in his book Pale Blue Dot, “There is something stunningly narrow about how the Anthropic Principle is phrased. Yes, only certain laws and constants of nature are consistent with our kind of life. But essentially the same laws and constants are required to make a rock. So why not talk about a Universe designed so rocks could one day come to be, and strong and weak Lithic Principles? If stones could philosophize, I imagine Lithic Principles would be at the intellectual frontiers.”
And as Rebecca Goldstein has said of "intelligibility" arguments alleged to prove the divine probity of human consciousness, they point (if anywhere) to something like Spinoza's pantheistic impersonal god, aka the universe itself, and not an object of personal worship.
Undergraduate conversations about the possible existence of a god are fun, sometimes. But insisting that they should make us all religious flirts insensibly, at this moment of political blitzkrieg in Washington, with theocratic intolerance. We don't all need to be religious, any more than we all need to be Republican.
==
Carl Sagan's discussion of the anthropic "fine tuning" argument--
“There is something stunningly narrow about how the Anthropic Principle is phrased. Yes, only certain laws and constants of nature are consistent with our kind of life. But essentially the same laws and constants are required to make a rock. So why not talk about a Universe designed so rocks could one day come to be, and strong and weak Lithic Principles? If stones could philosophize, I imagine Lithic Principles would be at the intellectual frontiers.” ― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
And see his Varieties of Scientific Experience--
"If the very strong version of the anthropic principle is true, that is, that God created the universe so that humans would eventually come about, then we have to ask the question, what happens if humans destroy themselves? That would make the whole exercise sort of pointless.
We would have to conclude either (a) that an omnipotent and omniscient God did not create the universe, that is, that He was an inexpert cosmic engineer, or (b) that human beings will not self-destruct. Either alternative, it seems to me, is a matter of some interest, would be worth knowing."
Ken Burrows was raised Catholic, and describes anxiety as his "dominant early religious emotion." But a college course reinforced the notion that a sense of right & wrong is innate to human nature. Read his journey to humanism.
'All the atoms that make up your body existed before you were conceived and will be there at the end, after you have gone... I am one with the infinite and need no other assurance.' Humanist trailblazer Zora Neale Hurston was born #OnThisDay 1891.
