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Tuesday, June 17, 2025

Free course: Introducing Humanism

 Welcome to Introducing Humanism: Non-religious approaches to life.

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.

We hope you enjoy the course!

Kind regards

Luke Donnellan

Director of Understanding Humanism

https://courses.understandinghumanism.org.uk/courses/introducing-humanism/

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The course includes several videos, including:

 



Summary of Part One:
  1. A humanist understanding of human nature recognises that we are animals; we were not created, nor was this universe made for us, but we are the result of natural, purposeless, physical and biological processes.
  2. Humanists believe that we are material and mortal creatures, and that there are many good reasons to be sceptical of any notion of an afterlife.
  3. There are ways that human beings stand out from the rest of the natural world – things we can celebrate about being human – for example, our capacities for communication, imagination, creativity, empathy, and problem solving.
  4. Self-consciousness provides us with an ability to ask questions and understand the world around us, an opportunity to become the authors of our own lives, and the potential to be moral beings.
  5. Our capacity to share our ideas with one another is what has enabled us to develop knowledge and culture, and to create many things that enrich our lives.
  6. A humanist believes all our human capacities are natural.
  7. These distinctive human capabilities bring a responsibility to consider how we should live.

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  1. Our beliefs can be mistaken; we should therefore be prepared to adopt a sceptical approach to knowledge and subject our beliefs to rational, critical scrutiny in order to give them the best chance of being true
  2. Humanists will typically trust the evidence of their senses; they will be wary of claims made on the basis of faith or revelation
  3. Different beliefs can fit the same evidence; when presented with more than one hypothesis that fits the evidence, it is often safest to go with the simplest; we should always consider whether our beliefs might be motivated by something other than the evidence
  4. Reasonableness can come in degrees; beliefs that are neither proved nor disproved can still be more or less reasonable than each other
  5. There is no non-circular justification for trusting reason; however, nor is there a good reason for assuming that reason is unreliable
  6. Humanists will reject a relativist approach to truth; facts about the world are independent of our beliefs about them
  7. Humanists believe that science provides the best and most reliable method of answering questions about the world
  8. Science has enabled us to make great progress in our understanding about the world; we should be wary of jumping to supernatural explanations for questions we can’t yet answer
  9. There might be questions that science cannot answer but that does not mean we must turn to religious answers to such questions
  10. A humanist will believe they have good reason to doubt the existence of any deity; humanists will be atheists, agnostics, or both
  11. Humanists believe we can be comfortable living with uncertainty; curiosity can provide many pleasures







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