Confidence in Humanism Versus Hubris

As an educator and observer of the human condition, I have found over the decades that most people who are steadfast in their rationalist confidence are often those willing to be more open and honest about what they accept as facts versus what makes them feel good. While faith without evidence may help soften an emotional blow or serve as a salve to cover the very nature of our existence, most of the people I’ve met who rely on science and experts are equally awed by the universe as those who rely on religious dogma to inform their lives. 

There’s plenty to be mindful of as we use our creativity, imagination and the tools of science to respect and stand in wonder over the unknown. Whereas, in many cases, there are people and whole non-secular institutions who accept a lack of information or experience as a form of self-fulfilling righteous prophecy more akin to hubris than actual knowledge. I’d put into this category most religious institutions as well as The Creation Museum and Ark Encounter. 

Probably the most telling form of hubris is the modern political world that we’re living through now in the United States. Rife with the deadly combination of ignorance and ill will, and with way too many comparisons to the George Orwell novel, “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” there’s little resembling what the Constitution’s creators envisioned for our nation. Given the last 80 or so years of progressive and scientific accomplishments, it’s as if humanists have crash landed on Earth years into the future and have uncovered a half buried Statue of Liberty in the sand. “Oh my god, we’ve been home the whole time.” 

The last election cycle has left millions of my fellow Americans asking the same question. Can we ever get back to a federal government that supports the rule of law and is both pro-science and pro-human rights? I believe the answer is a resounding “Yes,” but acknowledge that it will take time, energy and engagement to ensure we return to our political and social norms. Perhaps decades to regain the confidence and support of our fellow citizens and other democratic nations.

The flatulence coming from this administration regarding religious liberty is itself a statement of Christian fundamentalist dogma. The recent report authored by and delivered to the Trump Administration can best be described as religious paranoia wrapped in the flag and pushed as a form of theocratic victimhood turned into righteous vengeance.  

The entire focus of the Religious Liberty Committee, which was constituted to be anything but, has really been about enforcing radically-evangelical social policy while normalizing religious zealotry into legal doctrine. It’s not that the guardrails of the separation of church and state have been ignored, it is that this committee wishes to ignore such notions and have set their sights on obliterated secular government in favor of quasi-theocratic Christian dogma with the ultimate goal to supplant both Congress and the courts.

In retrospect, and at least formally since the mid-19th century, as T.H. Huxley rightly noted, Darwin’s work removed any such a need for divine creation or divine governance. However,  we’ve been dealing with the “God of the Gaps” ever since, meaning one’s personal preference for a god fills the gaps until science replaces the need for a divine catalyst or protector or cause. This has held up pretty well in our ability to use science as a tool but not in our politics.

Illnesses are cured with medicine and not caused by demons or healed through prayer; natural disasters are caused by climate change, human-made folly or plate tectonics and not angry gods or spirits. The reason we are all here is based on the laws of natural selection and the cosmos and not divine will. These are inescapable facts. But in our politics today, such rational truth is seen as useless or bygone, in favor of prayer vigils in Congress or seen in the overall embrace of evangelicalism by this administration.

How exhausting and even debilitating it must be to have to move the goal posts every time you think you have a firm grasp as to where one’s god wants you to plant his theistic flag in nature and public policy? Efforts require the constant vigilance of religious bad actors to prowl the halls of Congress to enforce their myopic theocratic views of the world. And when all is lost, like the striking down of Intelligent Design in our public science classrooms, the final apologist argument goes something like, “Well, we don’t know what started the cosmos, so that’s god.” But to that I would ask, what’s the difference between a god that puts everything into motion and then disappears versus no god at all? The answer is nothing. 

For centuries, philosophical and theological arguments have been used to obstruct or obfuscate both materialism and rationalism, which are the twin DNA strands at the foundation of science, humanism and modern democracy. From the executions of Hypatia and Giordano Bruno to the imprisonment of Galileo, from Pascal’s Wager and William Paley’s watchmaker analogy, organized religion has attacked reason and science for their own discordant ends. And while it has been a constant trial even through today, it’s a social and political litigation that science and reason has kept on winning.

Modern science continues to brighten both our lives and our knowledge. As time moves us forward, and as our knowledge expands through the accumulation of evidence about the world around us, we can reasonably expect that our confidence rather than our hubris grows. And perhaps not coincidentally, this is the easiest and best way to understand the cosmos and our place in it. Through evidence and knowledge that we are part of nature and not above it, we are made closer to being whole, we are more empathetic and humane, and finally we become more connected to each other and the cosmos.

In contrast I cannot write, given what I know about history and our current lives, that organized religion offers that same form of liberation and freedom. We know, because they tell us, that those who do not follow in kind are sinners. If we believe the wrong theology or dogma, or accept none of it at all, that we are destined to fail. This vocal and sometimes subtle hubris infuses both authoritarians and totalitarians and removes our common humanity. It removes the opportunity for understanding and enables inequality.

For me, that’s the difference between rational humanism and theologic hubris. I take comfort in knowing that I am part of nature and have not been divinely created. I owe my existence to mere chance, which can seem disturbing, but in fact is liberating. And knowing this is my only opportunity to be here, there is urgency to my ideas and actions. Since the likelihood of my existence is so unique, every moment spent on this plane of consciousness is indeed both reverential and humbling in the most secular way possible.

In contrast and as the late, great Christopher Hitchens often noted, religious belief is hubristic and lands all those who follow, regardless of faith, into a celestial North Korea with few in control and everyone else hapless victims of the whims of the theocrats in charge. Where the “great leader” is memorialized and fed with our love, thoughts and actions daily. Not doing so sends us to the gulag of the mind and at times the body as well. This kind of master/slave relationship, this form of ownership, is perhaps the most vile forms of servitude the modern world could present. And for everyone’s sake it must be avoided.

This is why supporting one’s local and national secular and science organizations is so incredibly important at this juncture of the American journey. No one who works to take away civil and human rights, ban books, obfuscate science or scapegoat others has EVER been the hero of the story. For justice to prevail we need to see this time, our time, as an “all hands on deck” moment. And how you contribute to it is up to you. Time? Money? Organizing? Education? It doesn’t matter. Only the fact that you work to do something to make things better matters. That is the meaning of building secular humanistic confidence and community, which indeed is the opposite of hubris.