The Religion of Secular Humanism and the Public Schools, by Homer Duncan (Lub-bock: MC International Publications), 136 pp., $3.00.

Tad S. Clements

Aserious philosophic or theological work concerned with the "religion of

secular humanism" would attempt to care-fully clarify the meanings of the terms religion and secular humanism, because without such conceptual clarification in what sense secular humanism is supposed to be a religion would remain unclear. Homer Dun-can labors mightily but unsuccessfully to give the impression that he has accomplished this task. His book contains literally dozens of quotations, commentaries, and assertions that ostensibly prove that secular humanism is a religion, one that dominates public edu-cation. All Duncan really proves, however, is that he does not recognize the essential difference between quantity and quality of evidence.

The defects in his "evidence" are numerous. For instance, he quotes people who lack the requisite philosophic or theo-logical expertise—legalists, biologists, and politicians, for instance—and thus commits the fallacy of transferred authority. He quotes some views of people from the early days of the humanist movement as though their views were binding on secular human-ists today. (How would Duncan react if someone were to insist that he must hold all the views held by Catholic popes of the past just because they were Christians?)

Duncan even misinterprets some of his own quotations. For instance, he cites a Webster's dictionary definition of religion that, he claims, fits secular humanism per-fectly, but he conveniently ignores two facts: (I) the definition insists that faith is essential to religion, and (2) secular humanists refuse to accept anything on faith (as that term is understood in acknowledged religious con-texts). And, perhaps worst of all, he fails to distinguish between religious humanists and secular humanists and quotes the former as spokesmen for the latter, thus misrepresent-

Tad S. Clements is professor of philosophy at the State University of New York Col-lege at Brockport.

ing both. In addition to such fallacies of

authority and fallacies of accent, the work abounds in other serious defects. For instance, Duncan completely ignores the rich variety of religious and philosophic positions in America, preferring instead to assert that there are only two, absolutely opposite, positions—that of secular humanism and that of "Biblical Christians."

He also badly misrepresents history. For instance, he claims that America was founded on Christian principles (p. 7). This is a half-truth that conveniently ignores the non-Christian views of many of the Found-ing Fathers, views that probably influenced their attempt to safeguard the secular state from undue religious influence by means of the First Amendment.

Some of Duncan's foot-in-the-mouth statements are almost humorous. For instance, fundamentalist Christians in other parts of the world should find it strange that, according to Duncan, "... all Bible-believing Christians are patriotic Americans" (p. 27).

With incredible philosophic, theologi-cal, and historical naiveté, he portrays the complex social and intellectual issues facing our nation and public education as simply a conflict between "Biblical Christianity" and secular humanism: "a conflict between God and Satan; between Christ and Anti-Christ; between Divine Revelation and human spec-ulation" (p. 6). There is, of course, a half-truth in his view. There is and has been a conflict between secular values—those essential ingredients of modernism, derived from the scientific outlook and from demo-cratic practice—and the "values" derived from the prescientific, absolutist orthodoxies of the past. No informed person would deny this. However, to interpret the complex issues involved in the simplistic, vague, and assumptive terms employed by Homer Duncan is intellectually inexcusable.

Duncan repeatedly charges unfairness. Fairness, he claims, requires that creationism and other Christian ideas be presented in public schools. Apart from the constitutional issues involved, such a position has implica-tions that even Duncan should find objec-tionable. Surely, if the separation-of-church-and-state principle is to be eliminated in the name of "fairness," then all religious posi-tions should have an opportunity to be

represented. How would Homer Duncan feel if Christian children had to listen to the sales pitches of atheists, agnostics, Unitarians, Jews, Marxists, Muslims, and Hindus? Even the persuasive presentation of the numerous versions of Christianity in the classrooms of America would probably have consequences that he would regret. Sci-ence, including evolution, belongs in the public schools whereas creationism does not; not because modern education is unfair, but simply because science has intellectually respectable credentials. To ignore such dif-ferences makes a mockery of the distinction between knowledge and unsupportable belief—a distinction fundamental to genuine education.

Much of Duncan's book supposedly establishes secular humanism's responsibility for nearly every sort of evil, real or imagined, afflicting America and its public schools today. Here, as in other parts of his work, Duncan misuses data and uses dubious premises. He quotes profusely from sources—some of which are excellent—por-traying an educational situation with many serious problems, problems that no knowl-edgeable person would be likely to deny, and then hastily jumps to the conclusion that secular humanism is somehow to blame. With ludicrous effect, he claims that such things as drug education, the teaching of evolution, and global and social studies are disguised forms of secular humanism (see, for instance, pp. 94 ff.). The quality of his distortions can perhaps be judged best by quoting two of his comments directly:

Common sense should tell anyone that when people ... were taught they were nothing but animals, they would begin to live like animals. [p. 45]

If there is no God, if Jesus Christ is not the Son of God, if the Bible is not the Word of God, if man does not have an eternal soul, if there is no heaven to gain or hell to shun ... the best philosophy of life is "eat, drink, and be merry for tomor-row we die." [p. 46]

Either Homer Duncan does not know (in which case, he is abysmally ignorant) or he chooses to ignore some well-known facts (in which case, he is guilty of extreme dis-honesty). Such phenomena as the extremely low crime-rate in Communist China, the almost complete absence of debauchery among devout Buddhists, the moral excel-lence of the great pagan philosophers of antiquity, and the rarity of the Unitarian-Universalists and well-educated secular humanists in our penal institutions, difficult to explain according to his premises. The

Books Secular Humanism and the Schools

58 FREE INQUIRY

United States probably has more funda-mentalist Christians than any other nation on earth, and their ranks have swelled during recent years. If we used Duncan's procedure for assigning causes, we should probably conclude that bible-believing

The Politics at God's Funeral: The Spiritual Crisis of Western Civilization, by Michael Harrington (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1983), 308 pp., cloth, $16.95.

Edward Walter

The theme of The Politics at God's Funeral is that atheism was made ten-

able about four centuries ago and belief in God has been declining ever since, creating a crisis from which the West has yet to emerge. The author, Michael Harrington, contends that a de facto atheism exists in the West today because religious belief has lost its influence in social and political affairs. During the Middle Ages, religion allegedly established common values that harmonized human behavior, legitimized political power, and guaranteed personal identity. Today, governments have lost the confidence of their peoples, economic growth is unplanned and irresponsible, and social and economic inequities persist. Peo-ple have reacted by supporting totalitarian regimes and adopting relativistic moral values.

God as a social reality has been dying in the West, according to Harrington, since Enlightenment thinkers demonstrated that the new science did not require God's exis-tence to account for natural processes. The intellectual leaders of the Enlightenment adopted Stoic philosophy as an answer to the loss of a personal God. Publicly, they promoted traditional religion so that the masses would remain submissive and pas-sive. According to Harrington, the masses were too intelligent to be duped and, as a consequence, rejected the rationalism of the Enlightenment.

Rousseau, who influenced the French Revolution, tried to overcome the wrench created by the new science by claiming that authentic religious belief was an inner

Edward Walter is professor of philosophy and chairman of the department at the University of Missouri at Kansas City.

Christians are responsible for our social and educational ills.

I recommend Homer Duncan's book to logicians and other scholars interested in studying fallacies, errors, and misinterpreta- tions—for this it is invaluable. •

reverence for God. This maneuver removed God from the public sphere so that his presence could no longer fuel social action. By the mid-nineteenth century, middle-class atheism was quite prevalent, and religious practices declined in all Western nations. Earlier, Protestant Christianity had elevated the notion of personal salvation based on inner conviction.

These divergent sources agreed that people could separate their moral lives from their social lives. Capitalism allegedly developed because it, too, bifurcated the world. Liberal democracy reinforced this unnatural situation by instituting a legal system in which people were equal but tolerating a socioeconomic system where people were unequal. Thus, society is torn apart because people are motivated to act hedonistically and selfishly. As Marx under-stood, Harrington says, capitalism is a system of disguised rule that is structurally agnostic.

The Marxist-Stalinist state eventually emerged as another attempt to repair the damage caused by the rending of the medi-eval social order. As Nietzsche recognized, the socialist state could rule by an appeal to the lowest common denominator. This occurred in many places because "scientific socialism," which was really developed by Engels after Marx died, became the philo-sophy of many revolutionaries. In it, anti-religious sentiment combined with a ration-alistic political structure to suppress dis-sidents. Totalitarianism necessarily emerged. Marx is exonerated by Harrington for this state of affairs.

Theologians from Friedrich Schleier-macher to Dietrich Bonhoeffer have attempted to rescue Christianity from the implied atheism of modern science in three ways, according to Harrington. First, God's existence and Christ's divinity have been established by an irrational leap of faith. Second, the concept of God has been reduced to a vague "ground of being" or to a feeling of awe when one confronts the universe. Third, modernism and science have been abjured. This last approach was

adopted by the Roman Catholic church from 1864 to 1958 and by American Protes-tant fundamentalists. Harrington is unsym-pathetic to these maneuvers on the ground that they are either irrational or reactionary. The current revival of religious funda-mentalism in the United States is said to be insignificant because studies show that Americans are not religious in practice.

Harrington hopes that ultimately a communitarianism will develop that will honor the functional differentation of modern society while providing common values that will motivate people to act morally. Collectivism, as was found in feudal society and is found in Stalinist states, is rejected because it is repressive. Democratic socialism ought to be the political system of the future because it blends the rational structure of liberalism with the organic society favored by Marx. In such a society, the economic sphere would become public and responsive to the will of the majority. The people, Harrington claims, could estab-lish new transcendental values that will do away with capitalistic hedonism. This kind of society could be achieved by the joint action of atheistic and religious humanists.

Harrington's thesis is developed by a review of the thought of significant thinkers of the last four hundred years. References to Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and others appear throughout this book. Although Harrington's treatment of these thinkers is sweeping and controversial, it is also fas-cinating and insightful. Harrington knows what is important and presents it in an exciting way. The reader is filled with the desire to reread these masters because of their intrinsic worth and to check Harring-ton's interpretations. This is a tribute to his perspicacity. A "democratic Marxist," he comes across as erudite, nondoctrinaire, and vital. Nevertheless, when one analyzes and interprets four hundred years of history, there is room for differences of emphasis and opinion.

Harrington's Marxism, rather than pro-viding a perspective from which to view social history, prejudices his opinion. A per-spective in which all assumptions are made explicit is impossible, as C.S. Peirce pointed out some time ago. But one ought to try to minimize the effect of this unhappy condi-tion as much as possible. Harrington does not try sufficiently hard. His Marxism leads him to go beyond reason to rescue Marx's reputation and to blame liberal democracy and capitalism for most of the problems of the contemporary West.

Marx cannot be exonerated for the totalitarianism of socialist states. Marx worked closely with Engels for many years.

Harrington's Marx and God

Summer 1984 59