Can We Justify Humanist Values?
A debate between a Christian and a secular humanist
Here’s a stirring debate I had over email with the Christian Matthew, which Matthew posted on his page. If you’re interested in religious challenges to secular accounts of morality, and in the humanism that’s presupposed in most Western secular endeavours, you should check it out.
Here’s a taste:
‘First, humanists determine that people are eminently valuable based on a combination of philosophical conjecture and scientific knowledge of what we are and where we stand in nature. There is indeed a danger here of succumbing to the naturalistic fallacy, and meta-ethics is a tricky subject. Secular humanists, though, are the ones who face those difficulties head-on, whereas theists and other anti-humanists hide from them with hand-waving obfuscations. For instance, a theist might say we’re valuable because God said so, but that could amount to a mere appeal to divine force.
‘No, what makes us valuable is personhood, which sets us apart from animals and inanimate, purely physical things. Personhood includes self-consciousness, intelligence, imagination, autonomy, ambition, and so on. In effect, theists present the same answer when they say we’re valuable because God gave us an immaterial spirit. The difference is that “spirit” is a mystification that overstates our value if we’re to assume that spirits are immortal or that they’re specially related to the source of all things. Rather, we have a mind, based on a brain, and this brain invents culture which inspires us to terraform the natural environment.’
