Against All Gods: The Way to Humanism

Findlay Clark David

Description

The author's grandfather (born 1832) was a farm worker and jobbing gardener who, unusually for the time, was a committed atheist. An autodidact, his education ended when he was eleven, but he became well enough read to be, from his soap box, a socialist scourge of Ayrshire aristocracy and to correspond regularly with Keir Hardie and George Bernard Shaw. His son, the author's father (born 1882), worked his way from poverty to Glasgow University and subsequent Training College to become a schoolteacher, but later decided to take a BD degree at Edinburgh University and was ordained as a Presbyterian minister. That did not find favour with his father, who told him never to darken the door of the family home in Girvan till he gave up "that daft dog collar". That he never did, but the author, his son (born 1930), eventually followed his grandfather's ways, rejecting his father's. In due course he came to write this "apologia pro vita sua" as an atheist humanist. The book presents the view that all human experience, behaviour, thought, understanding and productive activity are the products of or depend on healthy human brains, educated and trained, to some extent, in the arts, sciences and the scientific method. The book proposes that the concept of "god" is unnecessary and differences in understanding or using it are a source of conflict or even wars which continue to threaten human progress and indeed the species as a whole. There is no need to invoke gods as the creators of man, the cosmos and systems of morality. Evolution and history demonstrate that such systems would emerge naturally and progressively without any "divine tutorials or interventions". Rationality and the scientific method offer insightful and effective understanding and ameliorations of the human condition rather than dependence on supernatural and superstitious principles demanded by gods and their prophets. Humanists may sometimes adopt moral principles from religious precepts, but only if they can be validated by present human knowledge and experience.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie

Informations

• Publié par: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Date de parution: 31 janvier 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781528968577
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Against All Gods: The Way to Humanism
David Findlay Clark
Austin Macauley Publishers
2020-01-31
Against All Gods: The Way to Humanism About the Author Copyright Information © Acknowledgements Preface Chapter 1 The Nurturing of a Sceptic Chapter 2 The Faithful and the Sceptic Chapter 3 Toward Answers Chapter 4 Stardust to Skeletons and Skins Chapter 5 A Closer Look at the Human Condition Chapter 6 Speech, Language and Theory of Mind Chapter 7 Morality, Gods and Religions Chapter 8 Values Chapter 9 Purpose in Life Chapter 10 About Consciousness, Life and Death Chapter 11 A Humanist Glance at the Wider World Chapter 12 Humanism for All Humanity: A Background The 2002 Amsterdam Declaration: Postscript I’M DONE! About the Author Bibliography
About the Author
To my early university mentors, the late Professor Rex and Mrs Margaret Knight; and my many friends in the Humanist Society Scotland and Humanists UK.
Copyright Information ©
David Findlay Clark (2020)
The right of David Findlay Clark to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781528936149 (Paperback)
ISBN 9781528968577 (ePub e-book)
www.austinmacauley.com
First Published (2020)
Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd.
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Acknowledgements
I wish to acknowledge the prompt agreement of Humanists UK to my quoting the Amsterdam Declaration in full and the helpfulness of the officers concerned.
I am especially grateful to Emeritus Professor P J Kodituwakku who took the trouble in a still very busy academic life both in USA and Sri Lanka, to provide me with the content of the back cover.
I should also like to thank the following who have assisted me by reading and commenting helpfully on early drafts of the book: Prof. P.J. Kodituwakku, Bob Sutton, Alan and Marion Richardson, Ralph Dutch, and Derek Burton.
It would be foolish of me not to acknowledge the contribution of many friends, students and professional colleagues for their contributions to my thinking through friendly discussion over many years. These discussions cemented many more friendships than they damaged and for that I am especially grateful.
Preface
In the mid-19th century, Cardinal John Henry Newman (1801-1890) might well have earned himself the term “religious extremist” in the sense that he had, after conversion from the Church of England to Roman Catholicism, devoted his life and writings to pointing out what were for him the gross doctrinal errors of Protestantism. Were we to rate the strength of a person’s belief system on a 10-point scale (as we do in the assessment of pain, for example) then 10 would represent total, earnest and unshakable commitment to one’s beliefs and 1 would represent no commitment to any belief system at all. In between would fall the descriptive 4, 5 and 6, average scores of most people who claim any systematic religious or other beliefs at all but who, in practice, vacillate between more or less firm commitments in the course of daily life. I am not sure whether in statistical terms one could claim that strength of beliefs could be, in Gaussian terms, normally distributed, but it pleases me to think that if I place Cardinal Newman and, say, the Pope or the Prophet Mohammed at the positive end of the distribution (+3 standard deviations above the mean score), at the “extremist” end of the distribution, then my life has seen me fitfully but progressively wandering down to the lower scores of such a distribution until I would, I guess, now be very close to -3 SD (standard deviations) below the mean at the negative end of the distribution—and, presumably, a different kind of “extremist”.
There is a Latin phrase “apologia pro vita sua” which, apart from being the title of one of Newman’s works, appeared in the notes of earlier prelates and sages. Strictly translated, it means “a defence of one’s own life” but dictionaries translate it as “a written justification for his (the writer’s) own beliefs or course of life”. To that end, it could well have been my title for this book too. As the elder son of a Scottish Presbyterian minister, I was brought up and indoctrinated (inevitably, until I became old enough to think rationally for myself) in a rather austere Manse in a small northern Scottish town. Even at university, I was at first slow to cast about for ideas which might replace the religion with which, by the year, I was becoming increasingly dissatisfied, even disillusioned. Now, with senility beckoning with increasing insistence, I have decided to put down here the main ideational paths I have trodden in my search for a rational, humane, inclusive and evidence-based philosophy which has made, and looks like continuing to make, good sense of my life’s rich store of experiences and ideas.
I set out to write, not a textbook, but a book, written in everyday language for the intelligent layman, students or simply for curious individuals who, like me, might be interested to find out whether humanism might offer some guiding principles, quite apart from religion, which would form the basis for living a satisfying, happy and morally principled. life. What follows are some of the considerations that ensured my steady progress along the way to humanism.
Inevitably, since I am not a trained philosopher but a clinical psychologist and neuroscientist, there may be some errors of logic, but, I trust, none of fact. If there are, the responsibility for them is mine. I have written very much as a common man who has, nearing the end of his life, reached a satisfying and reasonably comprehensive understanding of what it has all been about, so far as I, my species and the universe are concerned. Although the book draws from my professional background, it is written not so much as an academic text as an exposition of a basis for the humanist philosophic stance for students and the intelligent layman.
Chapter 1

The Nurturing of a Sceptic
A sudden flurry of hailstones blew in off the North Sea, stinging my cheeks as I stood, flanked by two Flight Sergeants, in front of a squad of shivering airmen on that Sunday morning Church parade in October 1952. A brand new and very junior Pilot Officer in the RAF, I had been designated as operational squadron commander by my CO— just to test me out, I thought. It was only months since Queen Elizabeth the Second had ascended the throne as a 25-year-old, and my thoughts had been wandering to my RAF colleagues who had been despatched to serve in the war in North Korea and, more recently, to the UK’s exploding its own first atomic bomb on the Monte Bello Islands. However, tea had just come off rationing and I could look forward to a cuppa after the service. For me, no escape was permitted from that!
At a certain point in the proceedings, I had to intone a command, “Fall out, Roman Catholics and Jews!” Any Catholic and Jewish servicemen were then able to slink off to the gym or to their billets, where they would be spared what many of us thought the tedium of hearing the padre conduct a (Protestant) religious service. No account was ever taken of atheists, humanists, Buddhists, Theosophists, Taoists or Hindus. None of us who fell into any of these categories—and there was at least one of each of these in my Officers’ Mess at that time, and probably more in the station as a whole—was ever excused. We had to line up with the Protestants. Even at the time I thought that that was odd, since those of us in the categories other than the RCs and Jews were really more protesting than the Protestants!
As the decades passed, I was often asked, sometimes on official forms, what was my religion. As soon as I said, “None. I’m a humanist”, the inevitable next question would be either, “Are you a Protestant humanist or a Catholic humanist?” or “What’s a humanist anyway?” Several sections of the many answers I have tried to supply have been the starting point of this book.
Ever since I can remember, scepticism seemed to come as second nature to me. Very early in my childhood, perhaps at about the age of four or five, I was occasionally troubled by bad dreams in which various devils from my unconscious would come and leer at me in my sleep. Waking did not always put paid to them immediately, though when one of my parents, or the maid—for I grew up in a bourgeois Scottish household, a manse—came in and went through the fairly lengthy ritual of lighting a candle before fumbling with the gas lamp with its delicate mantle, the grotesque intruders would inevitably disappear back into the Rorschach patterns of the wallpaper. No doubt they were tamed by the very ordinariness of my football, my piggy bank or my wooden fort with its nasty looking lead soldiers. It was explained to me that these demons were the product of my imagination and without substance. Even then, I found this hard to square with the fact that an hour or so earlier I had been asked by these adults to say my prayers to similarly unreal creations of what seemed to be of their imaginations—and equally insubstantial ones at that! No doubt the demons that had wakened me were hellish enough, but I did wonder how they could be written off so easily when the angels in heaven were so patently of the same order, and I was not, by any means, to doubt their reality.
Even from our pre-school years, my brother Tom and I had to fall into the ritual of attending church every Sunday; somet