Belief Excerpts from Antidisestablishmentarianism I from Chapter 11. What Is Science to a Secular Humanist?

Like any religion which enthrones man in God’s place, there is a desperate and irrational need to attack true religion. “Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence,”³ says Richard Dawkins. In the Bible, in the founding documents of US history and in the US court system prior to the liberal takeover, belief was (and still is in reality) a legal term. Belief is the decision of a juror based on evidence. Faith is the action one takes based on belief based on tested evidence. The modern Secular Humanist twists the word “faith ” to mean the opposite of its historical definition. “Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.”⁴ This is the “blind leap of faith ” of Karl Barth and neo-orthodoxy, not the historic meaning of faith found in the Bible and US history.

The faith of the secularist, which is truly “in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence,” has a religious belief that the material universe is all that is, was or ever will be. The material universe is the ultimate reality. “Who is more humble?” asked Carl Sagan, “The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book [the Bible] must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?”⁵ Sagan is pretending humility while arrogantly dismissing the possibility that God might have actually written down His words out of love for his creation.

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1 Pierre Charron, De la sagesse (Of Wisdom, In Three Parts), French version, 1601, Translated by Samson Lennard, Eliot’s Court Press for Edward Blount and Will, Aspley, London, c.1615.

2 Charles Watts, “The Secularist’s Catechism,” complied in an undated book published by Watts & Co. entitled: Pamphlets by Charles Watts, Vol. I, originally written in 1896.

3 Richard Dawkins, from a speech at the Edinburgh International Science Festival, April 15, 1992.

4 Dawkins, The Richard Dimbleby Lecture: “Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder,” BBC1 Television November 12, 1996.

5 Carl Sagan, in an interview with Charlie Rose, late-night PBS talk show host, 1996.