PAPER NO. 90

CHRISTIANITY AND SECULAR HUMANISM

The Difference

There is a worldview difference between Secular Humanism (SH) and Christianity manifest in every aspect of life.

Secular Humanism

  1. SH denies that God exists or that it is clear that God exists. SH affirms that all is matter, that matter is eternal and that all of reality can and must be explained in material terms only. Theism is thus seen as a mere by-product of past human ignorance.
  2. SH denies that man is the image of God, that man is a rational animal, that man is a body-soul unity, that man has or is an immortal soul. SH affirms that man is an evolved animal, entirely a product of the environment, that the mind is identical with the brain and that we cease to exist entirely when we die.
  3. SH affirms empiricism, that all knowledge is from sense experience, that knowledge is pragmatically based, that science is the only means to knowledge, that science (not reason or philosophy) has authority and is therefore the basis of public discourse and policy.

There are corollaries to naturalism (material monism) grounded in empiricism, which lead to reductionism:

  1. Thought is identical with motion of atoms in the brain.
  2. A mental image is identical with a neural impulse.
  3. Analytical behaviorism analyzes pain as pain-behavior.
  4. The self is a bundle of mental images (the perceiver is the perceived).
  1. SH affirms that the good for man individually is pleasure (vs. pain), consistent with ethical egoism, the will to power, the superman ( ubermensch). The good for man collectively is utilitarian—the greatest good/pleasure/happiness for the greatest number, the collective, an earthly utopia (heaven on earth). There is no way to mediate the dispute between individualism and collectivism except through power. To change man’s thinking one must change his environment, by force/pain if necessary. Change in thinking is not by the use of reason but by non-rational (anti-intellectual) means since thinking is merely rationalization of one’s perceived self-interest.
  2. SH denies that there are any moral absolutes (besides pleasure individually or power collectively). Skepticism about clarity leads to moral relativism (and the socio-political doctrine of moral equivalence), which requires tolerance and political correctness. All speech that causes distress must be removed by sensitivity training or by exclusion from the realm of public discourse (loss of freedom of speech).
  3. SH believes that all power differences are produced by one group exercising power over another group at the other’s expense and rationalizing the difference by ideology. Differences are not produced by basic beliefs based on the use of reason prior to and apart from social contact among groups. In SH, the worldview of science and its material benefits (and hence power differences in societies) cannot be said to be “better than” the worldview of sorcery. In SH, differences arise from taking advantage of another. Therefore, all differences must be leveled by “social justice.” Mere participation in power differences makes one a capitalist, or a racist, or a sexist.
  4. SH believes that atheism is not a religion based on fideism (belief without proof), that all relgions are a hindrance to human happiness (the secular utopia), that (all) religion is the opiate of the masses, that (all) religion is infantile dependence, that (all) religion is opposed to (all) science, that science is not based on philosophical assumptions subject to critical analysis, that only science is free from dogmatic assumptions and that empiricism and uniformitarianism (the forces now operating have always operated and in essentially the same degree) are held not as dogmas but as pure facts.

Christianity

  1. Historic Christianity and the Scriptures affirm the clarity of general revelation (CGR) regarding the existence and nature of God and the moral law grounded in human nature, so that unbelief is without excuse. The difference with SH lies in the critical use of reason to understand CGR—basic things that can be known by all men, everywhere, at all times, prior to any appeal to special revelation (SR). The difference between Christianity and SH is therefore first philosophical before it is theological.
  2. SR presupposes CGR and CGR leads to and requires SR. All thought and discourse requires Common Ground (CG), which leads to the Principle of Clarity (PC)—that the basic things are clear to reason. The difference therefore between SH and Christianity is first epistemological: are basic things clear to reason or to sense experience? Reason as the laws of thought is most basic and is authoritative as the test for meaning. By reason we know there are no square-circles, no being from non-being, no uncaused events. By reason we know that there must be something eternal. Senses give sensations, which are appearances, not reality. We cannot know anything about reality by the senses alone. Empiricism, which holds that all knowledge is from sense experience, is therefore unwarranted and is merely a naïve dogma, based on neither sense experience nor reason.
  3. By reason I can know that the material world exists (the cause of what I perceive is outside all minds) and that the material world is not eternal (self-maintaining) due to entropy at every level of the material world. The material world is brought into existence (created ex nihilo) by Spirit. By reason I can know the soul exists (the mind is not the brain: thinking cannot be reduced to motion of atoms in the brain; in perception, a mental image (of a table) in my mind cannot be reduced to a neural impulse in the brain). By reason I can know the soul is not eternal (an eternal soul would have all knowledge). Therefore, only some (God) is eternal.
  4. By reason I know there are logical (not merely empirical) gaps in every stage of the naturalistic evolutionary explanation of the origin of man: from non-life to life, from life to more complex life, from more complex life to hominid, from hominid to human. By reason I know than man is the image of God, not the image of the animal, that since God is all good and all powerful, original creation was very good (without natural evil), and that theistic evolution must deny original creation was very good, that natural evil entered after moral evil. By reason I know that a concept is not an image (a universal is not a particular), that reason distinguishes man from animal, that man is of a different kind, not evolved from animal. By reason and experience I know that major geological data is best explained by non-uniformity rather than uniformity, and that the finely tuned universe is neither by chance nor by necessity but ordered by the wisdom of God.
  5. By reason I know that the good for a being is according to the nature of that being, that evil for man is an act contrary to human nature as rational. Moral evil is to neglect, avoid, resist, and deny reason in the face of what is clear to reason, that evil therefore is an act of self-destruction, not an act caused from outside. By reason I know that the good for man as a rational being is the use of reason to understand the nature of things, which, as created, reveal the nature of God, that the good for man therefore is the knowledge of God. By reason I know that virtue is not the good but the means to the good, and that happiness is not the good but the effect of possessing the good; that the inherent effect of not seeking and not understanding is meaninglessness and boredom and guilt and that no amount of pleasure apart from meaning can overcome boredom and its excess. 
  6. Given that God is all good and all powerful, by reason I know that the physical death of man is not original in creation, that death, which is universal, entered by one man (the Fall), that the just consequence of moral evil is spiritual death, not physical death. By reason I know that physical death, imposed by God on all men, is not punishment, but the last, final, and merciful call back from sin and self-deception and self-justification (regarding not seeking), that sin as unbelief remains in all men (both believers and non-believers), that natural evil (the curse of toil and strife, and old-age, sickness and physical death) as mercy requires SR (Scripture) to show how God can be both just and merciful to man in sin and spiritual death.
  7. By reason I know that SR must be consistent with CGR, that redemption in SR must meet the (covenant) requirements of the Fall, that another man in place of the first must undo what the first did and do what he failed to do. By reason I know that Genesis 1–3 which teaches creation–fall–redemption (and any further SR which builds on the worldview of Genesis) satisfies the demand of CGR. By reason I know what evil is and why God permits evil (theodicy), that it is only because God is all good and all powerful that good will overcome evil and that SH can never bring about a lasting culture.

What is known from CGR is assumed throughout SR, and both CGR and SR are made still more explicit in the Historic Christian Faith, which is cumulatively summed up by Church councils in their creeds.


© 2016 Logos Papers Press