The Philosophy of Humanism (Corliss Lamont) - Book Review

In 2001 I read The Philosophy of Humanism for my Christianity and Competing Worldviews class in order to study Secular Humanism. What follows here is my very first attempt at writing a critique for my graduate degree. Note that the kind people at the Corlis-Lamont website provide a free text version of the book for downloading.

The Philosophy of Humanism - A Critical Review

This classic work lays out the history of Humanism down through the ages from the Greeks onward. Corliss Lamont was voted Humanist of the Year in 1977, and his book The Philosophy of Humanism (Lamont, 1990, 300 pgs.) is considered by many to be the definitive outline of Secular Humanist thought (Noebel, 1991, p. 199). Lamont is very enthusiastic about his philosophy in this book, and holds
great hopes for it to be the saviour of the world. All quotes cited (by page number) in this review are taken from Lamont’s book.

In The Philosophy of Humanism Lamont succeeds in providing an interesting and eminently readable explanation of the philosophy of Secular Humanism. According to Lamont, Secular Humanism is “a philosophy of joyous service for the greater good of all humanity in this natural world and advocating the methods of reason, science, and democracy” (p. 12). He expands on this by providing ten basic propositions that succinctly define modern Secular Humanist philosophy. They are as follows:

1. Naturalistic metaphysics (all forms of supernaturalism are myth)
2. Man is an evolutionary product of Nature (he is monistic and therefore mortal).
3. Human beings possess the power or potentiality to solve their own problems.
4. Human beings possess genuine freedom of creative choice and action.
5. Morality is grounded in this-earthly experiences and relationships.
6. Individuals attain “the good life” through personal satisfactions, continuous
   self-development, significant work and other activities that contribute
   to the welfare of the community.
7. The widest possible development of art and the awareness of beauty.
8. A far-reaching social program.
9. The complete social implementation of reason and scientific method.
10. An unending questioning of basic assumptions and convictions.

The majority of the book is taken up with describing the implications of these propositions for Humanism as a philosophy of life and proclaiming the virtues of the Secular Humanist worldview.

Despite many commendable things in this book, it seems to me that the Secular Humanist has serious problems with his/her worldview, particularly in the areas of consistency, coherence and livability. The humanist is living contrary to his/her basic assumptions and intuitions about the nature of the world. These contradictions become especially evident in Lamont’s discussions on free will, reason, value, meaning, morality, truth and death.

The rejection of the supernatural, and supernatural revelation in particular appears to rely far more on a philosophical commitment to naturalism than evaluation of the evidence for the supernatural. In fact, Lamont shows a good knowledge of Christian theism in general but accompanies it with a discernable lack of understanding; as a result, he misreads Scripture
and seems more interested in discussing caricatures of Christianity than the real thing. It appears that he views the God of Christian theism purely through the ‘spectacles’ of naturalism, looking for Him inside Nature rather than outside (pp. 83, 95, 120, 121, 123, 125, 127, 129). His reference to “the neighborly, fatherly God of Christianity” as an inadequate Supreme Being (p.
119) clearly shows that he has no grasp of the Christian theistic concept of God. His assumption that the probability of intelligent life existing on other planets somehow negates God’s compassionate concern for humanity is also ill-informed (p. 119). Lamont’s treatment of the cosmological and teleological arguments for the existence of God is both superficial and weak (pp. 123-129), particularly in light of modern discoveries in astronomy and physics regarding
evidence for the apparent fine-tuning of the numerical constants of the universe.

Lamont reinterprets Jesus’ statements in Matthew 10:37-39 to refer to “allegiance to the social good” (p. 250) when it is clear that Jesus is making a radical call for his disciples to count the cost of following Him. Lamont also makes several unjustified statements such as “the New Testament as a document is…full of ambiguities as to correct human conduct” (p. 51) and “the traditional Christian attitude towards evil…has positively bad moral effects” (p. 148). He states
that it was the tree of ‘knowledge’ (rather than ‘knowledge of good and evil’ – a key distinction) mentioned in Gen 2:9 that Adam was forbidden to eat from, and uses this to support his notion that the Bible is anti-intellectual (p. 232). It is interesting that Lamont criticizes Paul for not mentioning intelligence as a cardinal virtue in 1 Corinthians 13. The irony of this is that Paul devotes much of the first three chapters to discussing how God has shown the philosophers
of the age to be fools because they trust in their own intelligence apart from God (1 Cor. 1:18-25; 2:7, 13; 3:18-23).

The difficulty with removing the existence of God as the eternal, infinite, and personal creator of Nature is that all the Humanist has left is Nature to take His place - “Nature is everything” (p. 22). Therefore, the Humanist must regard Nature as eternal, infinite and creative in order to account for his existence. Lamont makes this clear when he states that “matter is…a thing
of the most tremendous dynamism, complexity, versatility, and potentiality. It…is self-existent, self-active, self-developing, self-enduring. It is auto-dynamic” (p. 122-123). “Humanism…holds with Aristotle that Nature is infinite in duration as regards both past and future” (p. 175). Matter is eternal because “…no logical necessity forces us to the conclusion that there was a beginning in time” (p. 123), and “there was no one event that started the universe going,
and in fact no beginning at all” (p. 154). Therefore, it is primarily by giving Nature the attributes of God that the concept of God becomes superfluous for the Humanist.

The Humanists’ view of matter as eternal leads them to see everything as nothing more than matter in a vast causal chain. Lamont denies that this leads to determinism (pp. 159-169) and believes that it is possible – through the existence of objective chance – for humans to have free will (pp. 158-159). It is difficult to see how this can be the case. In fact, Lamont seems to have less confidence in this than anything else he writes (pp. 169, 211). The Humanist view is
that our capacity for thought derives from a purely material mind (monism – p. 81), so how can our choices be anything more than products of existing causal chains of matter? How is it coherent that can we be any type of “efficient cause” (pp. 166-167) if our thoughts are merely the results of previous chemical reactions in our material brains? We can make choices between options, but in what sense can those choices be seen as free or meaningful in the context
of a materialist philosophy? In fact, Lamont applies circular reasoning in using monistic theory to support his naturalistic and materialistic presuppositions, when it is clear that monistic theory is based on those same presuppositions.

Matter is creative because “Nature has constructed us on the principle of generous superabundance” (p. 91) and “we can no longer doubt but that whenever the physics, chemistry and climates are right on a planet’s surface, life will emerge and persist” (p. 114). It is evident that this is based on a prior philosophical commitment rather than evidence, since Lamont admits that “…biologists have not yet discovered precisely how organic forms evolved from inanimate matter” (p. 120). It is misleading of Lamont to ascribe any sort of principle
to Nature, since Darwinian evolution makes it clear that there was no construction principle involved, but rather only a long process of random mutations and natural selection (p. 42, 83). It seems clear that his belief in the creative power of “many-sided, infinitely productive” (p. 126) matter is based far more on his prior commitment to philosophical materialism than on scientific
method. His descriptions of Nature often tend to make use of religious language more commonly found on the lips of theists: “[Nature]… sustains us with its varied goods and stirs us with its wonderful beauty…this great and eternal Nature is enough” (p. 145).

There are problems with viewing Nature as creator, since matter – even if it does have creative power, as the Humanist asserts – is clearly impersonal, uncaring and arbitrary. There is no purpose, providence or power at work for our benefit (p. 109, 124, 147). In fact, “Nature considered as a totality has no purpose, no preferences, no prevision of the future, no awareness of the past, no consciousness of mind” (p. 145) and “is indifferent to human aims” (p. 147). Humanity is the accidental product of a chance process with no purpose or meaning, yet the Humanist maintains that we have value and significance. This is clearly inconsistent. For any meaning we derive from this life to be truly significant, it must ultimately be in reference to the greater meaning of the whole system. Yet in the face of this the Humanist confidently asserts
we have meaning, value and significance while the whole system does not. For him to be true to his presuppositions he must acknowledge that everything is completely devoid of meaning, and this realization leads down the slippery slope to nihilism (Sire, 1997, p. 90).

Another important outcome of Humanist philosophy is that it is very difficult to see how our ability to think and reason can be trustworthy as a truth-seeking mechanism. If the process that gave rise to our ability to reason did not have that in mind, but rather is based purely on chance and environmental adaptations, then how can we be sure it is reliable? How can we trust our
thinking to tell us anything true about the universe if it exists purely for survival value, rather than for truth-seeking value? Lamont does concede that the Humanist can never attain “absolute truth”, only “warranted assertibility” where “for all practical purposes the truth is the very, very probable” (p. 215). But the situation for the Humanist seems far worse than that; it is very difficult to see how such a view is a truly livable option.

Lamont’s scientism is clear when he extols the virtues of the scientific method as “a universally reliable method for attaining knowledge” (p. 197) that “men should apply …to every sector of their lives” (p. 37, cf. p. 210). His confidence in science seems to know no bounds, speculating that we may even one day evolve ourselves into a more advanced species (p. 110), control
human nature (p. 111) and even discover how to counteract the “so-called Law of Entropy” (p. 112). Lamont’s zealous faith in the ability of science and the pragmatic conception of knowledge (pp. 222-224) are an interesting combination, but ultimately his reasoning unravels. He states that no insight can be trusted “until it is thoroughly verified” (p. 217), yet this level of rigor runs contrary to how science has worked throughout history and still works today. Have the big bang theory and Darwinian evolution been thoroughly verified? How thorough is thorough enough?

Lamont's pragmatic approach leads to a very tenuous concept of truth, since truth is equated with conventional wisdom - the latest unfalsified theory - and what is vouched as true today could very well be completely false tomorrow. Even scientific laws such as the uniformity of Nature and causality cannot be anything more than observed regularities that could change at any time (pp. 215-216). He asserts that “practice or workability is the test of a truth…we are able to prove it true through verification” (p. 221), yet this is clearly an unverifiable philosophical statement and hence self-referentially incoherent.

In the Humanist worldview “morality…is a social product” (p. 89), as is conscience (p. 231), and “there is no evil except in relation to human life, strivings and aims” (p. 147). Lamont notes that with pantheism “there is left no genuine distinction between good and bad; and the nerve of morality is cut” (p. 137), but how can Humanism not fall into exactly the same pit? What meaning can morality have for us accidental products of Darwinian evolution (a process based solely on the strong overcoming the weak)? How is it that ethics can be determined by society and therefore be relative, yet not ultimately be subjective or arbitrary? Ethics has to be more than just description (ethos), it must also involve prescription of what ought to be; yet Humanism provides no basis for deriving “ought” from “is.”

Lamont constantly asserts that the chief end of man is to seek earthly happiness for himself and others (p. 3, 12, 14, 15, 227, 248), yet his ethical injunction runs completely contrary to the process that brought us into existence. In fact, Lamont’s book is rife with ethical judgments rendered on others, despite his having no discernable basis for making those judgments. Not only that, Humanists consciously make ethical assumptions and attempt to persuade others
to also make them (pp. 248-249). Lamont even goes so far as to state that “indubitably philosophers possess the right and duty to pass some severe moral judgments on modern man” (p. 10). The real question seems to come down to, “Says who?”, since there is no external authority that can be appealed to. Only the consequences of the action can be used as an ethical plumb line, since “no human acts are good or bad in or of themselves” (p. 232). Lamont
is deluding himself if he believes that “a true science of ethics is possible and will yet be established” (p. 232), since the “scientific method as such is ethically and socially neutral” (p. 225). In the Humanistic scheme even death is not be seen as an evil, but rather as fulfilling “a useful and necessary role in the long course of biological evolution” (p. 102). Lamont describes
how he can derive comfort from understanding the indispensable role of death in Nature (p. 104).

Perhaps the most troubling thing to me about Secular Humanism is that it is a religious worldview (p. 24, 144), but the secular mindset of western society disguises its religious nature. It is high time for Humanism to be recognized as a religious view so that Humanists are prevented from hiding behind the Bill of Rights to promote their religion. Lamont points out that “the Bill of Rights further clears the way for secular interests by guaranteeing separation between the state and religion” (p. 18), yet this separation must also apply to Secular Humanism if justice is to be served.

Secular Humanism has always been the dominant non-Christian influence in my life. I have struggled to come to terms with the secular thinking around me and always felt like I was holding the weak position. This is mainly due to how thoroughly the philosophy of Secular Humanism has pervaded the world around me, especially in the educational environment I grew up in; I was constantly bombarded by secular critiques of the Scriptures and Christianity in general. However, I understand now that the core presuppositions (i.e. naturalism, materialism) held by the Humanist are not based on empirical evidence but rather are a priori philosophical commitments (pp. 22, 37-38).

The philosophies of naturalism and materialism are not questioned by the Secular Humanist, but instead form the foundation for the entire Humanist worldview (expressed in monism, Darwinian evolution, atheism, agnosticism, relativistic ethics, scientism etc.). These philosophies lead to a worldview that struggles with issues of consistency, coherence and livability – particularly with regards to issues such as morality, free will, reason, significance, purpose, morality and truth. With this in mind it seems very foolish for Humanism to assign “to man nothing less than the task of being his own savior and redeemer” (p. 283).

Bibliography

Lamont, C. (1990). The Philosophy of Humanism (7^th ed.). New York, NY: Continuum.

New King James Version. (1982). The Holy Bible. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson.

Noebel, D. A. (1991). Understanding the Times. Eugene, OR: Harvest House

Sire, J. W. (1997). The Universe Next Door (2^nd ed.). Downers Grove, Illinois: Intervarsity Press.