New website

Please visit my new website at www.david-pollock.org.uk where the articles here and many more are available.  I do not intend at present to make any new posts here.

Secularism under Threat in Britain and across Europe

(This article was published on the Guardian Comment is Free - Belief website on 12 August under the sub-editor's title and subheading "The onward march of secularism - The European Union, led by Britain, is abandoning religion. We need to make sure this progress keeps up")

Claims abound that the ‘secularisation thesis’ (that society would steadily become less religious) has been proved false. The 2001 census reported that over 70% of people were Christian, and faith communities are rarely out of the news. But the Office of National Statistics admits that the census targets mere cultural affiliation: it is enough to have got married in church or to have been baptised as an infant (so why the same question again next year?). Meantime, church attendance remains at an all-time low and figures from Christian Research predict continued decline.

It is claimed that people believe without belonging: rather, people belong without believing. Non-religious parents almost invariably transmit their unbelief to their children, while half the children of believing parents fail to pick up the bug. Knowledge of the key claims of religion is abysmally low for a culturally Christian country. People are overwhelmingly hostile to faith schools (unless they can use them as a middle-class bolthole for their own children) and to religious influence over government.

Yet in an alarming sense the secularisation thesis has indeed proved false. The churches are making a huge comeback in their influence and power over our lives - and they are doing so with the complicity and encouragement of our politicians. It started with the Blair government’s instant acceptance of the Church of England’s 2001 plans to open more schools (and use them to secure the church’s future rather than see them primarily as a public service).

Then came the Home Office collaboration with religious leaders under the title Working Together - ministers explicitly excluded the humanists even from consultation and the resulting report said government departments should heed religious views and recommended, on the excuse that lack of resources rather than of followers was sapping religious influence, a Faith Communities Capacity Building Fund which over two years dished out almost £14 million. (Noone noticed that even the least well off of the six “world” religions has associated charities with combined incomes well over £10 million a year - whereas the humanists, supposedly so influential in secularising society, manage on less than half a million!)

Further huge sums were handed out in misguided response to 9/11, and faith advisors and panels sprang up all over Whitehall. Gaping exceptions were written into anti-discrimination laws to allow religious bodies to discriminate against not just other religions but gays and women too. Worse, under pressure from government, public services began to be contracted out to religious groups, with quite inadequate safeguards from religious discrimination for staff transferred from public employment or for service users.

All the time, however, bishops and politicians have conducted a campaign alleging that they are being sidelined or even persecuted - but persecution in this context is usually being required to respect the human rights of their fellow citizens in the few cases where they have not extracted exemptions.

The new government promises to be even worse. Communities secretary Eric Pickles has bought into the persecution line, saying: “Religion is often seen as a problem that needs solving. The new government sees it as part of the solution; the days of the state trying to suppress Christianity and other faiths are over.”

But this is not just a British phenomenon. In the rest of Europe, where religion is equally in decline, assiduous lobbying over fifteen years has won the Vatican and other religions direct access to the top-most levels of the European Union. The Lisbon Treaty requires the EU Commission, Council and Parliament to maintain “an open, transparent and regular dialogue” with the churches and other religions, and they plan to exploit their advantage to the full. In May the Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox bishops jointly submitted their demands to the EU in an unpublished letter: a similar submission in 2002 asked for the presidential level meetings, working sessions with officials and pre-legislative consultation that they have now got, plus a liaison office within the Commission offices “to make use of the forward thinking that religions can offer with regards to policy-making”. The Vatican has a large staff of lobbyists just down the road from the Berlaymont.

And pressure is being brought to bear in backrooms across Europe to put the secularisation process decisively into reverse. Last November the European Court of Human Rights ruled unanimously against the compulsory display of crucifixes on the wall of every Italian state school classroom as the infringement that it plainly is of parents’ rights to bring up their children in the religion or belief of their wish. In a far-reaching judgement the Court drew on impeccable principles of non-discrimination, respect for individual rights and separation of religion and politics, but the Italian right reacted furiously, and Italy launched an appeal to the Grand Chamber of the Court. The final judgement is not expected until the autumn but already Vatican allies are crowing at their coming victory. Gregor Puppinck of the staunchly Catholic European Centre for Law and Justice claims: “Three weeks after the hearing . . . every day it becomes clearer that a truly considerable victory has been achieved against the dynamic of secularization.”

Let us (if you will pardon the expression) pray that he is wrong, for the implications and consequences of such a victory would be dire.



3 August 2010

The Limits to Legal Accommodation of Conscientious Objection

(Paper for a Humanist Philosophers’ Group seminar on 3 June, 2010: a revised version of a paper I gave at a side-meeting at the OSCE Human Dimension Implementation Meeting in Warsaw in September 2009.)

International human rights instruments endorse the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. Manifestation of religion or belief is to be restricted only when necessary “in the interests of public safety, for the protection of public order, health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others”. The OSCE’s Guidelines for Review of Legislation pertaining to Religion or Belief (see http://www.osce.org/publications/odihr/2004/09/12361_142_en.pdf) state that:

It is important . . . that specific statutory exemptions be drafted and applied in a way that is fair to those with conscientious objections but without unduly burdening those who do not have such objections.

I want to explore that borderline between being fair to those with conscientious objections and unduly burdening those who do not have such objections.

Now, our consciences are a concomitant of our existence as moral beings - they are of the essence of our being human. Conscientious behaviour is the foundation of society, and in a liberal society under rule of law consciences will generally prick us into cooperative and mutually beneficial behaviour. They will clash with the social norms and laws of the society only at the margins. But the fundamental importance of conscience to our humanity is such that society should as a rule seek to accommodate the minority whose consciences point in different directions from those of the majority.

Laws dealing with conscientious objection originated with war. Noone can be in doubt that recognising the legitimacy of conscientious objection in wartime was an advance in civilised values. How barbarous it was for the state to force people to kill other human beings against their innermost feelings of moral revulsion. So it must be welcome that we now allow conscientious objectors to appeal to official tribunals that are charged with assessing whether each objection is based on genuine religious or moral principles.

When laws to legalise abortion in defined circumstances were introduced it seemed a logical extension of this principle that a right was usually included for doctors and nurses not to take part if they had conscientious objections.

But in recent years there have been claims that the principle should be extended in many ways that are much less obviously justified. These claims have come almost entirely from religious - mainly Christian - sources. Real or plausible examples - which go far beyond the fairly narrow range of cases cited in the OSCE Guidelines - include the following.

• In Britain recently a magistrate claimed the right not to preside over cases involving laws of which he disapproved: specifically, dealing with the legal adoption of children by lesbian and gay couples.
• Some nurses refuse to take part in IVF (in vitro fertilisation) on the grounds that it involves creating and discarding ‘spare’ embryos, which they regard as the murder of other human beings.
• Some pharmacists - Christian and Muslim - refuse to dispense the so-called ‘morning after’ contraceptive pill on the (disputed) grounds that it brings about an abortion (it prevents implantation, which is abortion only if you regard life as starting with fertilisation).
• Soon, maybe, some doctors will refuse to provide treatments developed with the use of foetal tissue or embryonic stem cells. (This and much more were proposed for legal recognition in a Bill in the US state of Wisconsin a few years ago - see BMJ 2006; 332;294-297).
• Plymouth and Exclusive Brethren parents refuse to allow their children to use computers or the Internet in school on the ground that they are diabolical inventions.
• Some Muslim parents on grounds of religious conscience refuse to allow their children to take part in art classes at school if they have to draw human figures - or indeed anything from nature, or (similarly) to take part in physical education unless in single-sex groups and unless the girls especially are swathed in modesty-protecting garments.
• Some people employed as cooks have claimed a right not to work with pork, or with non-halal or non-kosher meat or with alcohol.
• Some people refuse to work on Fridays, Saturdays or Sundays, depending on their religion.
• Back in the health field, medical students may refuse to undertake parts of their training - say about contraception or abortion or about embryonic research - on conscientious grounds.
• Again, people who let rooms in their own houses already have the right to refuse gays as lodgers: they say their consciences would be offended by having homosexual acts happening on their premises. Now there is a religious lobby to extend this right to hotels run as businesses - and then to allow all businesses - “Christian” garages, “Muslim” printers and so on - to pick and choose whom they will and will not do business with.
• And - in a further extension of the sensitive religious susceptibility - there are those doctors whose consciences cannot be satisfied merely by refusing to undertake (say) abortions but who claim the right not to reveal the reasons why they are refusing and not to refer their patients to another doctor. Similar provisions were written into the recent timid Bill from Lord Joffe to allow assisted dying for the terminally ill - a Bill nevertheless massively opposed by religious interests.

Are all these claims for conscientious objection acceptable? Many of us would think not. In past ages, far less respect was paid to people’s conscientious feelings, and they had unenviable tough decisions to make about the extent to which they took the risk of obeying their own principles. That might seem undesirable to our more tender age, but we need to examine the consequences of allowing unlimited appeal to conscience.

Let me leave aside the question whether it might lead to cynical manipulation of the privilege for personal advantage - although this is a serious risk and was of course the reason for tribunals being brought in to deal with wartime claims of conscientious objection.

The real issue is: what would it mean for other people and for society as a whole? Obviously it usually means that someone else has to do the work - perhaps bear a greater burden. But it is not just co-workers who are involved, for one person’s right to opt out of a duty is too often another’s loss of a right to access a service. Alternatively or in addition it may mean that other people are conspicuously singled out for discriminatory, unfair treatment.

As for society, it depends on people’s behaviour being to a large extent predictable and reliable - the more so when public officials and public services and laws are involved. This could be threatened if conscientious objection became so widespread that the reliability of public services and the fairness of official behaviour became unpredictable. Ultimately, it would be impossible to run reliable public services. Some doctors would not be fully trained. It might be impossible to get some prescriptions dispensed. Courts would fail to administer the law decided by Parliament. Women seeking abortions would be advised against it by their doctors without being told that the advice was not medical but an expression of the doctor’s religious beliefs. Religious organisations would compete to demonstrate their power by pressurising their followers to exercise their rights of conscientious objection. (The Roman Catholic church is organising concerted campaigns in Italy at this moment to persuade pharmacists to refuse to dispense the ‘morning after’ pill despite its being legal.) And when that happens the question becomes political - conscientious objections are generated artificially.

How to tell the difference between a conscientious objection and a prejudice? Is there in the last analysis a difference? Was it religious principle that led the Christians in the Dutch Reformed Church in apartheid South Africa to treat blacks as an inferior species - or sheer race prejudice? If people’s baser instincts or culturally induced hatreds can be dressed up as matters of principle, religion or conscience, where shall we end up? - with a society that offers legitimacy under certain conditions to discrimination that would otherwise be illegal, against gays or divorcees or single mothers (and their children), other ethnic groups, other races (in a recent case a Jewish school pleaded religious exemption from the laws against race discrimination) or religions (remember how, for example, the Roman Catholics suffered in some countries including England over centuries). A society might result where conscientious objection is accepted as a legitimate reason for people to opt out of fulfilling the duties of their employment or position. Conscientious objection in that case, one might decide, is a luxury that society cannot always afford to indulge!

But the other end of this spectrum, opposite this carte blanche for prejudice and dereliction of duty, is an enforced uniformity that does not accommodate deeply held principles of pacifism, or religious duty, or other deep conscientious beliefs.

Lines have to be drawn. But where? Criteria are needed by which we can decide which exercises of conscientious objection are acceptable and should be accommodated in our laws and procedures - and which not. What would those criteria be? Or at least, without defining them in detail, what would they be about? We need to examine the problems involved in each case and the way that plausible criteria would work out in practice, what the logic of each would be and how each could be justified and what objections to it might be raised.

So, what criteria should inform our laws? [See at the annex to this paper a list of distinctions that it may be useful to bear in mind in considering this complex topic of the individual wishing to behave in a non-conforming way on the basis of conscientious (mainly religious) beliefs. They take in claims to be allowed to wear religious symbols, which I have not dealt with in the body of the paper.]

One possible criterion, of course, is that the claimed conscientious objections should be genuine, not pretended. But that does not get us far.

Is the right criterion, then, to do with the strength of the conscientious feeling itself? One might well imagine that the revulsion someone feels against being forced to kill might be greater and more compelling than someone else’s objection to dispensing a medicine. But the criteria we adopt need to be capable of objective administration. The strength of internal feelings is not in that class. Besides, it would be odd if one person’s objection was ruled legitimate and another person’s identical objection was rejected because his feelings were judged less profound.

Or is it that religious objections should carry more weight since they are based on heavenly commands and immortal souls are at stake? But religious objections are not the only or even the most profound ones at stake: non-religious people have as strong consciences as the religious. Albeit they are more aligned in general to the patterns of liberal democratic societies, some non-religious people have very strong ethical objections to euthanasia, some to abortion in particular circumstances. Moreover - as mentioned - religious objections are to some extent learnt before being felt - formulated and generated outside the individual’s conscience - whereas typically a non-religious conscientious objection is very strictly personal, arising from freestanding deep feelings or principles. Besides, new religions can be created all too easily and might well be created to provide ‘cover’ for prejudiced behaviour.

One might argue therefore that the acceptability of a conscientious objection is to do with comparatively objective criteria: for example -

∙ whether the person claiming the right of objection is in a public or private role
∙ the centrality of the principle at stake to a recognised religion or lifestance
∙ the proximity of the action the person refuses to perform to the matter to which conscientious objection is taken
∙ the social consequences of the objection being accepted
∙ the effects on other individuals involved.

Let me look at each of these in turn.

Should the criterion be whether the person claiming the right of conscientious objection is in a public or private role? Certainly there is something odd about someone taking on a public official role - as a magistrate, for example - and then objecting to performing the required duties. Should people with objections to carrying out the duties of a public position take it on in the first place - especially if dispensation of the law is involved? In fact, the magistrate in England who wanted to be able to stand down whenever he was asked to oversee an adoption by a gay couple had instead to resign. Otherwise he would have been seen as an agent of the state casting doubt on the laws of the state - an anomalous and basically unacceptable situation. Similarly, in the days of capital punishment, judges with personal objections to the death penalty had to decide either nevertheless to impose it as being part of the law of the land or to direct their careers into areas of the law where the question did not arise.

So we could certainly say that a pick-and-choose attitude to official duties is unacceptable. But does that mean that conscientious objection should be unfettered in the “private” realm? Is discriminatory behaviour based on religion or conscience to be acceptable in commerce and trade, in social relations? Should we allow hotel chains that proclaim “no gays” or “no unmarried couples” - or “no blacks” - to plead religious principles and get away with it? What of the British railway boss who is notoriously anti-gay - should he be allowed, if he wished to risk his commercial interests (which he does not), to ban gays from his trains? How different would that be from saying “No Jews”?

So there may be a difference between public and private roles - especially where “private” means domestic private life, not just “not involving public office” - but it does not provide a clear criterion of what is or is not acceptable conscientious objection.

Is it an adequate criterion then to require that the principle at stake should be central to a recognised religion or lifestance? This may seem logical at first sight but it raises unresolvable questions. It would require on the face of it that the conscientious objection related to a wider framework of belief. If you simply held as a matter of conscience that vivisection was wrong, without rationalising your feeling or fitting it into a wider explanatory framework of belief, you might find that your conscientious objection was overruled. Again, it would require official or judicial inquiry into what was or was not central to a religion or lifestance. Are judges to be required to become theologians? Anyway, most religions do not have the central authoritative direction of the Roman Catholic church - one of the subsidiary objections to any official endorsement of sharia law is its uncertainty; and Humanism allows wide personal discretion in the application of its basic principles and shades off on all sides into various non-Humanisms that may be equally moral in nature.

Beyond that, it would open the way for religious authorities to become legal authorities, being called in to adjudicate on the authenticity or centrality to their religion or belief of an essentially personal conscientious objection. This would give powerful backing to religious authorities in any attempt they made to regulate the behaviour of their followers, imposing a group-think on moral and religious matters that would quickly become itself a denial of personal consciences.

My next suggestion was that the criterion might be the proximity of the action the person refuses to perform to the matter to which conscientious objection is taken. You might feel more sympathy with a doctor refusing to carry out an abortion than with one refusing to recognise that an abortion is a possibility - and more with the latter than with one who refuses to admit to his patient that his own conscientious objection is involved and to refer her to another doctor. One might be readier to accommodate a doctor who refused to take a post which involved in vitro fertilisation treatment than with a hospital administrator concerned with the efficiency of an IVF department. In such a case the agency involved is very remote and certainly not final or definitive. So this is a sensible distinction to make - but it still raises big difficulties for those with absolutist principles. After all, the contention that “if you will the means, you will the end” does have some logical force.

Besides, this will never be an adequate criterion in itself, since it would give carte blanche to all conscientious objections of any nature that were based on first-hand involvement. Even so, it may have a contributory role to play in our formulation of sensible criteria.

Next on my list was the social consequences of the objection being accepted. This would include the practicality of society coping with it - such as the possibility of someone else taking on the role - and the effects on social cohesion of any widespread incidence of such conscientious objections.

With this criterion we begin to find some solid ground. If the conscientious objection is exceptional and can be accommodated, little damage may be done to society’s fabric and arrangements - services will generally be provided by others taking the place of the conscientious objector. If one nurse will not assist at an abortion or in IVF treatment and another is available to take on the work, then surely this is acceptable? It amounts to something like the “reasonable accommodation” which is found in some legal frameworks for employment.

But it too is problematic. The same person with the same conscientious objection may at one time find that he is accommodated, at another not but instead (perhaps) liable for disciplinary action, simply because of the extraneous circumstance that at one time a substitute is available, at another not. And this is not just a black and white question - if the substitute can be found only by complex juggling of duties or of work schedules in a large workforce, then there is a cost in making a substitution and it is borne by the employer or institution - and therefore ultimately by the public through prices or taxes - not by the conscientious objector. It also means that the more common a conscientious objection is, the less likely it is that it can be accommodated so that the necessary work can be done.[1] A Christian commentator on an earlier version of my paper suggested that where the demand for exemption was more common - for example in Italy over abortion - a tougher line might be needed so as to ensure the availability of the service than in liberal countries where few doctors would seek exemption.[2]

More important even is the effect on the rule of law: if one person’s conscientious objection to obeying a law or fulfilling a lawful duty prevents someone else from exercising a lawful right it is not acceptable: nobody should be above the law.

Moreover, there is likely to be an effect on the cohesion of the whole society - on the commitment of its members to maintaining its institutions - if a group within the society is seen to have arrogated to itself a privileged position, standing apart from the whole and not contributing on the same basis.

Lastly, I suggested the criterion might be the effects on other individuals involved. Maybe such people would have problems accessing services to which they were entitled or not receive them at all; maybe they would suffer demeaning treatment, being discriminated against despite legal guarantees against it. Or maybe - a special case - children are involved because of their parents’ conscientious objections.

With this we confront the crux of the matter. We need to have regard not only to the feelings of those with conscientious objections to some duty or obligation but also to those others who will be personally affected if the conscientious objection is indulged. These will variously be:
∙ patients not receiving treatment they are entitled to - abortion, IVF - or medicines they have been prescribed - the morning-after pill - or having to go to special trouble to obtain such services
∙ citizens not being treated in the fair or non-discriminatory way to which they are entitled by law but receiving demeaning treatment from public institutions or from individuals in official positions - as with gays seeking to have a marriage or civil partnership registered or to have their adoption of a child formalised by the family court
∙ patients finding that the health professionals they rely on are not fully competent because they refused owing to a conscientious objection to undertake part of their training - a conscientious objection that they may no longer feel at a later stage in their lives
∙ fellow employees being expected to take on extra duties or to work more weekend shifts or otherwise suffer some cost as a result of accommodating other people’s conscientious objections
∙ people being subjected to demeaning discrimination that would otherwise be illegal but is permitted when in fulfilment of some religious conscientious objection - having some aspect of their identity held up to moral opprobrium as a demonstration of the conscientious feelings of someone whose views neither they nor society at large shares.

The price of accommodating the conscientious objections of the few is paid, in other words, not by the conscientious objector (who may instead receive a moral uplift from his conspicuous virtue) but by random members of society at large who are unhappy enough to encounter such strong upholders of what they consider virtue.

There is a special case where the third parties involved are children, notably the children of parents whose consciences will not allow them to receive the full education that their contemporaries receive (incidentally being made awkwardly “different” from their friends) or (worse) to receive the medical treatment they need. Children of the Amish in the USA are allowed to leave school to work on the land before completing statutory education: the authorities condone it or at least do nothing about it, and as a result these children go through life lacking the basic qualifications they need for employment - a substantial disincentive to leaving their isolated communities or a substantial disadvantage if they do decide to seek a new life in the city . Some fundamentalist Christians, as mentioned, seek to prevent their children being taught to use computers, which would leave them at a major disadvantage in the modern world. Children of Jehovah’s Witnesses who need blood transfusions may even die unless society steps in and through the courts overrules their parents’ conscientious objection.

Where does all this leave us? It leaves me feeling that there is a need for a lot more hard thinking about the problems and that there is no easy solution. Conscientious objection sounds virtuous but its effects are by no means wholly benign. A free-for-all unregulated endorsement of conscientious objection cannot be allowed, even on the unlikely assumption that all alleged conscientious objections are based on genuine beliefs and feelings. If a free-for-all is ruled out, then criteria are needed for deciding what is acceptable. The European Convention on Human Rights gives us some broad pointers when it talks of public safety, protection of public order, health or morals, and (especially) protection of the rights and freedoms of others - but that is too broad a formulation to be sufficient in itself.

Let me venture some tentative and interim suggestions. Conscientious action is the basis of social functioning and conscientious objections arise from the same consciences that produce altruistic and self-sacrificing behaviour based on principles and beliefs. The obligation on society to look indulgently on conscientious objection is strong, but it is not unconditional. Among the conditions placed on it might be the following:

∙ the conscientious objection should be deeply felt and preferably the conscientious objector should be able to give a coherent account of it;
∙ the conscientious objection should be to a proximate action and not to some remoter or associated matter;
∙ society should not in accommodating conscientious objections put at risk the rule of law or its social cohesion by seeming to favour one group over another;
∙ holders of public office, representing the state, the law or the community, should have less or no rights to conscientious objection, their acts being not their own but those of the public authorities or the state;
∙ the rights of others involved must have at least equal regard - the right not to suffer discrimination, to be able to access facilities and services (especially public services);
∙ children in particular must be protected from damage to their education to their health: there must be limits to their parents’ power over them.

The price of accommodating conscientious objection should be paid or at least shared by the conscientious objector himself. It may mean restricted career options or choosing between overcoming moral objections and accepting penalties such as disciplinary measures or dismissal. In wartime, after all, conscientious objectors were not let off to continue their normal lives but were assigned to alternative war work - and if they were unwilling to do that, they went to jail.

Conscientious objection may be a luxury that society can sometimes afford - but it is also a luxury that must carry a price to the conscientious objector which he may choose sometimes not to pay.


31 May 2010


[1] Of course, sometimes the objective of the conscientious objector may be to bring about that the work cannot be done - but that goes beyond conscientious objection, which is an individual matter, into political action, which may be a defiance of democratic decision-making about the availability of services or about guarantees of non-discrimination.

[2] Similarly one might argue that (for example) specialised adoption agencies serving the needs only of gays or of Christians might be acceptable if they were marginal to the mainstream service and did not purport to provide a mainstream service. But such exceptions can only be safely accepted in a context of general and undisputed equality and non-discrimination.


ANNEX
SOME POSSIBLY USEFUL DISTINCTIONS

Below is a list of distinctions that it may be useful for any consideration of individuals wishing to behave in a non-conforming way on the basis of conscientious (mainly religious) beliefs. Some may be fundamental and some mere distractions.

∙ the basis of the claim:
Is the claim based on
∙ religion or belief / conscience (e.g., a religious duty)
∙ something else (e.g., freedom - to dress as one wishes, wear ‘message’ badges)

∙ the context:
Is the person concerned in the circumstances
∙ a private citizen (e.g., a woman in the street or - a different matter for the French - in a public building)
∙ an employee of a private concern without a religion or belief character (e.g., a check-in clerk for BA)
∙ an employee of a private concern with a religion or belief character (e.g., of a church or religious charity)
∙ a public employee, in particular one who deals directly with the public (e.g., a registrar)
∙ a public office holder, again in particular one who deals directly with the public (e.g., a magistrate).

∙ the action:
Is the person concerned seeking the right
∙ to do something (e.g., to say prayers for a patient or wear a cross)
∙ not to do something (e.g., not to conduct civil partnership registrations)
∙ to compel others to do something (e.g., to be present at prayers - maybe in a hospice)
∙ to compel others not to do something (e.g., not to ‘defame’ religion)

∙ the nature of the claim
Is the claim based on:
∙ an established mandate or obligation of a religion or belief (e.g., do not eat pork, do say prayers five times a day)
∙ a communal custom, albeit closely associated with a religion or belief (e.g., wear the veil)
∙ a voluntary wish, albeit motivated by religion or belief (e.g., evangelise at every opportunity)

∙ the penalty
Is the person concerned at risk of suffering a more-than-nugatory religious or social penalty if denied the exemption?

∙ the consequences for others
∙ Will allowing the claim have consequences for other individuals? (e.g., needing to work disproportionately at weekends to allow for sabbath observance)
∙ Will there be foreseeable, maybe undesirable, consequences for society at large? Is the individual being ‘used’ as a stalking horse, as is arguably the present situation, with the Christian Legal Centre and other bodies seeking to make a political impact by way of individual grievances? (e.g., non-availability of morning-after pills in areas where all the pharmacists are Muslim; halal-only school meals as an economy measure to avoid two-stream kitchens).

SECULARISM - A CHALLENGE

Secularism is the best and indeed the only reliable protection for freedom of religion or belief. Why? Before answering that question it is necessary to ask what is meant by ‘secularism’ in this claim, for the word has many uses.
Not atheism, certainly, for that is a committed position that rejects religion. No-one wishes to recreate the oppression of the enforced atheism of communist Albania or the state-sponsored atheism of Soviet Russia.
Nor, most definitely, does it mean a secular society - in the sense of a society where most individuals have rejected religion. In such a society the communal institutions and arrangements might be inimical to religious belief, and that would be contrary to secularism as here intended. Such a society - about which there will be divided opinions - may indeed come about, just as ultra-religious societies have come about in history and continue to do so, but that is not the meaning of ‘secularism’ here intended.
Rather, by ‘secularism’ I mean a secular state. It is the institutions, laws and conventions of the state that are in question. Such a state provides a neutral constitution that treats all religions and beliefs fairly and alike. (Be it noted, of course, that ‘beliefs’ in this phrase from human rights law embraces non-religious beliefs and the rejection of beliefs.) The motivation for such neutrality will without doubt be a commitment to human rights and non-discrimination. This is secularism as a political principle.
Such a state could in theory be made up entirely of religious believers, maybe in a variety of religions, and still be secular. It is not the beliefs of the individual citizens that matter: it is the neutrality of the institutions.
In this sense many religious believers are secularists - for example, there is an organisation in Britain called Muslims for Secular Democracy. In fact, commitment to secularism is independent of belief and (for example) there are atheists and agnostics who do not support secularism because they have too weak a commitment to the human rights of believers: they may wish to exploit unfairly a majority position in a democratic society.
Humanists in general support a secular state. We sometimes call it an ‘open society’ (but still with the emphasis on the institutions, not the inhabitants). We give freedom of religion or belief greater priority and importance than propagation of Humanism - or rather, human rights are a fundamental part of our Humanism because, if this is the only life we have, each of us should have the right to live it as she or he thinks best.
In his book Humanism (1968) H J Blackham (1903-2009) saw creation of the open society as waiting upon “general acceptance of the principle of interdependence for the sake of independence as a corollary of political democracy”. Recognising the principle of interdependence runs harmoniously with recognising the human rights of others with whom one differs, maybe profoundly, to live their independent lives.
What does acceptance of a secular state in this sense entail for religious believers and their institutions? Just as for humanists, it means that they have to give freedom of religion or belief a higher priority than propagating their religion - that proselytising has to be done in a way that fully respects the freedom of religion or belief of others and the secular nature of the state. That is all.
In fact, anyone arguing against secularism in this (well established) sense of a political principle is necessarily arguing at least for some belief group to have a privileged position in the state and probably therefore for restrictions on the freedom of religion or belief of others.
Many religious believers do so argue. They usually do so (in their own minds at least) in obedience to a religious imperative. For example, a proselytising religion that sees this life as a preparation for another is inherently inclined to set a lower value on the values of this “vale of tears” than on saving souls for all eternity.
Alternatively, they may argue on the basis of assumed superior insight provided by their religion. In this case they will argue from premises that are contained within religious doctrine, as does the Roman Catholic Church when it uses its own concept of natural law as the basis for seeking to impose its own moral values on society as a whole. The church assumes a particular teleological view of mankind from which it can with circular logic reach conclusions that conform entirely with its own doctrines. It may then, for example, seek - as with the proposed concordat with Slovakia - seek to impose in law on all and sundry a narrow interpretation of conscience dependent entirely on Catholic doctrine. When the Pope says[1] that he supports secularism except in matters of morals, what he means is that he reserves the right to impose his church’s moral standards on everyone.[2]
Similarly, Muslims - or others - whose religion allows no difference between the secular and the religious aspects of life often fail to see the clear distinction made by other people for whom there are many aspects of life that are not dictated by their religious or other beliefs. If the distinction is not made, then religion necessarily has a view on everything and rapidly asserts the need for a theocracy, as in the various ‘Islamic republics’. Human rights count for little in such a system: freedom of religion or belief certainly includes no freedom to renounce Islam, and the externalities of sharia law can soon be imposed on everyone, regardless of their beliefs.
Both the Catholics and Muslims who behave in the ways instanced above are acting in conformity with what they see as religious dictates - as are other believers who adopt similar positions that place religious considerations above human rights. These others may not be so extreme, but they include anyone who opposes secularism in the sense defined.
Our challenge to them[3] is simply that they admit that this is their position. For such believers claims that they respect human rights and freedom of religion or belief are at best self-delusion, at worst hypocritical window-dressing. They - in particular, their leaders - are asserting a right to impose their own beliefs on all and sundry. Such a right can be justified only in terms of their own religious beliefs. When they use positions of power or influence to exercise such a ‘right’, they restrict other people’s freedom - not just religious freedom but often much wider freedoms: to speak their minds, to dress as they wish, to express their sexuality, and so on.
And the first to suffer from such doctrinaire religion are large proportions of their own nominal followers, whose beliefs and values diverge from the orthodox line. Their implicit obedience and subservience to religious commands is demanded by leaders who sometimes may not recognise the degree of dissidence and dissent in their own ranks but often are well aware of it but choose to disregard it - as with the Roman Catholic church and its doctrines on contraception and abortion.
What we demand is that such religious leaders recognise the truth of their position. Having perhaps inherited a historically privileged position (as with established churches) and being deeply committed to their own beliefs, this may not be easy. They face a choice: they can put their own religious doctrines ahead of everyone else’s freedom or they can recognise that they live in a world where people hold to a bewildering variety of religious and other beliefs and that, however deep their own beliefs, they cannot objectively justify a superior position of power for themselves. (Even by its own standards, the Catholic Church must recognise that its moral example is to say the least tarnished, prompting some scepticism about its right to dictate to others.)
How much of a compromise does this require on the part of these doctrinaire leaders, whether of a religion or a non-religious belief? - the latter rarely, however, since such beliefs are rarely either doctrinaire or strongly organised. They will have to recognise the legitimacy of other beliefs and moral positions and that in an open society legal or institutional privileges for their own belief system cannot be justified. This will call in question, for example, public subsidies to churches (such as the church taxes that are very common across Europe), positions of power in the legislature (such as the twenty-six seats in the UK Parliament occupied ex officio by Church of England bishops), historical privilege in the education system (whereby religious instruction is built into the general curriculum or religious schools are paid for out of general taxes) or in public media (such as the dominance of Christianity in some countries’ public broadcasting systems - for example, the BBC).
But it does not mean that the churches or other religious (or humanist) voices will be silenced or excluded from the public arena. Far from it. The human right of freedom of speech applies to all, and their voices will be heard in proportion to their volume and their persuasiveness. And in an open society, the government should listen to all, lend weight to different voices in proportion to the wisdom and expertise they appear to embody and/or to the democratic following they command, and finally make decisions on its own responsibility. So, for religious leaders as for all others it means that if their voice does not convince, they have to allow that their views will not - and should not - prevail.
If this requires a compromise of some religious demands in order to live in peace and concord with the rest of society, they can surely - like so many of their fellow believers - find elsewhere in their beliefs justification for respecting the independence of others who disagree with them, recognising that people are interdependent, that the ‘golden rule’ of reciprocal respect is a justification for refraining from relentless attempts to impose their own values on those who do not share them.
16 June 2009
1. Often, but for example in an audience with San Martino's new ambassador to the Holy See on 13 November 2008: "healthy secularity [implies that] each temporal reality abides by its specific norms, which should not, nevertheless, forget fundamental ethical forms, the bases of which are found in the very nature of man."
2. And of course he does so, as with his opposition to contraception which overwhelmingly affects non-Catholics in the third world rather than members of his Church.
3. Let me repeat in parenthesis so to avoid misunderstanding that I am not referring to all believers: there are many religious people - but less frequently religious institutions - who genuinely support freedom of religion or belief and a secular state. And I repeat that some non-religious people show no respect for these principles.

SCIENCE AND RELIGION

One day in January 1348 a ship docked in Genoa in Italy, arriving from the Middle East. It brought with it the Black Death - bubonic plague, a disease now well controlled by modern medicine but then, like almost all illness, without cure. It took hold rapidly and spread out in concentric waves over the next 3-4 years across the whole of Europe.

Up to 1 in 3 of the whole population of Europe died.

Not only could they not cure it: people then had no notion of infection, or of germs or of their spread by rats. They came up with many possible explanations, like putting it down to the influence of the planets drawing foul exhalations from the earth. Almost everyone saw it as a punishment decreed by God, because the 14th century - like all ages in the eyes of religious commentators - was, after all, a uniquely wicked and dissolute age. The poet William Langland said in Piers Plowman: “These pestilences were for pure sin.”

The best people could do for cures was to fill the house with sweet-smelling flowers and spices, or prescribe medicine concocted from treacle, wine and chopped-up snakes.

It was a plague like AIDS today in Africa - beyond control - but worse: it killed people within a few days, and it was beyond all understanding.

The reaction of some of the most devout was to punish themselves so that God might abate his punishment of the whole people. They went round in groups beating themselves with whips studded with spikes and chanting hymns:

Ply well the scourge for Jesus’ sake
And God through Christ your sins shall take . . .
Had it not been for our contrition
All Christendom had met perdition. [1]

Ingmar Bergman portrayed just such a group of flagellants in his powerful film The Seventh Seal.

Why did they think the Black Death was a divine punishment? Why not just see it as bad luck? Simply because their whole understanding of the universe did not allow it. The Black Death reveals the mindset of people in a pre-scientific age.

Their universe was a fixed one, designed in every part by God, each part having its own decreed role, any step outside which would tend to upset the whole.

The Greeks more than 1,500 years earlier had begun developing a scientific way of enquiring about the world, and had (for example) realised the earth was round. Eratosthenes of Alexandria in about 200 BCE actually measured its circumference to within 1%, and Hipparchus of Rhodes a few years later measured the length of the year to within 5 minutes. But all this was forgotten in the centuries of Christian domination after the conversion of the Roman empire.

So what was the picture of the world held by these people, our ancestors about 650 years ago?

It would seem to us a poetic, inexact one. But not to them, because they had no other type of language or thinking to use. It was a static, sacred world., where the church had adopted some Greek theories about the world, especially from the philosopher/scientist Aristotle - but only in the form of fossilised lists and classifications - pickled, preserved in aspic, not as science but as a creed.

Thus, the world was made of four elements - earth, air, fire and water. Flesh was made of four humours - blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile - and sickness resulted from an imbalance of the humours. (Hence the resort by doctors to bloodletting, to reduce the presumed over-dominance of the blood - which amazingly persisted into the 20th century.[2]

In Shakespeare’s Pericles[3], Pericles asks “But hark! What music?” and answers himself: “The music of the spheres! Most heavenly music!” Here is another clue to the mediaeval view of the world - and remember, this was not mediaeval at the time: it was life being lived in the 14th century present.

What were the spheres?[4] They were concentric spheres, made of glass or crystal, revolving round the earth. In them were set, like jewels in a brooch, the moon, the sun, the stars and all the other heavenly bodies. What seems to us a theory (however alien) of a physical universe merged in an unnoticed way with their theology, for the angels and archangels and finally God himself resided in a strict hierarchy beyond the ninth sphere. Somewhere up there too you could find the blessed dead - or maybe you would do so after the Day of Judgement, when very soon (and it must be soon, given the dire portents of the Black Death) the dead would be raised - with their bodies - from the grave to face that final awful pass-or-fail examination.

Similarly, on earth, Man was the crown of creation, with Woman in second place. But there was an elaborate hierarchy among mankind, with the Pope as God’s vicar (which means “stand-in” or representative) on earth standing at the top of two pyramids. One was the hierarchy of cardinals, archbishops, bishops and priests, the other the secular structure of kings and princes. Kings ruled by divine right, so that disobedience of them was sinful. Kings of England by virtue of this divine right were believed able by their touch to cure the King’s Evil, the name they gave to a disease we know as scrofula. (The Church of England still has a service for this ceremony in some versions of its prayer book.)

Under the kings came an ordained social order through the nobles and the merchants till you got to the yeomen, freemen and serfs. The rest of creation - birds and animals and crawling things - were in a lower hierarchy, and then below the earth you got to the dread nether regions of purgatory and hell in another hierarchy of descending circles populated by the souls of the damned until at the bottom of the pit you found the devil.

And who was he? A rebellious angel, unwilling to give complete obedience to God. And what was his name? Lucifer - which means Bringer of Light - the light, without doubt of Knowledge. It is the same theme as in the Garden of Eden: knowledge is forbidden, and Eve made the sinful choice in choosing knowledge, for which God punished not just her but everyone ever since, according to the hateful doctrine of original sin. Similarly, too, in early Greek mythology: Prometheus (which means Far-Seeing) gave mankind fire and taught him how to use it and for this he was eternally punished by Zeus, the head Greek god: he was chained to a remote rock where vultures came every day and pecked at his liver.

In mediaeval times it was sinful not only to question this set order of nature, by which the power of the pope and kings was guaranteed, but even to pursue knowledge for its own sake. St Augustine had deplored the quest for knowledge back in the 5th century:

Another more dangerous form of temptation . . . is a certain vain desire and curiosity of making experiments cloaked under the name of learning and knowledge through a mere itch to experiment and find out. Thus men proceed to investigate the phenomena of nature though the knowledge is of no value to them, for they wish to know simply for the sake of knowing.[5]

The only enquiries you were meant to pursue were such vital matters of theology as how many angels could dance on the head of a pin - or, as St Thomas Aquinas seriously discussed in the 13th century, the problem that would arise at the Day of Judgement when the dead were resurrected from the grave with their bodies: what on earth would happen with cannibals whose bodies were made up entirely of the bodies of other people, which those others would reclaim, leaving the cannibals with no bodies of their own?[6]

It was even forbidden to translate the Bible into English. When William Tyndale began to do so - into beautiful English that was left largely unchanged 70 years later in the Authorised Version - he was tracked down before he could complete his translation by the agents of the revered St Thomas More and burnt at the stake.

Why were the church and the state (the two were only just coming apart) so much against knowledge? Because knowledge was power. If ordinary people could read the Bible, they could quote it back at the priests and argue with them. They might start questioning the entire social order - and that would be a rebellion not just against the local lord or the more distant king but against the church and even God, because the whole structure was divinely ordained and maintained.

So when the learning of the Greeks, which had been preserved and (especially as far as mathematics was concerned) extended by the Arabs during the European Dark Ages, began to filter back into Europe, real trouble was in store. For example, the idea was revived that maybe the earth was round. It was not just silly - anyone could see the earth was flat! - but more than that: it was dangerous. If the earth went round the sun, the earth was not at the centre of the universe. What happened to the idea of the spheres, of God above them all? The whole model, on which everything depended - the authority of the church, orthodox religious belief, morality - would collapse.

The church did its best to prevent such revolutionary thinking. The Inquisition, a department of the church, clamped down heavily, banning some books and burning others. Scientists like Galileo were imprisoned and forced to recant, or like Bruno were burned at the stake.

But slowly, despite all their efforts, the new thinking took hold. The Renaissance - which means re-birth - revived classical learning. The new attitude was later called Humanism - Renaissance Humanism - not in the modern sense of humanism as a non-religious ethical way of life but in the simple sense of giving value to a human perspective, not subordinating all thinking to the domination of God. It led to a great flowering of art and music, with the churches full of splendid art dedicated to the glory of God.

Soon, however, some people took advantage of the new freedom to put on different chains - the Protestant tradition arose which put all its emphasis on the individual and his soul and rejected the vainglorious outward display of the church. Where they gained power they took the second commandment literally and broke the statues and smashed up the stained glass in the churches and scratched out the religious paintings on the walls. If you think what the Taliban did in Afghanistan was bad, destroying Buddhist relics in the museum in Kabul and blowing up those monumental statues of Buddha, then what Henry VIII and Edward VI did in the churches and monasteries of England was many times worse.

So we got two Christian traditions in Europe - the Catholic one of baroque theology, richly decorated churches and elaborate and vital ritual, and the Protestant one which at its Puritan extreme is characterised by self-denial, bare, whitewashed chapels and personal conscience and salvation. (The American humourist H L Mencken said with some perception that Puritanism is “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere might be happy”.) And the two fought it out over the next few centuries of religious wars, inquisition, torture and burnings at the stake. Yet this horror and cruelty was carried out with good consciences by people for (as they saw it) the best of motives. It has been truly said that there is nothing so dangerous as a good man possessed by a bad idea.

About 300 years ago something new began. It was not a religious movement at all - though to start with almost everyone involved retained a belief in God. It was called the Enlightenment, and thinkers in Britain - especially (and in successive generations) Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and David Hume - were prominent in getting it started.

It was the beginning of modern thought. At its most radical it took nothing for granted and put no bounds on the questions that could be asked. For the first time, it saw tolerance as a virtue. It created the concept of the “rights of man” - Thomas Paine wrote a book of that title and strongly influenced both the American revolution (1776) and a few years the French revolution (1789) with its motto of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.

Under the Enlightenment, the word “science”, which had previously just meant “knowledge”, took on its modern meaning. Queen Anne was the last English monarch to touch sufferers from scrofula to cure them of the King’s Evil. Soon it was no longer blasphemous to dissect corpses to find out how the body worked. When there was an epidemic, you did not get on your knees or go in for self-flagellation: you looked for its causes and tried to eliminate them - so when in 1854 Dr John Snow worked out that an outbreak of cholera in London was linked to a particular water pump that was producing infected water, he removed the pump handle and stopped it spreading.

What has happened between 1700 and the present day is that our thinking has been set free. Just as so long ago with the Greeks, so now free enquiry has become valued and rational argument and experimental investigation have been used to find answers to all manner of questions.

This has not always gone smoothly: there has always been resistance from some parts of the church and the more reactionary parts of the establishment. Scientific advances have constantly been denounced and dire consequences have been predicted from “interfering with nature”. Churchmen fought against lightning rods, which interfered with God’s plans for his thunderbolts. They railed against inoculation and vaccination for the same reason: if God’s plan was for people to die of smallpox, men had no right to interfere. They denounced the use of anaesthetics - God wanted his creatures to feel the pain of surgery. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, persisted in regarding epilepsy as possession by devils.[7] Even today some churches are trying to block stem cell research aimed at cures for inherited diseases and opposing various procedures in fertility treatment. Likewise, the Roman Catholic church in alliance with some Islamic governments is actively and effectively frustrating family planning work - and even the use of condoms to protect against AIDS - in the third world.

When serious investigation of the fossils of the dinosaurs dug up by the young Mary Anning in Lyme Regis began in the 1820s, the idea that the earth was more than a few thousand years old was still seen as outrageous: churchmen had calculated that creation could be dated to the year 4004 BC. Even worse if one creature had evolved into another, for the Bible said that God had created each of them and named them one by one. But the tide of enquiry was unstoppable, and eventually it lapped even at humankind itself, despite the best efforts of religious scientists such as Charles Lyell to maintain a gulf between animals and Man.[8]

Charles Darwin left man out of his Origin of Species (1859) but the message was clear long before he corrected the omission with The Descent of Man (1871). It was not just that science was undermining religion - the political and social order too were affected. If the natural order was the result of the survival of those best adapted to their environment, it was not laid down by authority. So questions were asked about the social order too. People might sing in church:

The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate
God made them high and lowly
And ordered their estate

but what if it was not God who ordered their estate but the workings out of a power struggle? The working class saw that they might become “the fittest” and became the strongest supporters of Darwin’s theory, flocking excitedly to lectures by Thomas Henry Huxley and others.

As scientists provided satisfactory explanations for more and more aspects of our experience, religion retreated further and further. From being the underpinning and explanation of everything, God became the “God of the Gaps”, surviving only in the areas that science had not yet colonised. Isaac Newton’s laws of motion and mechanics seemed to explain everything from the motion of the planets to the fall of an apple and threatened even to undermine the idea of free will.

The 20th century scientific revolutions created even greater difficulties for the orthodox believer. The universe had already broken out of its crystalline spheres, but now it has become vast beyond comprehension. How could God have created all that just as a setting for mankind? And it has become unbelievably old - creation took not seven days but 15 thousand million years before mankind emerged. Yet scientists have plausible theories for how it evolved from the first split second.

And now not even time can be counted on - it and space turn out to be aspects of the same thing, and time goes faster or slower depending on how quickly you move through space.

Even worse than relativity is quantum physics and the impossibility of making predictions about the behaviour of matter at the subatomic level. Yet the theory works and is basis of electronics.

Further still, the unravelling of DNA and the mechanism of genetics that eluded Darwin mean that much of animal and human behaviour could be explained at least in part by a study of the genes. It has gone so far that even the area of the brain most frequently associated with religious experience has been identified, and it has been found that people suffering from epilepsy are particularly likely to have religious experiences.

At first, painful as it was, the advance of science could be tolerated, but eventually it became intolerable. How did believers react?

Large numbers of them stopped believing. Even more relegated their belief to churchgoing and stopped trying to reconcile their everyday understanding of the world and their Sunday pieties. Instead, believers put more and more emphasis on the moral teaching of religion and saw religion more as a code of conduct than as a set of beliefs. What they often did not realise was that the code of conduct they adopted owed at least as much to secular, non-Christian traditions and Enlightenment thinking as to anything specifically Christian.

With the gaps for God getting far too small for comfort, two new and opposite ways of reacting have emerged.

One is to reject scientific explanations altogether. This is fairly easy for those whose education has given them only a limited understanding of science, but you find it also among some well educated people, even some scientists. Religious beliefs can be very powerful, and it is all too easy for people to hold inconsistent beliefs. As with the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland:

“One can’t believe impossible things,” said Alice.

“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” responded the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!”

so some believers follow Tertullian, one of the early fathers of the Church (c160-c230), who notoriously said of Christianity “it is certain because it is impossible”.

So you get people today who still believe that the earth is only a few thousand years old. The clever ones do all sorts of bad science to try to get out of their difficulty, but it is blatantly bad science, and noone should be taken in by it.

The other way that believers have reacted is to adopt for everyday purposes all that science tells them, but then to try to add religion on as an extra. This either means retreating into poetic language, which is fine as long as it is not meant to be taken literally, or else they claim to find God in the underlying orderliness of the universe.

If you challenge them, they deny that this means that their God, as it were, wound up the universe by setting the rules and left it to run like a clock, because such a god would be completely remote and impersonal, but they are unable to deliver an account of the nature of such a god or say how they can communicate with him. It is difficult to make much sense of what such people say.

For example, Sir John Polkinghorne, an eminent scientist-cum-theologian, talks[9] of everything having “an origin in the mind of the creator who is the ground both of our mental experience and of the existence of the physical world of which we are inhabitants.” That sounds good, but what does it mean? He says that his god acts within the open grain of nature[10] because the grain of nature is already as aspect of god’s nature and he cannot act against himself - which seems very close to the clockwork model.

And people who believe in a god so remote have just as much of a problem with the existence of evil as any other believers.[11] Challenged about the Lisbon earthquake on All Saints Day, 1 November 1755, which killed 50,000 people, mainly gathered for services in churches which collapsed on them, another eminent theologian, Austin Farrer, said: “God’s will was that the elements of the earth’s crust should behave in accordance with their nature”. There is not much comfort there - nor (more importantly) much reason to believe in such a god.

So, finally, I want to come to the essential difference between science and religion.

What do we mean by religion? It started with attempts by primitive men to explain the mysterious and threatening world they lived in. They saw the world as inhabited by many powerful spirits, and they tried to appease them with sacrifices. Once you found that if you carried out some ritual at the right date in the depths of winter, the sun began to come back and winter turned to spring, it was too risky to stop doing it every year. Once the Aztecs began human sacrifices of slaves and prisoners of war to their gods, they could not stop in case the gods turned against them.

And so we progressed from a world of many gods - it is clear from the Old Testament that the Jews started by believing in many gods - gradually unifying them. But the idea of preserving the community through carrying out the correct rituals survived, and it was entrenched because of the power it gave to the priests and kings. It was also reinforced because inevitably general rules of conduct and morality became attached to religion, and so in due course religion became the vehicle for much of mankind’s profoundest thought.

This is where we stand today. Religion offers comfort and community to some people, and it still helps sustain the power structure of society, but its factual claims about the nature of the world are generally given as little emphasis as possible - especially in external discourse - because they cannot be supported.

What do we mean by science?

First, science is not the same as technology or engineering. Medicines and detergents and fertilisers and refrigerators and computers are by-products of science but they are not science itself. Nor is science fiddling around in laboratories, doing experiments.

Science lies not in what scientists do but in the method they use for doing it. It is a way of knowing about the world - or, better, a way of diminishing our ignorance.

Science works by asking questions and proposing answers - “hypotheses”. These are often flashes of inspiration, as when Francis Crick and James Watson suddenly realised that the DNA molecule was a double, intertwined helix.

But that is not enough. The next step is to deduce or predict what the consequences of the hypothesis would be and to test the idea by finding out if these predictions actually are true. Only when all the consequences of your hypothesis you can think of have been tested and found to be true does your hypothesis become a theory - not a fact, because scientific answers are always provisional and open to revision.

Despite - or probably because of - this very cautious way of proceeding, science has proved to be the most powerful tool we have ever had for finding out about the world we live in. From the origins of the universe to the minutest fundamental particles inside the atom, it has delivered an internally consistent account that has stood up to the most rigorous testing, constantly evolving and being elaborated. If human enterprises are to be judged by their fruits, then science has proven itself beyond question.

And it has done so by maintaining doubt. At the end of the 19th century Isaac Newton’s laws of motion were so fundamental to all our understanding of the universe that they must have seemed fixed for eternity. But then along came Einstein and bent space and unified it with time. Lord Kelvin, one of the greatest scientists of the 19th century, worked out that the earth was only a million years old. But he was no creationist: he was calculating the time the earth would have taken to cool to its present state but without knowing anything about the way the earth’s heat was sustained by radioactivity within it. So scientific ideas can be wrong, but science is not the ideas but the method by which they are both proposed and then disposed of and the method by which they can be replaced by something more in conformity with what observation and experiment have found.

This is where science differs utterly from religion and is infinitely superior to it as an endeavour. Take some examples.

In the 17th century, two German scientists, Johann Becher and Georg Stahl, came up with a clever chemical theory to describe what happened when things burned. For a few decades stuff called phlogiston was thought to be given off in combustion, but eventually the theory was displaced by a better understanding of chemistry and phlogiston was relegated to history.

By contrast, Einstein’s theory of relativity predicted that - incredibly - time would go slower the faster you moved through space. The effect would be absolutely minute, but eventually when atomic clocks were accurate enough and aircraft fast enough, the experiment was done and the clock that went up in an aircraft was found to have moved on slightly less than the one left on earth. If the clocks had shown no difference, the theory would have had to be altered or even abandoned.

Similarly, in subatomic physics and in cosmology, the theoreticians are way in front of the experimenters. Time and again, they have predicted the existence of new subatomic particles which much later have usually - but not always - been found to exist in experiments using atom-smashers - the huge cyclotrons which collide atoms together and observe the bits they break into. Similarly, the existence of the planet Pluto was predicted long before it was actually observed, and the same happened with black holes.

This consistent, rigorous method applied in all areas by scientists has led to its huge success. It is not just that it has produced spectacular results in so many areas: except at the absolute leading edges where science is still somewhat speculative, the whole story hangs together in a consistent, coherent description of how things work. Such success is unprecedented in the history of mankind.

What would be the equivalent enterprise in religion? When has religion ever predicted something for which a careful test could be made? Well, Jesus predicted the end of the earth within the lifetime of his hearers.[12] Did they abandon his theories when this prediction turned out to be false? No. And ever since, priests and cults have been predicting the end of the world, naming date after date. What happens then? They are proved wrong. Do the millennialists change their beliefs? No way! They simply go quiet for a while and then make a new prediction.

Even more fundamentally, given that Islam and Hinduism and Christianity and so on are all incompatible with each other, can their believers propose any objective test to distinguish which religion is true? Of course not, because their religions are based on accepting their claims without question on the unproven authority of sacred books or the teachings of prophets.

Religion is about certainties, and doubt is destructive. Science is about uncertainties and doubt is fundamental. When you ask a scientist what would convince him that a theory was wrong, he can answer easily. When you ask religious believers what would convince them that their belief was mistaken, they generally say “nothing”.

That does not indicate reasonable belief. It is belief at best without evidence and at worst in the face of the evidence. And yet believers tend to regard such unreasonable belief - faith - as especially virtuous. It is better regarded as wrong and dangerous. Ambrose Bierce, the American satirist (d. 1914) defined faith as:

belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge of things without parallel (The Devil’s Dictionary).

Mathematician and educator W.K. Clifford (1845-1879) said:

It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence. (Ethics of Belief)

And Voltaire said all too truly:

People who believe absurdities commit atrocities.

- the old idea of good men possessed by bad ideas.

Richard Robinson, an Oxford philosopher who died a few years ago, went further, and I want to end with a quotation from his book An Atheist’s Values:

According to Christianity one of the great virtues is faith. . .

According to me this is a terrible mistake, and faith is not a virtue but a positive vice. More precisely, there is, indeed, a virtue often called faith but that is not the faith which the Christians make much of. The true virtue of faith is faith as opposed to faithlessness, that is, keeping faith and promises and being loyal. Christian faith, however, is not opposed to faithlessness but to unbelief. It is faith as some opposite of unbelief that I declare to be a vice. . .

Christian faith is not merely believing that there is a god. It is believing that there is a god no matter what the evidence on the question may be. Have faith, in the Christian sense, means ‘make yourself believe that there is a god without regard to evidence.’ Christian faith is a habit of flouting reason in forming and maintaining one’s answer to the question whether there is a god. Its essence is the determination to believe that there is a god no matter what the evidence may be.

Therein lies the difference between science and religion.

[18 March 2003 - revised 21 April 2003]


1. Hymn of the Flagellants - see Ziegler p.73

2. It was recommended by Sir William Osler in the 1923 edition his Principles and Practice of Medicine - http://www.library.ucla.edu/libraries/biomed/his/blood

3. Act 5, Scene 1

4. The spheres make another appearance in The Merchant of Venice [Act 5, Scene 1]:
“There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims.”

5. Confessions, quoted in Koestler p

6. Koestler, p.105

7. See http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/whitem10.html

8. Cadbury p.307

9. http://www.ctns.org/
10. Except, he says, for explicit miracles such as the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

11. David Hume, following Epicurus, presented this classic problem in the form of a trilemma: “Is he [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?” - Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, part X.

12. Mark 13.30
___________________________________________



SOURCES AND RECOMMENDED READING


Arthur Koestler - The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe (Arkana)

J D Bernal - The Extension of Man (out of print)

Roy Porter - Enlightenment - Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (Penguin)

Philip Ziegler - The Black Death (Penguin)

Deborah Cadbury - The Dinosaur Hunters (Fourth Estate)

Karen Armstrong - A History of God (Heinemann)

A N Wilson - God’s Funeral (John Murray)

Richard Robinson - An Atheist’s Values (Oxford, & on Internet at http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/athval0.htm )

Lewis Wolpert - The Unnatural Nature of Science (Faber)

Richard Dawkins - Unweaving the Rainbow (Penguin)

Jared Diamond - Guns, Germs and Steel (Vintage)

Matt Ridley - The Origins of Virtue (Penguin)

HUMANISM IN SHORT

Humanism is not an “-ism” - it has no source book of unquestionable rules or doctrine. You don’t ‘convert’ to Humanism and then have to take the rough with the smooth. Instead, most people become humanists without contact with any humanist organisation or even necessarily knowing of the word. Rather, Humanism rather is a label for a range of beliefs and attitudes. To the extent that your beliefs and attitudes coincide with that range, then the label humanist is more or less appropriate for you.


Humanism’s beliefs and attitudes make up an approach to life based on humanity and reason. Humanists recognise that it is simply human nature to have moral values but that in making moral particular judgements we need to interpret our widely shared values by the use of knowledge, reason and experience. Humanists make decisions after considering the available evidence and assessing the likely outcomes of possible actions, not by reference to any dogma or sacred text.


Humanists see the naturalistic and provisional explanations of life and the universe provided by scientific enquiry and the use of reason as the best available. They think it folly to turn to other sources - such as religion or new age superstition - for answers to unanswered questions. Humanists are therefore atheists or agnostics so far as a god or gods are concerned - but Humanism is a philosophy in its own right, not just a negative response to religion.


Humanists believe that this is the only life we have and see it as their responsibility to make life as good as possible not only for themselves but for everyone - including future generations. They strongly support individual human rights and freedoms but believe equally in the importance of individual responsibility, social cooperation and mutual respect. They endorse the idea of an ‘open society’ in which people of good will but fundamentally different beliefs and lifestyles live cooperatively together, with shared institutions, laws and government that are neutral on questions of belief - that is, a secular state.


Humanists create meaning and purpose for themselves by adopting worthwhile goals and endeavouring to live their lives to the full. They feel awe in considering the immensity of the universe and the intricate nature of its workings, they find inspiration in the richness of the natural world, in music, the arts, the achievements of the past and the possibilities of the future, they find fulfilment in worthwhile activity, in physical recreation and endeavour and in the pleasures of human interaction, affection and love.