There have been many books and articles that define humanism. They all have in common a rejection of supernatural ideas, but typically they don’t define what is supernatural. The dictionary definition of supernatural is “an event attributed to some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature.” Thus, this would include invisible people (such as angels, devils, Jesus after he ascended into space for over 2,000 years to return to earth at some unspecified time full bodied), invisible places (such as heaven, hell, limbo), and invisible entities (God, souls that pop into and out of humans at various times between conception and death, souls that exist after death to be joined with Jesus when he returns).
Other examples of supernatural ideas are sticks turning into serpents (Exodus 7:10), a serpent and a donkey talking (Genesis 2:3–5 and Numbers 22:28–30, respectively), iron floating (2 Kings 6:5–6), a woman turning into a pillar of salt (Genesis 19:26), the Sun standing still (Joshua 10:13), and people rising from the dead (Matthew 27:52). Adam and Eve came into being without a mother or father. There is the pregnancy of Mary, Jesus’s mother, without intercourse or the semen of a human, and the existence of an invisible god whose form is interpreted in several thousand ways by thousands of living and dead religions, many of which claim to be the one true religion favored by God. The book of Exodus details one miracle after another, including some performed by God’s opponents. Exodus 8:6–7 says, “Aaron stretched out his hand over the waters of Egypt, and the frogs came up and covered the land of Egypt.” Exodus 7:10–11 says that the pharaoh’s magicians turned their rods into serpents, and Exodus 7:21–22 says both they and Aaron turned the Nile into blood. Of course, notoriously, God parted the Red Sea to allow the Jews to escape slavery from the Egyptians.
Miracle healing claims are supernatural events, because they are not repeatable under experimental control conditions.
Claims of miracles are not the only claims lacking evidentiary support that are widely believed, unfortunately. Some examples of truth claims that are uncorroborated by evidence are: 40 percent of Americans believe that the tale of creation in Genesis is the word of God; 45 percent believe in ghosts; 73 percent believe in heaven, 62 percent in hell; 35 percent believe we were saved by Jesus dying a tortuous death (that belief is a necessary condition to join Jesus when he returns); 31 percent believe that global warming is a hoax perpetuated by scientists, the government, and journalists; 27 percent believe that the government has, in league with the pharmaceutical industry, hidden evidence of natural cancer cures; 51 percent believe that extraterrestrials have visited or are visiting Earth; 18 percent believe that vaccines cause autism; 49 percent believe that Donald Trump won the popular vote in 2016; 13 percent believe that Barack Obama maybe or definitely was/is the anti-Christ; 15 percent believe that the media or the government adds secret mind-controlling technology to television broadcast signals; 28 percent of voters believe a secretive power elite with a globalist agenda are conspiring to eventually rule the world; and 21 percent believe in spells or witchcraft.1
In the book Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500 Year History (2017), author Kurt Anderson describes such diverging post-truth attitudes as follows: “Americans believe more than others in the developed world in Satan on Earth, in reports of recent trips to and from heaven, and in a story of life’s instantaneous creation several thousand years ago.”
Religious supernatural claims violate the foundation of historiography, that is, history as a credible academic discipline designed to account for understanding our past, to wit:
Ernest Troeltsch (1865–1923) formulated three principles on which critical historical inquiry was based that were incompatible with traditional Christian beliefs:
- the principle of criticism: our judgments about the past are provisionally true, open to revision in the light of criticism by peers, by the discovery of new evidence;
- the principle of analogy: we’re able to make judgments of probability only if we presuppose that our own present experience is not radically dissimilar to the experience of past persons; and
- the principle of correlation: one must consider an event in terms of its antecedents and consequences.
The phenomena of humanity’s historical life are so related and interdependent that no radical change can take place at any one point in the historical nexus without effecting a change in all that immediately surrounds it. Historical explanation, therefore, necessarily takes the form of understanding an event in terms of the antecedents and consequences, and no event can be isolated from its historically conditioned time and space. This principle is violated by claims of supernatural intervention, virgin births, resurrection from the dead, or talking snakes.
The third principle of correlation, by itself, shows that no critical historian could make use of supernatural intervention as a principle of historical explanation, because that would break the continuity of the causal nexus, and “no event could be regarded as a final revelation of the absolute spirit, since every manifestation of truth and value was relative and historically conditioned.”2
Without the miracle of the Resurrection, Christianity would collapse. Paul said in 1 Corinthians 15:14 and 15:17, “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain.” Harold Lindsell said on page 204 of The Battle for the Bible, “Once we discard miracles, we automatically open the door that leads to a denial of the virgin birth and the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.”
Jesus was born to a married teenager in a time when she would have been subject to a penalty of stoning to death under Jewish law if she had committed adultery by having sex with someone other than her husband. If she had claimed today that she became pregnant by God, then Jesus’s blood could be tested to determine whether he had a human father. One peculiar thing about the Nativity story: Jesus didn’t have to be born as a result of a normal period of female gestation according to God’s power. He could have arrived as Adam and Eve did, as a fully grown adult.
What Does Humanism Offer to Replace the Supernatural?
The following ideas were assembled from the writings of books by Kenneth Patton (1911–1994) and edited by me:
By experiencing the universe and our worldview without supernatural influence, we may avoid making up our reality. We are skeptics, unwilling to delude ourselves, our brains unhitched from our longings, thinking what we are told, no matter how we might prefer it otherwise. Our eyes will not lie to us on demand. We don’t accept false facts or faith claims with evidence to the contrary.
We feel mystified by what eludes our comprehension, but it is not mysterious. Nature has no censors, shame, pride, exclusiveness, or banishment. It is not awesome; it is we who are awed.
We affirm this world as an incredibly beautiful place.
Every day is abundant with color, splendor, sensuality, taste, and whatever music we experience.
Any leaf could shatter our placidity, convict us of wonder.
Our loves are native and human. We have seen sunsets a thousand times more beautiful than heaven, minnows more justified than God.
A bird’s wing and a snail’s shell refute all disbelievers.
We are undone by reality.
Any child is a miracle; what more assurance do we need?
Let us worship with our eyes, ears, and fingertips; let us love the world through heart, mind, and body.
We feed our eyes upon the mystery and revelation in the faces of our brothers and sisters.
The purity of birds singing and the music of throat and brass and wood—these are golden to the ear lonely for beauty.
We seek to understand the shyness behind arrogance, the fear behind pride, the tenderness behind clumsy strength, and the anguish behind cruelty.
All are lonely as we are lonely, and all need the sure presence of those who love and are loved.
Let us worship, but not in bowing down, not with closed eyes and stopped ears.
We worship with the opening of all the windows of our beings, with the full outstretching of our spirits.
A religion without supernatural ideas is not limited to what is; we have our native dreams.
We are made and remade by incredible creations. With dreams for blueprints rather than panaceas, we make better worlds than we had, reform cities and nations, become more affectionate and caring, and make the landscape more fair.
We increase science, technology, and wisdom, extend the arts, increase fields and herds.
We can make our world flourish.
Religions claim to go beyond reality to out-strip and out-bedazzle it, elongating these lives into immortality, increasing mind to omniscience, power to omnipotence. Yet all religions are grounded in realities, for supernaturalisms and heavens are spin-offs from what we are, projections of the human image, elaborations of imagination.
The wishful seek, and if they do not find, they invent religions complying with their needs, concerned not with what they can realistically expect but what they wildly hope for.
We cannot reject the glittering world, its tumultuous life, this blossoming earth, this birth, growth, and age, our waning powers and final subsidence, this welter of achievement and failure, tragedy and ecstasy, for a passel of dreams.
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Religion without supernaturalism focuses our attention on the wonders of nature, the beauty of the cosmos. It enables us to resolve conflicts by relying on facts that are experientially verifiable. Like court trials that have rules of evidence that exclude irrelevant evidence, we can converse by exchanging our lived experience through dialogue. Constructive discourse takes place when people with different opinions are open minded to the possibility that they may be wrong.
However, by engaging in conversation with claims that we speak with God’s authority is a conversation stopper because it is irrefutable. Humanism rejects claims of infallibility by advocates who claim that their source is holy or is the authority of a perfect ideology or religion.
Ideologies that are insulated from considerations of the impact of lived experience are similar to religions that claim infallibility. Hierarchical theories of libertarianism (unregulated free market economics) or originalism (a theory of constitutional interpretation) are treated as sacred by their adherents. Libertarianism ignores externalities. Originalism ignores the benefits of what our social sciences have learned about the social nature of humans.
Humanists embrace a moral foundation based on the collective conscience (We the People) of people engaged in constructive discourse in pursuit of serving the general welfare. Humanist morality is a social enterprise that values inclusive participation. Good morals incorporate fair rules of procedure, participation, transparency, and assessment of outcomes.
Notes
1. These statistics are based on several polls conducted by various agencies including Gallup, Pew Research Center, and YouGov.
2. Van A. Harvey, The Historian and Believer: The Morality of Historical Knowledge and Christian Belief. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1996.
There have been many books and articles that define humanism. They all have in common a rejection of supernatural ideas, but typically they don’t define what is supernatural. The dictionary definition of supernatural is “an event attributed to some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature.” Thus, this would include invisible people (such …