The Trouble With Humanism Is Humans

We often hear talk in the UK of injecting more humanism into our society in an attempt to rescue us from the archaic social cancer that is religious belief. Humanism is a non-religious ethical life stance that commits to development and human wellbeing on the basis of reason and naturalism.

The upshot is, humanists are a group of people that want to cut the supernatural out of ethics and decision-making. The problem with being a humanist is that it involves the tricky business of trusting human beings - which is ultimately going to leave us in trouble.

There are two ways we can trust humans: one is in what we can achieve, and two is in how we behave. It's quite easy to trust humans in the first sense. Our achievements are phenomenal: we've built big cities, travelled into space, mastered global travel and communication, learned how to treat the sick, lifted millions out of poverty - and with the Internet we have all the world's knowledge at our fingertips.

Alas, it's in the second sense, in our behaviour, that humans are so very hard to trust. However much we advance our scientific achievements and improve our material living standards we are always going to have to face up to the reality that at our worst we humans are pretty selfish, ignoble, inconsiderate and unkind creatures.

That's why even if I wasn't a Christian I could never be a humanist - I think humans are as much of the problem as they are the solution. We are so incorrigibly wretched inside that we can never be the solution to the problems of being human, just as gravity can never be the solution to a skydiver having difficulty opening his parachute. Gravity of course is the reason he needs his parachute just as our human brokenness is the reason we need so much more than humanism. We need Christ, in fact.