Why UU Humanism Requires Rejecting Our Humanity
Why UU Humanism Requires
Rejecting Our Humanity
By David R. Burton
This essay discusses humanist beliefs, the
rise of humanism within Unitarianism, and why those beliefs require the rejection of our
humanity.Introduction
When we think about what it means to be human, about the things that differentiate us
from inanimate objects or lower life-forms, we think about our capacity to reason, to
exercise our freedom to make choices, our capacity to recognize right from wrong, our
capacity to love and to create and appreciate beauty. It is these things that make us
human. It is these things that constitute our humanity.
It is the contention of this essay that UU humanism necessarily requires the rejection
of our humanity. The humanism that is now such an integral part of Unitarian Universalism,
the humanism that has marginalized Christian and other theist thinking within Unitarianism
and Universalism, necessarily and logically requires the rejection of the proposition that
there is such a thing as right and wrong, the denial of our ability to make choices, and
necessitates the view that love and beauty are not real. It is only by embracing the
reality of God that we may retain our humanity, our capacity for moral choices, for love
and for the aesthetic appreciation of beauty.
It is time for Unitarian Universalism to confront the fact that humanism is a moral and
religious dead-end. It is time to rediscover instead the intellectual and theological
roots of Unitarianism. For it is there, not the arid wasteland of humanism, that truth,
insight and spiritual sustenance can be found. It is in a more traditional Unitarian
understanding of our place in the Universe that we can find our humanity, not in so-called
humanism. Only a God-centered Unitarianism allows us to find a fully modern religious
understanding of mankind that retains our humanity.
The Rise of Unitarian Humanism
Humanism became an important force within Unitarianism early in the 20th
Century. Despite a recent resurgence of “spirituality” within Unitarian
Universalist circles that some observers claim is underway, humanism has become the
dominant theological position in Unitarian Universalism as we enter the 21st
Century.1 In any event, there is little doubt that humanists are a strong force
within the majority of UU congregations and at the UUA. They are dominant in many
congregations. They are sufficiently powerful at the UUA that publications and religious
education materials informed by the Unitarian tradition are virtually never forthcoming.2
The humanists’ work over the past century has been sufficiently successful that only
a small fraction of UU congregations are explicitly Christian or avowedly theist or
God-centered. As their power and influence has grown, the humanists tolerance for
“outmoded” traditional Unitarian ideas about God has waned.
In 1927, Curtis W. Reese, then secretary of the Western Unitarian Conference and editor
of the prominent Unitarian periodical Unity, edited a volume entitled Humanist
Sermons. This volume, composed of 18 sermons or essays primarily by Unitarian
ministers, is a testament to the strong influence of humanism within Unitarianism outside
of New England and the South by that time.
Humanists did, and do, regard themselves as thoroughly modern, progressive and
enlightened. The “time has passed,” they opine, for theism and deism.3
They pride themselves in having dispensed with a supernatural God in their religion and
look forward to building a religion with man rather than God as its centerpiece.4
They hold that “the chief end of man is to serve man.”5 They redefine
religion as “the knowledge of man and our duties toward him.”6
Causes, ideas and goals replace God as the means to redemption and salvation.7
Science, psychology and political action became the building blocks of the new religion.8
Unitarian Minister E. Burdette Backus wrote, “I belong to a fellowship that is
greater than that of any religion that has ever existed. I am a member of the Church
Universal that is yet to be; a worshipper in the Temple of Humanity, not yet builded, but
building.”9 Humanists possess a virtually unbounded faith in the goodness
and potential of mankind. They shout “Glory to Man in the Highest, for Man is the
Master of Things.”10 The humanist pioneers regarded themselves as
transcending the Unitarian past and, indeed, they jettisoned the Unitarian tradition. They
created a God-free religion. It is their Unitarian Universalism with which we now must
contend.
The Humanist Manifesto was published in 1933 in The New Humanist. It was
signed by 34 prominent humanists, nearly half of whom were prominent Unitarians. Curtis W.
Reese, for example, was a prominent Unitarian leader for decades. He was secretary of the
Western Unitarian Conference for 11 years, editor of Unity for 8 years and one of
four members of the Unitarian Commission on Hymns and Services that created, with the
Universalists, Hymns of the Spirit that served as the Unitarian and Universalist
hymnal until well after the 1961 merger.11 John H. Dietrich was the prominent
Minister of the First Unitarian Society in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Other Unitarian or
Universalist signatories included E. Burdette Backus, Raymond B. Bragg, Ernest Caldecott,
Albert C Dieffenbach (a former editor of the Unitarian flagship publication the Christian
Register), R. Lester Mondale, Clinton Lee Scott, Frank S. C Wicks and Edwin H. Wilson.12
The Humanist Manifesto has the virtue of being clear. It does not obfuscate or
temporize. Unlike the collection in Humanist Sermons, it also was a statement of
common belief and has endured as a statement of humanist thinking, both within
Unitarianism and beyond. The following points in the manifesto are of particular relevance
to the concerns of this essay.
First: Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created. …
Fifth: Humanism asserts that the nature of the universe depicted by modern science
makes unacceptable any supernatural or cosmic guarantees of human values. …
Sixth: We are convinced that the time has passed for theism, deism, modernism, and the
several varieties of "new thought.” …
Ninth: In place of the old attitudes involved in worship and prayer the humanist finds
his religious emotions expressed in a heightened sense of personal life and in a
cooperative effort to promote social well-being
Tenth: It follows that there will be no uniquely religious emotions and attitudes of
the kind hitherto associated with belief in the supernatural.
The humanists, then, denied that God created the Universe. They denied God, or at least
denied God had any known religious relevance.13 They denied that religion was
different from other human disciplines and they denied God as the source of human values.
Instead, they put their faith in man and in their conception of the universal man and a
good society.
Humanism and Science
In the words of the Humanist Manifesto, “humanism asserts that the nature of the
universe depicted by modern science makes unacceptable any supernatural or cosmic
guarantees of human values” and, further, that “there will be no uniquely
religious emotions and attitudes of the kind hitherto associated with belief in the
supernatural.” But the science that Unitarian humanism embraces -- an atheist
science, a science uninformed by religious insight, a science that rejects any role for
God -- requires the rejection of our humanity. As more fully discussed below, traditional
Unitarianism, in contrast, embraced both science and God, regarding both as critical to a
proper understanding of the human condition.14
Make no mistake, modern physics implies determinism (or, as we shall see, randomness).
Determinism is the proposition that all our actions are effects necessitated by preceding
causes. In classical physics, the physical state of a system at time B is a function of
the laws of nature applied to the previous physical state of the system at time A.
Physical state C is a function of the laws of nature applied to the previous physical
state at time B. And so on. There is no room for free will. Everything we do is a function
of the laws of nature and the physical state of the universe from the beginning of the
universe until the end of the universe.15 With sufficient information about the
state of a system (including the universe, which is just a big system), the future state
of the system could, in principle, be predicted using the laws of physics.16
One might not have enough information to accurately predict the future but, in
principle, the future was pre-ordained by the past. The algorithm that connects the
past to the present to the future is the laws of physics. This scientific view has been
called the “clockwork universe”.
Albert Einstein, for example, squarely stated this in the New York Times in 1930
and acknowledged its moral implications.
The man who is thoroughly convinced on the universal law of causation
cannot for a moment entertain the idea of a being who interferes in the course of events
-- provided of course that he takes the hypothesis of causality really seriously. He has
no use for the religion of fear and equally little for social or moral religion. A God who
rewards and punishes is inconceivable to him for the single reason that a man's actions
are determined by necessity, external and internal, so that in God's eyes he cannot be
responsible any more than an inanimate object is responsible for the motion it undergoes.17
Einstein’s views are not idiosyncratic but representative of scientists’
views. Unless, that is, religious insights are brought to bear on the issue.
Arthur Stanley Eddington in his 1928 book The Nature of the Physical World wrote
"religion first became possible for a reasonable scientific man about 1927" with
"the overthrow of strict causality by Heisenberg, Bohr, Born and others." What
he was referring to was the advent of quantum mechanics and, specifically,
Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle.”18
Without going into details unnecessary for the purposes of this essay, quantum
mechanics stands for the proposition that it is impossible in principle to know
with certainty both the momentum and position of a particle. The more accurately momentum
is measured, the less accurately position can be known and vice versa. Now this can be
interpreted as just a measurement problem. At the subatomic level, the act of measuring
affects the particle. But physicists have generally adopted a differing view, known as the
Copenhagen interpretation. The world, at its most fundamental level, is viewed by the vast
majority of physicists as being extremely uncertain. At the subatomic level, the world is
regarded as composed of a vast array of particles but these particles are not
“real” in the ordinary sense. They are ghosts that simply represent statistical
possibilities until they are observed and the act of observation “collapses the wave
function.”
Einstein, it should be said, rejected the Copenhagen interpretation with his famous
dictum that "God does not play dice with the Universe." He preferred a more
classically deterministic view of the universe and believed that quantum mechanics must be
a manifestation of a deeper reality. But his rejection of the now dominant view is
considered by most physicists as one of his lesser moments.
Now let us look at the implications of all of this for us. Whether Einstein was right
or the current interpretation of quantum mechanics is right, free will is a casualty. In
the classical deterministic physical world, the past determines the future. The neurons in
our brain fire as a direct result of the physical state in a previous period of time.
Subject to the problem of insufficient information, the future can be predicted by a
rigorous application of the laws of physics. The future is determined. All that quantum
mechanics really does is replace classical determinism with a statistical function.
Randomness replaces hard determinism.
If matter and energy is all that exists, if everything is a matter of physics and there
is no other force or realm that influences real events in the universe, then our humanity
is a necessary casualty. Whether our actions, thoughts, and feelings are a function of
classical determinism or quantum indeterminance, we are not free in the sense that we mean
when we talk about free will in religion, philosophy or law. Whether our actions are
function of physical states in a previous period or the function of purely random quantum
events, in no meaningful sense do we have a choice about our actions. Therefore, in no
meaningful sense can we be held morally accountable for our actions because we had no
choice over them. It is not just, after all, to hold someone accountable for an action
over which they had no control.19 Similarly, concepts like love and beauty
begin to rapidly lose coherence and meaning if the Universe and everything in it simply
had to be the way that it is or, in the alternative, is a function of random interactions
at the subatomic level.
Affirming Our Humanity: Rejecting Humanism and Embracing God
William E. Channing, in the introduction to his Collected Works wrote:
One of the greatest of all errors, is the attempt to exalt God, by
making him the sole cause, the sole agent in the universe, by denying to the creature
freedom of will and moral power, by making man a mere recipient and transmitter of a
foreign impulse. This, if followed out consistently, destroys all moral connexion between
God and his creatures. In aiming to strengthen the physical, it ruptures the moral bond
which holds them together. To extinguish the free will is to strike the conscience with
death, for both have but one and the same life. It destroys responsibility. It puts out
the light of the universe; it makes the universe a machine. It freezes the fountain of our
moral feelings, of all generous affection and lofty aspirations.20
Channing was responding to Calvinists and others that adopted the position that the
future was pre-ordained by God. His criticism, however, is no less valid of humanists who
substitute Science for God. An affirmation of our free will, our moral responsibility, our
capacity for self-culture and self-improvement and our humanity is an absolutely central
tenant to a traditional Unitarian understanding of mankind. In the absence of some means
for us to exercise free will (however, constrained by physical reality our range of
choices may be), we cannot be human. We cannot make choices. We are automatons. Our
humanity is not real unless free will is real.21
Humanists have no means of explaining free will. They have no way out of the box they
have created for themselves. As noted above, they reject God the creator.22
They reject a supernatural God, a God beyond matter and energy, a God that can influence
the physical universe. They reject God as a source of values. They reject any uniquely
religious insights. They reject the idea of a soul or of the Holy Spirit. They must, if
they are to be intellectually honest, reject our humanity because their position requires
that they follow Einstein (or the quantum theorists) and reject our free will.23
American Unitarians, however, can affirm our humanity by embracing God. God is the
source of our free will. Our freedom is a central fact of God’s creation. One may
express this insight in traditional terms as God infusing us with the holy spirit, or as
our soul being the source of free will. Or one may adopt a process theology perspective
based on the work of Alfred North Whitehead.24 In either event, God has given
us the gift of free will.25 By exercising that freedom, we influence the future
course of the Universe. Just as God created the universe, we create the fabric of our
lives and become cocreators of the Universe of the future. We are indeed, in that sense,
created in God's image.
This creativity is a fact of the human condition. This creative reality is the source
of not only decisions about our daily lives but of our great art, of institutional
innovations, even of scientific and mathematical insight. Its reality is a manifestation
of divine love. This creativity is wholly inconsistent with Unitarian humanism.
In the final analysis, trying to dispense with God and replacing God with science as
the Unitarian humanists did, was an intellectual and spiritual failure. Trying to paint
man as entirely self-sufficient and worthy of worship in Backus’ “Temple of
Humanity” is shallow and, ultimately, does not comport with reality.26 We
all know that we are finite and limited. We are not gods. We are sophisticated enough to
know that there is something greater than ourselves. We know that in the absence of a
faith in that sustaining reality, we do not feel whole or at peace or even fully human.
We must embrace science but must understand its limitations as did the early American
Unitarians. Science is reason applied to the physical world. It enables us to understand
one aspect of reality, but there is more to the world than just matter and energy and the
laws of physics. God is a necessary hypothesis unless we are willing to abandon our
humanity. Since we know that our humanity is real, we must add religious insight to the
insights of science. Our own experience and reason tell us that we are more than rocks,
that there is such a thing as right and wrong and beauty and love. The experience of many
of us confirms a divine presence of sustaining love.
Those of us who are engaged in the religious enterprise are truly affirming our
humanity and seeking after truth. It is not a particularly easy or simple task but it is a
worthy and necessary one. As James Freeman Clarke once wrote, in language that must be
regarded as very un-UU:
Use and improve the powers which look up to an infinite truth, beauty and goodness, and
they lift you towards these. Let them sleep, and they cannot see this Kingdom of God, this
Divine element in the universe. The fool, who has not developed his spiritual nature, says
in his heart, “There is no God.”27
Footnotes
1. For example, in the 1997 Unitarian Universalism Needs and Aspirations Survey,
which surveyed about 10,000 Unitarian Universalists, 46 percent of UUs described
themselves as humanist and 19 percent as earth/nature centered. 13 percent described
themselves as theists, and 9.5 percent described themselves as Christian. Thus, humanists
constitute by far the largest group within Unitarian Universalism and are approximately
twice as numerous as those holding traditional Unitarian beliefs (broadly defined).
Although there is renewed interest in the traditional Unitarian understanding of God, the
primary cause, so far, of a resurgence in “spirituality” with Unitarian
Universalism that some have observed is, in the author’s judgment, the new prominence
of new age, pagan, Wiccan, other “earth centered” and Buddhist practice and
beliefs within UU congregations.
2. The work of the UUA affiliate, the Unitarian Universalist Christian Fellowship is an
exception.
3. Humanist Manifesto, Sixth Article, 1933.
4. “Humanism does not recognize the existence of any supernatural.” John H.
Dietrich, “Unitarianism and Humanism, in Humanist Sermons [Chicago, 1927], p.
97. “We will need no other god but the ideal of perfection for the whole human race
– the universal man,” Eugene Milne Cosgrove, “The Architecture of
Humanism,” Humanist Sermons [Chicago, 1927], p. 144.
5. Ibid, p. 104.
6. Ibid, p. 96
7. “Causes, ideas, goals have regenerative power,” Curtis W. Reese, in
Preface, Humanist Sermons [Chicago, 1927], p. xv.
8. See, e.g. Eugene Milne Cosgrove, op. cit., at pp. 141-145.
9. E. Burdette Backus, “Christianity and Humanism,” Humanist Sermons
[Chicago, 1927], p. 73.
10. Dietrich, op. cit., p. 111.
11. It still does in more traditional Unitarian and Universalist churches such as
King’s Chapel and Universalist National Memorial Church.
12. Their institutional affiliations at the time of the Manifesto, as best the author
can determine, were: Backus (former Minister, First Unitarian Church, Los Angeles), Bragg
(Secretary, Western Unitarian Conference), Caldecott (First Unitarian Church, Los Angeles,
California), Mondale (Minister, Unitarian Church, Evanston, Illinois), Scott (Minister,
Universalist Church, Peoria, Illinois), Wicks (All Souls Unitarian Church,
Indianapolis), Wilson (Minister, Third Unitarian Church, Chicago, Illinois). Reese, then
Dean of the Abraham Lincoln Center in Chicago, Dietrich, Backus and Caldecott were
among the 18 contributors to the 1927 Humanist Sermons, op. cit. Interestingly, the
extraordinarily influential Frederick May Eliot, President of the American Unitarian
Association from 1937 to 1958 was also a contributor, contributing “Humanism and the
Inner Life.” In his contribution he certainly sings the praises of the “Humanist
Faith” and makes it clear he does not expect divine intervention in human affairs
but, he steers clear of the militant atheism found in most of the other sermons in the
volume.
13. Reese, for example, in his preface to Humanist Sermons denies that humanism
can be equated with atheism. He simply argues that humanists do not regard God as relevant
to religion and maintain a stance of inquiry as to whether or not God exists. This
statement can be regarded as an attempt to immunize humanists within Unitarianism from the
charge of being atheists; they adopted, instead, the posture of agnostics. During the six
years that elapsed between the publication of Humanist Sermons and the Humanist
Manifesto, Reese seems to have become more willing to embrace an explicit atheism (as,
of course, did the many other prominent Unitarians who signed the manifesto). Many UU
humanists today have a nearly violent reaction to so much as the mention of God in a
Sunday service and many, perhaps most, would deny the existence of God rather than merely
professing doubt or ignorance. In any event, the distinction between a confirmed atheist
and an agnostic that regards God as irrelevant to religion is probably operationally
unimportant.
14. For an example of early Unitarians embracing science while also recognizing its
limits, see William Ellery Channing, “The Present Age,” in The Works of
William E. Channing, With an Introduction (1841), (Boston: American Unitarian
Association, 1898), pp. 160-161.
15. If there is an end. The universe may end in a big crunch or it may expand
indefinitely and die as entropy steadily increases in accordance with the second law of
thermodynamics. In the later case, the universe would exist but no order or life would
remain.
16. Naturally, in a system as large as the universe, acquiring enough information
becomes an issue even in principle.
17. “Religion and Science,” New York Times, Nov. 10, 1930.
18. A revolution occurred about the same time in mathematics with the publication in
1931 of a paper by Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel. Gödel showed that in any formal
system adequate for number theory there exists an undecidable formula that is not provable
and whose negation is not provable. A corollary of this theorem is that the consistency of
a formal system adequate for number theory cannot be proved within the system.
Gödel’s work is generally accepted and stands for the proposition that mathematics
cannot be proven true. There are always unprovable assumptions that need to be made or,
more accurately, mathematics cannot be formalized within one system. Thus, uncertainty or
indeterminacy was introduced into deductive systems like mathematics in a manner analogous
to that of empirical sciences.
19. In fact, it is almost incoherent to talk about an action unless it is paired with
volition.
20. Introduction, The Works of William E. Channing, With an Introduction (1841),
(Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1898), p. 4.
21. This essay necessarily simplifies, given its length. Philosophy (as opposed to
religion or science) has grappled with the “problem of free will” at least since
ancient Greece. Modern philosophy does not appreciably help resolve the issue of whether
we have free will although it does help to clarify the issues involved. For a basic
introduction to the philosophical perspectives on this issue, the reader may find helpful
Roy C. Weatherford, “Freedom and Determinism,” and “Determinism” in The
Oxford Companion to Philosophy, ( 1995) or Richard Taylor, “Determinism,” in
The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1967).
22. Science, of course, tells us that the universe had a beginning – the Big Bang.
This is primarily a function of the fact that the universe is observed to be expanding but
is also a necessary implication of thermodynamics. The Big Bang, however, is a violation
of the known laws of physics since anything as massive as the universe and as small as the
universe at the beginning would be a black hole from which nothing could escape. It is
difficult to make sense of these scientific fact without positing a creator God.
23. They do not, of course, reject free will. They simply adopt the inconsistent
positions that there is free will and that there is no God and continue merrily along.
Scientists do the same. Einstein, for example, wrote of right and wrong in his book Ideas
and Opinions and elsewhere notwithstanding his New York Times article above. A
philosophy that is inconsistent with how one leads one’s life should be regarded as
suspect.
24. See, e.g., Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929);
Sceince and the Modern World (1925).
25. See American Unitarian Conference Religious Principle No. 3, “Free will is a
gift from God.”
26. Humanists have an almost irrational faith in man. Dietrich’s “Glory to
Man in the Highest, for Man is the Master of Things” rings hollow when one reflects
on man’s inhumanity to man and all of the evil done by man. Is man a god any of us
would really want to worship.
27. From James Freeman Clarke, “Man’s Duty to Grow,” in Self-Culture:
Physical, Intellectual, Moral and Spiritual, 1892.
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