'Humanism' serves here as an umbrella term that covers both non-belief in religion and non-religious philosophical beliefs.

Introduction

According to the 2001 census, 15.5 per cent of people in Britain (over nine million people) have no religion - the largest 'belief group' after Christianity, about three times as big as all non-Christian groups taken together. A further 7.3 per cent of the population chose not to answer the question on religious belief in the same census.

Other opinion surveys have since suggested that the percentage of non-believers may be even higher: 27 per cent of respondents to a Populus poll commissioned by The Sun newspaper in 2005 described themselves as atheists, while in Scotland, as many as 37.4 percent of respondents to a similar survey in the Glasgow Herald said they did not believe in God. Some people may identify themselves culturally with a religious tradition, but not believe in God.

People who have no religious belief span a wide spectrum of philosophical and political opinion and may or may not consider the question of belief to be important. Some belong to organisations such as the British Humanist Association or the National Secular Society, but many do not. They may describe themselves simply as 'not religious', or by a variety of terms that overlap in some measure with 'humanist', although a preference for one term over another may indicate some difference of meaning or emphasis.

Terminology

Agnostic

In common usage, someone who 'is not sure' about religious belief. In a stricter philosophical sense, someone who has not found sufficient evidence for a particular belief, and who accepts that there are limits to what can be known.

Atheist

Someone who has no belief in the existence of 'God' or 'gods', or for whom these words have no meaning that corresponds to any objective reality.

Freethinker

Someone who rejects authority and tradition in matters of belief, relying instead on evidence and reason, and therefore cherishes the principle of freedom of thought and expression. Historically, the term includes those who have questioned and rejected orthodox religious dogma without necessarily abandoning all religious belief ('Deists', for example - believers in an impersonal God), as well as non-believers.

Humanist

Someone who takes the view, based on evidence and reason and not on belief in any supernatural agency, sacred text, superstition or mystical experience, that human beings, unaided by any deity, must take responsibility for the world they live in; that they have only one life; and that moral values are founded on human nature, experience and social needs. Unlike the other terms in this list, 'humanism' denotes not simply an attitude to religion, but a non-religious world view, and a basis of ethics. See also 'Secular humanist' below.

Rationalist

Someone who gives primacy to evidence, reason and scientific method, and rejects the authority of scripture or dogma.

Sceptic

In this context, someone who is unpersuaded by the available evidence on which others base a religious belief.

Secularist

Someone who thinks that religion should be kept separate from the state, the law, and public institutions. Unlike the other terms in this list, 'secularist' does not necessarily imply a rejection of religion, although people who reject religion are likely to be secularists.

Many people who are religious, especially adherents of minority faiths, want the state to be secular as a guarantee of freedom of belief and worship, tolerance and equality, and as a safeguard against the acquisition by any particular religious constituency of political privileges or monopolies of power. On this basis, the constitutions of the United States and France are in many respects 'secularist', and in post-independence India, the secular nature of the constitution was widely understood to protect minority faiths including Islam.

Secular humanist

Someone who is a humanist in the sense described above. The qualification 'secular' is sometimes added to distinguish humanism as it is now commonly understood from a 'religious humanism' in which a humanistic ethic is combined with some form of deistic or pantheistic belief (belief in a non-personal God, or in God as the universe or nature), or even with quasi-religious ritual expressions, as in the 'positivist' philosophy of Auguste Comte ('the 'religion of humanity').

Humanist tendencies can be found within many religious traditions, but the subject of this article is humanism in the sense of 'secular humanism'.

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A short history of humanism and freethought

Humanism, in the sense used here, is often seen as a product of the European 'Enlightenment' of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The liberation of philosophical and scientific enquiry from the constraints of religious authority that occurred at that time is seen by humanists as a most important historical development, but they also consider that sceptical and rationalist views are nothing new in the world. If these views have been less commonly found in certain places and during certain periods, at least part of the reason is that they have been suppressed, often brutally, by religious orthodoxies.

Evidence from hunter-gatherer societies, in which shamanistic beliefs in a spirit world prevail, suggests that there has probably always been considerable variation in the readiness of different individuals to believe the pronouncements of self-appointed mediums and medicine men, and that through countless millennia there have been sceptics inclined to regard them as frauds and charlatans.

In the civilisations of the ancient world, and not only in Europe, many thinkers emphasised the importance of life on earth over any speculative notions of life after death, and advocated reason, ethics based on human experience, and a questioning of religious authority. Humanists today identify these thinkers to a greater or lesser degree with their own outlook.

Ancient India and China

From an early date, India's wide-ranging philosophical tradition includes some evidence of atheistic, anticlerical and philosophically materialist currents of thought ('materialist' in this sense means the view that there is one universe of matter and energy, rather than separate worlds of matter and spirit). One such current is known as Charvaka or Lokayata. It's teachings are thought to have been set out in a Brihaspati Sutra, but are known only from fragments cited by Hindu and Buddhist opponents. 'If he who departs from the body goes to another world,' reads one verse, 'how is it that he come not back again, restless for the love of his kindred ?... it is only as a means of livelihood that the Brahmans [members of the priestly caste] have established here all these ceremonies for the dead...'

Siddharta Gautama ('the Buddha', c.566-486 BCE), originally one of a group of itinerant philosophers who rejected the authority of the Brahmans, became the founder of a new teaching which preserved elements of Hindu thought, but dispensed with the concepts of a creator God (Brahma) and an eternal soul. The Buddha, also urged his followers to test all religious statements in the light of their own experience, accepting nothing purely on authority.

The teachings of the Chinese sage Confucius (Kong fuzi, c.551-479 BCE) in many ways represent a humanistic system of social and political ethics. Confucius spoke of 'heaven' (tian) as a shorthand expression for the laws of nature, taught that ancestors should be venerated, but otherwise expressed rationalistic views. 'Not yet understanding life, how can you understand death?', he said; and, 'If we cannot serve man, how can we serve spirits?' Even more than Confucius himself, his follower Mencius (Mengzi c.372-289 BCE) is often considered to be an early humanist, since he emphasised the inherent goodness and reasonableness of human nature, and the innate character of morality, and strove to define an ethic that all human beings could follow based on the four virtues of human-heartedness (ren), righteousness (yi), courteousness (li) and wisdom (zhi). Hsün-Tzu (Xunzi c.300-215 BCE), while taking a less charitable view of human nature, was a declared sceptic, teaching that all events have natural causes, religion has no supernatural efficacy, and beliefs in gods and spirits are the products of superstition and ignorance.

Classical Greece and Rome

A line from the Greek playwright Euripides's 'Bellerophon' reads, 'There are no gods in heaven. To believe in such old wives' tales is folly.' In fifth century BCE, the same age that knew Confucius and Buddha, Greek civilisation was Europe's focus of a new spirit of intellectual enquiry that was troubling to the Athenian establishment.

Convicted on a politically motivated charge of atheism and corrupting the young with dangerous ideas, Socrates (470-399 BCE), a great pioneer of the search for truth through reasoned discussion, was sentenced to death. Atheism, prohibited under Athenian law was therefore known in ancient Greece, though only a few reputed atheists, including Diagoras of Melos, are known by name.

Other Greek progenitors of rationalism and humanism include the sophist, Protagoras (481-420 BCE), who coined the maxim that 'Man is the measure of all things'; Democritus (c.450-370 BCE), whose theory that all matter consisted of atoms made possible a view of creation that was two thousand years ahead of its time; Aristotle (384-322 BCE), whose Nicomachean Ethics has been taken as a model of humanistic ethics; and Epicurus (341-270 BCE). The main object of Epicurus's teaching was to deliver people from the fear that he identified as the main motive for religious belief. Death was no more than non-existence. He did not deny the existence of gods in a remote sphere of their own, but denied them any credit for influencing human affairs. He analysed the problem of evil thus: God either wishes to abolish evil and cannot, or can and will not, or neither can nor will, or both can and will. The first three are unthinkable if he is a God worthy of the name; therefore the last alternative must be true. Why then does evil exist? The inference is that there is no God in the sense of a governor of the world.

The philosophy of Epicurus was carried into later generations by the Roman poet Lucretius (99-55 BCE), author of De Rerum Natura ('On the Nature of Things'). Educated Romans of the time were open both to the anti-religious sentiments of Epicureanism, and to Stoicism - the philosophy represented in Roman form by Cicero (106-43 BCE) and Emperor Marcus Aurelius (121-180 CE). Both in their own convictions were rationalists and sceptics but, unlike the Epicureans, they upheld the value of maintaining religious beliefs among the masses as a mechanism of social and political control. As another Stoic philosopher, Seneca (2BCE-65CE), put it, 'Religion is recognised by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.'

The Islamic world

In spite of the severe proscriptions of Islamic jurisprudence against heresy and apostasy, a number of historical figures from the Muslim world have given open expression to sceptical and humanistic views. The enigmatic ninth-century Persian theologian Ibn al-Rawandi, known more from bitter polemics against his heresy than from any surviving writings of his own, advanced sceptical arguments against central tenets of Islam that amounted to a case for atheism. He was associated with another freethinker from the same region, Abu Isa al-Warraq, (the pseudonym 'Ibn Warraq' has often been used since by dissidents). The blind 11th-century Syrian poet Abu Ala Al-Ma'arri, was even more outspoken in his opinions. 'Religions,' he wrote, 'have only resulted in bigotry and bloodshed, with sect fighting sect, and fanatics forcing their beliefs onto people at the point of a sword. All religions are contrary to reason and sanity.'

Less radically heretical but nonetheless associated with a certain rationalism and scepticism within Islam was Ibn Rushd ('Averroes' 1126-1198), of Cordoba. Like his central Asian predecessor, Ibn Sina ('Avicenna' 980-1037), Ibn Rushd was one of the Muslim scholars whose commentaries on the works Greek thinkers such as Aristotle and Plato helped to reconnect Europe with its classical past at a time when these works had been lost through the obscurantism of the Christian early middle ages. The influence of these Muslim thinkers helped to prepare the ground for the later emancipation of reason and science in Europe.

The Renaissance and the Reformation

The term 'humanism', in a somewhat different sense from the main subject of this article, is often used to characterise scholarship and literature during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when intellectual enquiry was taken beyond the confines of theology to the 'humanities' of philosophy, history, and literature. While the renewed interest in the pagan antiquity involved a rediscovery of pre-Christian thinking, the development of a secular sphere, and a liberation of reason and knowledge, it was not inherently anti-religious. A characteristic philosophical movement of the time was 'neo-Platonism' - an attempt to reconcile the teachings of Plato with both Christianity and the evidence of the natural world. Humanists in the Renaissance sense, who emphasised the human dignity and the need for tolerance, included Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) and Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536).

By the early sixteenth century, the religious life of Christendom was being torn violently apart by the Reformation, which brought about the overthrow of Roman Catholic ecclesiastical authority in much of northern and central Europe, and the emergence of the new 'protestant' churches of Luther and Calvin. The cultural efflorescence of the Renaissance was soon overshadowed by the horrors of religious war and intolerance. While maintaining orthodox professions of faith, the French writer Montaigne (1533-1592) was a rationalist in his thinking - a position he maintained by separating reason and religious belief into separate realms. 'It is setting a high value on one's opinions,' he wrote, 'to roast men on account of them.' His less orthodox Italian contemporary Socinus (Fausto Sozzini 1539-1604), a founder of Unitarianism, was another important figure in preparing the ground for the Enlightenment through the advancement of reason and tolerance. 'Religion is a curse,' he declared, 'if persecution is a necessary part of it.'

The problems of reconciling new scientific discoveries with orthodox Christian dogma were becoming ever more acute. The hypothesis of the astronomer Copernicus (1473-1543) that the earth orbited the sun rather than vice versa was confirmed by the telescope observations of Galileo (1564-1642) but refuted by the Roman Catholic church, which first suppressed Galileo's conclusions, and then forced him under threat of torture to renounce his discoveries. Galileo's work remained on the Vatican index of prohibited books until 1835, while the earth continued to orbit the sun.

The Enlightenment

Although heretics and unbelievers were still occasionally being burnt alive by both Catholics and Protestants, by the early seventeenth-century the momentum of the search for philosophical and scientific truth without regard to religious dogma, led by such philosophers as Francis Bacon (1561-1626), René Descartes (1596-1650), and Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), had become unstoppable. One of the most clearsighted advocates of reason, freethought, and toleration as the preconditions of this search, was John Locke (1632-1704) - although his clearsightedness fell short of granting toleration to atheists.

Many of the eighteenth-century freethinkers associated with the Enlightenment and the revolutions in France and America were fierce in their criticism of established religion, but were 'Deists' rather than atheists: they retained a belief in an impersonal God as creator of the universe, but not in a revealed God personally determining the fate of individual human beings. This was true, for example, of Voltaire (1694-1778); of his friend, Frederick the Great of Prussia (1712-1786 - the first European ruler to enact complete freedom of conscience in a statute); and of the English radical Tom Paine (1737-1809), author of 'The Rights of Man', and 'The Age of Reason', and a founding member of the first anti-slavery society in the United States. But among Voltaire's close associates, the French Encyclopédistes, there were now for the first time self-declared atheists such as Baron D'Holbach (1723-89) and Denis Diderot (1713-1784), the author-in-chief of the Encyclopédie.

British freethinkers who associated with the Encyclopédistes included the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776), and Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, whose quip on the miraculous events reported by early Christians was that 'the laws of nature were frequently suspended for the church.' The pioneer feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797), author of 'A Vindication of the Rights of Woman' combined a rationalist outlook with a belief in the possibilities of social and educational reform in a way that would become characteristic of humanism in the generations to come, while her son-in-law Percy Byshe Shelley ( 1792-1822), achieved renown both as an atheist and as one of England's greatest poets. In Germany, too, poets such as Goethe (1749-1832) and Schiller (1759-1805) helped to liberate the arts from the constraints of religion.

The nineteenth century

The miserable living conditions which the Industrial Revolution created for a huge class of urban poor gave rise both to charitable institutions and to political movements in which freethinkers and religious believers - particularly from the non-conformist churches - often found common cause.

On the one hand were liberal social reformers and wealthy philanthropists like the non-religious Scottish-American industrialist Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919). On the other were early socialist movements such as Chartism, which included both Christian socialists and atheist radicals such as G J Holyoake (1817-1906), who in 1842 gained the distinction of being imprisoned for blasphemy.

Rationalist and humanist thinkers could be found across a similarly wide political spectrum. John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), the founding father of classical liberalism and sometime member of parliament, developed Jeremy Bentham's philosophy of utilitarianism, whose object was 'the greatest happiness of the greatest number'. Mill looked forward to a time when social ethics would be based on a common sense of responsibility in the service of humanity instead of unsustainable beliefs in the supernatural; and as a proponent of the rights or women he was far ahead of his time. On the left, Karl Marx (1818-1883), whose early writings in particular are considered to be humanistic, described religion as 'the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions... the opium of the people'. Developing the ideas of Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872), Marx saw religious belief as evidence of man's self-alienation, which had to be overcome if he was to free himself from oppression.

One of the central figures of British rationalism in this period was Charles Bradlaugh (1833-1891), founder of the National Secular Society, and author of many works on freethought. With his friend, Annie Besant (1847-1933), Bradlaugh was a brave campaigner for contraception, on which account they came close to being imprisoned for obscenity. Elected as Liberal MP for Northampton in 1880, Bradlaugh was the first declared atheist to enter parliament, though he was only allowed to do so with a solemn affirmation instead of an oath taken on the Bible after six years of delay, during which time he was re-elected four times by his constituents.

The greatest shock to the authority of religion in the nineteenth century came not from politics, but from geology, and from the studies of the birds of the Galapagos made by Charles Darwin (1809-1882). Darwin's theory of evolution, together with new biblical scholarship in Germany, led many prominent Victorians including Darwin himself, through a crisis of faith, into the agnosticism that Darwin's most important intellectual ally, T H Huxley (1825-1895), defined with the maxim, 'In matters of the intellect do not pretend conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable'. The agnostic philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) had preceded Darwin with a theory of social evolution that lent itself to inegalitarian conservative interpretations, but he strongly opposed militarism and imperialism. One who welcomed the cosmological earthquake that Darwin precipitated was the atheist philosopher and abolitionist Harriet Martineau (1802-1876). The Russian anarchist and naturalist Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921) engaged TH Huxley in a famous literary debate over the mechanisms of evolution, arguing that natural selection involved not only competition 'red in tooth and claw' but, as Darwin had observed, also an inherent capacity for mutual aid that was evident in both animal and human societies.

Nineteenth-century humanists in the field of literature included George Eliot (Marian Evans 1809-1882) and Thomas Hardy (1840-1928). In America, the poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) had no belief in a personal God, and the humorist and novelist Mark Twain (1835-1910) and the orator Robert G Ingersoll (1833-1899) were prominent and influential freethinkers. Also reckoned a freethinker in her time, for her fierce attacks on Christian misogyny, was the suffragist, abolitionist and advocate of Native American rights Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826-1898). Like Annie Besant in England, however, she turned to Theosophist mysticism in later life.

Freethinking social reformers formed local 'ethical societies' to promote their debates and campaigns and, as the nineteenth century progressed, these became numerous in Britain, the USA and many other countries. One of the oldest such groups, the South Place Ethical Society, still exists in London; others combined to form the Ethical Union, the precursor of the British Humanist Association. Publications such as the Freethinker magazine (founded in 1881 by G W Foote and still published monthly) and books published cheaply by the Rationalist Press Association helped to publicise and develop humanist ideas.

Humanism since 1900

By the early twentieth century the religious constraints on scientific and philosophical enquiry had been weakened and, in cosmopolitan Britain at least, it was becoming easier to declare a secular humanist outlook. Fundamentalist interpretations of scripture became less common as 'modern' varieties of theology appeared, influenced by developments in science and philosophy. Many humanists worked actively for such social reforms as the abolition of capital and corporal punishment, the repeal of laws against abortion and homosexuality, reform of the law on abortion, the removal of censorship of literature and drama, and improvements in education.

As the century progressed, as a result of the world wars, militarised imperialism, the growth of totalitarian ideologies of left and right, the Cold War and the nuclear arms race, and the social effects of technological development, humanists, from their varied political viewpoints, began to give more attention to defending human freedom and dignity against the dehumanising effects of these phenomena.

The claims made by Nazism for 'racial destiny', or by Stalinism for the inevitable course of 'historical materialism', besides being obviously irreconcilable with respect for individual dignity and freedom, had a character that from a rationalist point of view was equivalent to religious dogma. Humanist criticism of authoritarian ideologies often came from liberal viewpoints such as those of the philosophers Karl Popper and Bertrand Russell, but socialist humanists of the 'New Left', such as the historian E P Thompson, were also fiercely critical of the Soviet system, and committed to revealing the individual humanity of the ordinary men and women whose lives and roles had been obscured in the conventional study of history.

Prominent humanists and rationalists from the last hundred years are too numerous to list in more than a fraction of their numbers (fuller lists can be found via the British Humanist Association website), but some of the greatest names include the philosophers G E Moore, A J Ayer and A C Grayling; the psychologist Sigmund Freud; Scientists such as Albert Einstein, J B S Haldane, Julian Huxley, Joseph Rotblat, Francis Crick, and Richard Dawkins; politicians and statespeople including Aneurin Bevan, Jawaharlal Nehru, M N Roy, Michael Foot, Fenner Brockway, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Vaclav Havel; and writers and journalists including Joseph Conrad, George Bernard Shaw, H G Wells, Arnold Bennet, E M Forster, Virginia Woolf, H L Mencken, Naomi Mitcheson, Brigid Brophy, Umberto Eco, Kurt Vonnegut, Isaac Asimov, Gore Vidal, and Octavio Paz.

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Humanist views on creation and purpose in life

Humanists are likely to be open to the views of astronomers and physicists on questions of cosmology, but many will also think it unlikely that there can ever be certain answers to such questions as 'How did the universe begin?'. Introducing the concept of a creator God will provide no answer for rationalists, since the same questions that already apply to the universe then apply to God. 'How was God created'? 'If God is eternal, what was God doing 'before' the universe was created? If it is a 'mystery', why not just say we don't know?'

To someone who has no belief in God, purpose in life cannot be God-given. To humanists, a way of living well is something that human beings, who have intelligence, compassion and reason as well as instinct, must define for themselves. The rationalist view is that this is what religious believers do in any case, even if they then attribute their conclusions to God.
Humanist ethics

Humanists have no sacred texts and do not believe in any divine moral authority. Nor do they believe in any afterlife in heaven, hell, or reincarnation that provides reward or retribution for the way life is lived. The basis for humanist ethics is social - the relations between human beings, and their responsibility to future generations, rather than the relation between human beings and God.

Actions have consequences on earth - individual, social and environmental - and humanist ethics take these into account to the extent that the consequences are understood and predictable.

Humanists may have various views concerning human nature, and the relations between 'nature and nurture', but a common view is that human beings are neither inherently good or inherently evil, but are born with a potential for both good and evil. It is the purpose of ethics, guided by evidence and reason, to realise the potential for good and restrain the potential for evil.

In broad terms, definitions of good and evil have been largely shared across different human cultures and belief systems throughout history. Cruelty, murder, theft, injustice, selfishness, and disregard for other people are commonly seen as evils, while kindness, loving care, generosity, justice, co-operativeness and consideration for others are seen as good. In general, humanist ethics are the ethics of 'the golden rule' - 'do as you would be done by', based on values of human dignity, freedom and equality, and an understanding that people who are subjected to evil acts are likely to repay them in kind, often with interest.

Humanists will refute any suggestion that a God-based ethic is required in order to live a moral life. If an ethic relies on the authority of God rather than reason, the loss of belief in God will result in the loss of the basis for morality. God-based ethics offer no basis of morality to the large number of people in the world who believe in no God, but wish to be good.

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Humanist festivals and ceremonies

Humanism has no calendar of festivals, but humanists may well appreciate the excuse for a celebration that religions provide, and have in mind the fact that most ostensibly Christian festivals were originally pagan.

It has become common for people without religious belief to want secular marriages, baby-namings, and funerals, rather than endure ceremonies based on religious assumptions they do not share. These ceremonies may be formal or informal, and may involve music, and readings of appropriate texts embodying the wisdom of like-minded thinkers. Some humanist organisations now keep directories of accredited 'officiants' who can preside at such ceremonies.

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Links to sources of further information

• National Secular Society
• British Humanist Association
• Rationalist Association (formerly the Rationalist Press Association)
• International Humanist and Ethical Union
• South Place Ethical Society

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