Religious Naturalism (humanism) Kritik

1/4 Religious Naturalism (Humanism) Kritik (5) B. Link AFF’s view of nature places our source of Being in nature, claiming that all knowledge of the external world is relative. Edward L. Ericson [leaders of the Ethical Culture societies in Washington, D.C. and New York City, following a Humanist ministry in the Unitarian Universalist church; as president of the American Ethical Union (the national federation of Ethical Humanist societies); and as member of the American Humanist Association. He has written the books American Freedom and the Radical Right and The Free Mind Through the Ages, also editing Emerson on Transcendentalism], “The humanist way: an introduction to ethical humanist religion”, Pages 96-7 Copyright 1988 by Edward L. Ericson, Published by The Continuum Publishing Company, ISBN: 0-8044-2176-5 (HEG) Religious naturalists treat the “natural” universe as an independent, self-contained system because our knowledge of the world, as Kant brilliantly demonstrated two centuries ago, is totally confined to events within the world itself. We can describe parts of the world in relational terms—how they affect each other—but we have no way of defining or grasping the “being” of the whole. In recognizing this limit to all our knowledge, contemporary naturalism and the philosophy of science accept Kant’s reasoning. In fact, contemporary naturalists argue that they apply Kant’s principle more consistently and rigorously than he could do, since he was misled by the now discredited assumption, believe in his day to be firmly established, that mathe- matical logic discloses the fixed physical structure of the universe and that space and time are absolute. Recognition since kant’s day of alternative logical systems, giving rise to non-Euclidean geometry, and Einstein’s theory of rel- ativity have made both absolutes untenable. A logically consistent naturalism simply accepts the uni- verse as given, recognizing that what we know or can know about external reality must always be confined within the limits of finite events and relationships contained within nature itself. There is no conceivable way—not even in principle— for us to step “outside” that naturalistic frame to look beyond the phenomenal world. All knowledge of the external world is therefore relative. This brings us back to an assumption that recurs throughout this book. For the religious naturalist or Hu- manist, the sources of our being must be located within the familiar realm of time and space, in nature, in evolu- tionary and cultural history, and in the context of the sus- taining relationships of human beings living in community with one another and the world. It is in this sense of being “in the world” that we earlier described Humanism and related naturalistic philosophies as “secular”—which lit- erally means “in the world.” At the same time, we rejected the view that Humanism is necessarily “secularist,” in the now common usage of opposing or excluding religion from its vision of life.

2/4 Religious Naturalism (Humanism) Kritik C. Analysis AFF’s reallocation of our source of Being into nature closes off all other moral views Edward L. Ericson [leaders of the Ethical Culture societies in Washington, D.C. and New York City, following a Humanist ministry in the Unitarian Universalist church; as president of the American Ethical Union (the national federation of Ethical Humanist societies); and as member of the American Humanist Association. He has written the books American Freedom and the Radical Right and The Free Mind Through the Ages, also editing Emerson on Transcendentalism], “The humanist way: an introduction to ethical humanist religion”, Page 98, Copyright 1988 by Edward L. Ericson. Published by The Continuum Publishing Company, ISBN: 0-8044-2176-5 (HEG) We turn instead to find the knowable sources of our being within the interactive creative process that is life. But even this conception is too broad if we wish to discover the character of the moral factor in human creation. Here we must be much more selective in identifying the factors in nature and nurture that support the emergence of moral and spiritual values and sustain them in human relation- ships. If this were not so, we could relax in the assurance of a benevolent pantheism, finding the divine goodness equally distributed in all things. But if the whole of things actualizes God, the whole of things just as certainly ex- presses Satan. Such misty fantasies do not carry us far in understanding the moral creativity we seek in order to maximize the good life, or to affirm the moral worth of persons. Religious naturalism does not deify the universe. Nature as a whole is blind and prodigiously wasteful of life. With Albert Schweitzer we are horrified by much that is manifest in nature. To pretend that the “real” is good, while evil is “illusory” or is merely deprived of the good—an expla- nation as old as ancient Greek philosophy—simply evades the problem. Even those who profess to see final moral perfection in the cosmos are sure to take their flu shots and wear their rubbers in inclement weather. Nature is not uniformly “friendly,” and to the degree that it is friendly at all, it is so because all viable life forms have evolved means of coping with the hostile and destructive forces that confront them in the struggle for survival. We see evidence of this fact throughout the biological world and do not look to the universe any more than we look to a transcendent God to safeguard our lives or guarantee our values. Thus our religious naturalism does not make us nature wor- shippers. On the contrary, it inoculates us from the wor- ship of “forces” and “powers” of whatever guise.

3/4 Religious Naturalism (Humanism) Kritik D. Impact This closing off of other conflicting moral views causes our morality to be derived from “reverence for life”, leaving morality to be determined by one’s perspective Edward L. Ericson [leaders of the Ethical Culture societies in Washington, D.C. and New York City, following a Humanist ministry in the Unitarian Universalist church; as president of the American Ethical Union (the national federation of Ethical Humanist societies); and as member of the American Humanist Association. He has written the books American Freedom and the Radical Right and The Free Mind Through the Ages, also editing Emerson on Transcendentalism], “The humanist way: an introduction to ethical humanist religion”, Pages 98-99, Copyright 1988 by Edward L. Ericson. Published by The Continuum Publishing Company, ISBN: 0-8044-2176-5 (HEG) What then is left that is worthy of human veneration and reverence? What remains is the moral and spiritual potential to achieve the good within our relationships, within our actions and attitudes toward each other, and within ourselves. To understand this in the most radical, fundamental terms is to discover the necessity for the eth- ical life to be morally and spiritually self-contained and selfgenerative. We can rely on no props external to the moral process itself. Indeed, no such props are possible except at the price of illusion and self-deception. Viewed in this light, Schweitzer’s inspired phrase, “rev- erence for life,” acquires a deeper meaning. Not only do we reverence life by feeling compassion and empathy for its concrete forms; but more fundamentally, through rev- erence for life we see life as a precarious but infinitely precious creative process pregnant with the meanings that give to human existence the only enduring values that we can know. Ethical Humanism, grounded in a this-wordly concep- tion of the forces and conditions that sustain moral de- velopment, finds no merit in postulating a supermundane Heaven as the repository of our ultimate life values. The theory of ethical creativity presented here reflects elements that were common to the thinking of Felix Adler, John Dewey, the religious naturalist Henry Nelson Wieman (who somewhat confusingly called his concept “naturalistic theism”), and more recently, the psychologists Erich Fromm, Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, and others. How- ever much these thinkers may have differed among them- selves on certain logical and metaphysical issues that were important to their technical philosophies, they spoke with a single voice in affirming the interpersonal process as the generative source of moral development—the creator of the whole spectrum of qualities that make us human and give us the ability to assimilate and express all the “higher” attributes of the spiritual, aesthetic, and intellectual life.

4/4 Religious Naturalism (Humanism) Kritik E. Alt a) Religious Naturalism: Edward L. Ericson [leaders of the Ethical Culture societies in Washington, D.C. and New York City, following a Humanist ministry in the Unitarian Universalist church; as president of the American Ethical Union (the national federation of Ethical Humanist societies); and as member of the American Humanist Association. He has written the books American Freedom and the Radical Right and The Free Mind Through the Ages, also editing Emerson on Transcendentalism], “The humanist way: an introduction to ethical humanist religion”, Page 97, Copyright 1988 by Edward L. Ericson. Published by The Continuum Publishing Company, ISBN: 0-8044-2176-5 (HEG) The philosophical and religious naturalist refuses to di- vert human idealism and effort to the vain and untestable attempt to account for the existence of reality as a whole by postulating some external “divine” or “supernatural” power that, as popular religious supernaturalism contends, must be propitiated and worshipped. The naturalist sees no ground for supposing such a being to exist, or for investing human resources in pursuit of a will-of-the-wisp so footless in logic or meaning. b) Instead of deriving our morality from nature, we should integrate nature into our morality – as God’s creation, we have a moral duty to tend it and not allow wanton destruction.