AO1: Secularism & Humanism
- Secularisation is the sociological process by which religion’s influence within society changes, such as through decline or movement into private life.
- Secularism is instead a political principle about the proper place of religion in public life and the state.
- Procedural / open secularism allows religious and secular worldviews to participate publicly, aiming at pluralistic coexistence.
- Programmatic / closed secularism seeks to restrict religion within public institutions and confine it more strongly to private life.
- The Enlightenment weakened religion’s position as the main source of truth and morality.
- Galileo helped establish the authority of empirical science over religious doctrine.
- Locke defended freedom of belief, while Kant sought to bring religion “within the limits of reason,” partly in response to religious conflict.
- Secular humanism develops these ideas into a positive worldview rather than merely criticising religion.
- It argues that truth should be based on reason, evidence and scientific inquiry rather than revelation or religious authority.
- Truth is therefore provisional and open to revision rather than fixed by sacred texts.
- Its ethics are similarly grounded without God.
- Morality is based on human wellbeing, autonomy and flourishing rather than divine command.
- Humanists affirm the dignity of persons, drawing partly on Kant’s idea that individuals should be treated as ends in themselves.
- This supports human rights while combining autonomy with concern for human flourishing.
- Secular humanism can support different forms of secularism depending on which values are prioritised.
- Emphasising autonomy and pluralism supports procedural secularism, where religion remains part of public debate.
- Emphasising rationality and preventing harm can support programmatic secularism, where religion’s public role is more restricted.
- Secular humanism therefore seeks to provide truth and values without religion while allowing disagreement about religion’s public role.
AO1: Dawkins: Militant atheism / anti-theism & the rise of New atheism
- New Atheism became culturally prominent in the 21st century.
- New Atheists accept religious freedom but want believers to abandon religion through persuasion in the “marketplace of ideas.”
- Their method therefore fits open secularism: cultural argument rather than state suppression.
- Their goal is more radical, since they seek religion’s eventual disappearance rather than merely its removal from public institutions.
- They argue religion remains harmful even in liberal forms and as a private belief.
- Major figures include Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett.
- Religion as a virus
- Dawkins coined ‘meme’ for ideas and practices transmitted culturally through imitation.
- Religious memes can spread “epidemiologically”, especially from adults to children.
- Because children naturally depend on adults, they may accept religious beliefs before their critical thinking develops.
- Dawkins particularly condemns teaching hell, which children may experience as a real and terrifying threat.
- He points to former believers requiring therapy for persistent fear of hell and argues psychological harm can be as serious as physical harm.
- This supports his provocative description of some religious upbringing as ‘child abuse’.
- New Atheists also follow Freud in explaining religion through psychological needs.
- Fear of death and desires for meaning, authority and reunion with loved ones encourage comforting religious beliefs.
- Dawkins compares theism to belief in Santa Claus and calls dependence upon religion for meaning ‘infantile’.
- His “truly adult view” is that humans create meaning for themselves.
- Dennett similarly suggests some people value religion mainly for its comfort and purpose, effectively “believing in belief in God”.
- These criticisms connect New Atheism with secular humanism.
- Its emphasis on evidence and reason encourages distrust of unquestionable authority and confidence in individual judgement.
- This supports liberal values such as autonomy, human flourishing, rights and publicly justifiable laws.
- New Atheists therefore argue that irrational ways of forming beliefs can produce irrational moral and political authority.
- Hitchens attacks religion for idealising submission to divine authority, especially when believers use God’s commands to coerce others.
- Harris argues that treating faith as a legitimate source of certainty can enable extremism, while moderate religion may protect faith from rational criticism.
- The debate is therefore partly about what kinds of reasons are legitimate in modern society.
- Science, autonomous ethics and liberal politics require claims to remain open to criticism and justification.
- New Atheists oppose religion because faith can exempt beliefs from those demands.
AO1: McGrath’s defence of Christianity in ‘The Dawkins delusion’
- McGrath argues there is a “lunatic fringe” on both sides of the religion–secularism debate.
- He accepts that religious fundamentalism exists, but argues Dawkins’ militant atheism represents an opposing extreme.
- McGrath accuses Dawkins of misrepresenting Christianity rather than engaging with it accurately.
- Dawkins attributes to Tertullian the idea that Christians should believe “because it is absurd”, although Tertullian did not actually write this phrase.
- McGrath argues that repeating such claims without properly checking them contradicts the scientific commitment to evidence Dawkins claims to represent.
- Dawkins also uses Luther’s criticisms of reason as evidence that Christianity is irrational.
- McGrath responds that Luther was discussing salvation through faith rather than human achievement, not rejecting reason in general.
- He therefore calls Dawkins’ treatment of Luther “inept” and lacking in “evidence-based scholarship.”
- Dawkins’ polemic, McGrath argues, can resemble propaganda aimed at destroying religion rather than fairly understanding it.
- His militant atheism therefore risks displaying the same dogmatism he condemns in religious fundamentalists.
- McGrath also criticises Dawkins’ approach to religious education.
- Militant secularism could simply replace religious dogma with its own, resembling Soviet anti-religious education which portrayed religion as superstition defeated by science.
- Children should instead be taught “fairly and accurately, what Christianity actually teaches.”
- McGrath also defends Christianity positively.
- Natural theology shows religious belief need not depend on crude God-of-the-gaps arguments; thinkers such as Swinburne and Polkinghorne use more sophisticated arguments such as fine-tuning.
- Christian ethics can likewise appeal to Jesus as the role model for a life centred on love.
- McGrath ultimately supports procedural secularism, where Christianity remains free to contribute actively alongside secular worldviews.
AO1: Emphasis on the the social relevance of Christianity: liberationist approaches (poverty, etc)
- One Christian response to secularism has been to emphasise Christianity’s social relevance.
- Western secular culture is often criticised as materialistic and consumerist, encouraging fulfilment through wealth and individual success.
- Christianity can offer an alternative source of meaning through service, community and concern for the vulnerable.
- Catholic social teaching has long stressed duties towards the poor while rejecting both unrestrained capitalism and revolutionary communism.
- Vatican II called Christians to share the “joys and hopes” and suffering of humanity, while the preferential option for the poor gives priority to those most in need.
- Liberation theology developed this much further, especially in Latin America during the 1950s and 1960s, amid extreme poverty and inequality.
- Gustavo Gutiérrez and Leonardo Boff argued that traditional charity could relieve suffering without challenging the structures producing it.
- They therefore drew selectively on Marxist analysis, particularly Marx’s account of capitalism as dividing owners from exploited workers.
- They rejected Marx’s atheism but used his analysis as what Boff called “methodological pointers” for understanding poverty.
- This helped develop the idea of structural sin: injustice can be embedded within economic and political institutions, not just individual behaviour.
- Liberation theology therefore emphasises orthopraxis (right action).
- Gutiérrez described theology as “a critical reflection on Christian praxis in the light of the Word.”
- Christians should participate in liberating the oppressed and then reflect theologically upon that action.
- This approach is presented as biblical.
- Exodus depicts God liberating slaves, while Jesus repeatedly sided with the poor and warned against wealth.
- The Kingdom of God is therefore not merely future salvation, but something Christians help realise by transforming unjust society.
AO1: New religious expression & movements in response to secularis-m/isation
- Secularisation does not necessarily mean the disappearance of spirituality.
- Some people instead identify as “spiritual but not religious” (SBNR), rejecting churches, clergy and fixed doctrines while still seeking transcendence, meaning or spiritual wellbeing.
- Their practices may be eclectic and self-directed, including meditation, mindfulness, yoga, holistic healing or New Age ideas.
- Authority is located mainly in personal experience and authenticity rather than scripture or religious institutions.
- Heelas and Woodhead describe a related shift from “life-as religion” towards “subjective-life spirituality.”
- Traditional religion asks individuals to conform to externally given roles and truths, whereas subjective spirituality encourages meaning through inner experience.
- SBNR therefore suggests secularisation can involve the individualisation and transformation of religion, rather than simply its disappearance.
- The Fresh Expressions movement is partly a Christian response to this post-institutional culture.
- Developing particularly from the Church of England’s Mission-Shaped Church report (2004), it creates new forms of Christian community for people unlikely to attend traditional churches.
- Rather than expecting people to enter parish churches, mission goes to where people already are.
- Communities may therefore form in cafés, pubs, homes, workplaces or around shared interests.
- Fresh Expressions often begins by listening to local communities, building relationships and serving people before developing explicitly Christian worship.
- This may appeal to people interested in spirituality but suspicious of formal institutions.
- Unlike SBNR, however, its ultimate aim remains explicitly Christian community and discipleship.
- The British house church movement, developing especially through charismatic renewal in the 1960s and 1970s, offered a different response.
- Many were influenced by restorationism: the belief that established denominations had become overly institutional and Christianity should recover the simpler New Testament Church.
- They emphasised small communities, lay participation, charismatic gifts such as prophecy and speaking in tongues, and direct engagement with Scripture.
- This reduced dependence on large denominations and made Christianity more immediate and participatory.
- Unlike SBNR, house churches remained strongly evangelical and doctrinal.
- They therefore sought not individualised spirituality but renewed Christianity stripped of inherited institutional structures.
- Together, SBNR, Fresh Expressions and house churches show that secularisation can stimulate new forms of spirituality and religious organisation, rather than producing straightforward religious disappearance.
AO2: Science vs religion on Methodology
- The scientific method aims to believe what current evidence gives us most reason to accept.
- Dawkins argues faith instead gives people an excuse to believe what they want.
- In doubting Thomas, Jesus appears to praise those who believe without seeing.
- This can encourage an unscientific mindset in which authority is valued above critical investigation.
- Such habits can harm society when religious beliefs override evidence in areas such as medicine.
Counter
- However, McGrath argues this ignores natural theology.
- Aquinas’ Five Ways use a posteriori reasoning from features of the world to argue for a higher power.
- Religious belief can therefore be supported by evidence and reasoning rather than blind faith.
- Even if these arguments fail, they show religion need not be simply irrational.
Evaluation
- However, natural theology still does not justify specifically Christian belief.
- The Five Ways may at most establish some higher power, so using them to support Christianity stretches the evidence beyond what it shows.
- Natural theologians often admit that faith is required to make this further step.
- But that concedes that belief goes beyond the evidence.
- McGrath therefore confuses using reason with being fully rational.
- Hume argues that the wise person proportions belief to the evidence.
- Christianity may be consistent with evidence, but it is not proportioned to it.
- Even sophisticated theology therefore still promotes an unscientific mindset.
AO2: The harmfulness of religion
- Dawkins describes the Old Testament God as an “ethnic cleanser … misogynistic, homophobic, infanticidal, genocidal” and “the most unpleasant character in all fiction”.
- His point is that worshipping such a God may reinforce violence and prejudice.
- Humans already have an evolved tribal tendency to favour their own group and distrust outsiders.
- Religion can intensify this by dividing humanity into believers and non-believers, as religious conflict illustrates.
Counter
- McGrath argues Dawkins unfairly treats fundamentalism as representative of religion.
- Extremists may distort Christianity to legitimise prejudices they already possess.
- Christianity can also oppose tribalism, since Jesus models agape across social boundaries, as in the Good Samaritan.
- It can therefore challenge rather than encourage dehumanisation.
Evaluation
- However, McGrath risks a No True Scotsman fallacy by treating violent Christianity as merely a distortion.
- Biblical passages concerning women, homosexuality and slavery can themselves support prejudice.
- Extremists therefore do not simply misuse Christianity; aspects of Christianity can also attract and enable them.
- Religion can be both a symptom and a cause of prejudice.
- Liberal reinterpretation cannot fully remove the problem because fundamentalists can appeal to the prima facie meaning of scripture.
- As Sam Harris argues, the problem with religious fundamentalism can therefore lie partly in religion’s fundamentals.
- Religion remains burdened by texts Mill called “in many respects barbarous”.
AO2: Whether secularism tends towards nihilism
- Dostoyevsky warned that if there is no God, everything is permitted.
- Ratzinger similarly argues secularism reduces morality to human opinion and relativism.
- This can leave the state free to define morality, helping explain 20th-century totalitarianism.
- His view assumes a “dependence” anthropology: morality needs a transcendent foundation.
Counter
- Liberalism argues state power can instead be restrained by democracy, rights and constitutional limits.
- Kant offers an ‘autonomy’ anthropology, where rational humans can recognise moral law for themselves.
- However, secular democracies generally avoid totalitarianism more reliably than theocracies and often perform well on social measures.
- As Sam Harris argues, secularists only need to show that secular societies can flourish.
- That disproves the claim that secularism necessarily ends in nihilism.
Evaluation
- Nietzsche gives a deeper reason to reject Ratzinger’s conclusion.
- Even if the ‘death of God’ initially causes nihilism, this does not show transcendent morality is permanently necessary.
- Christianity may itself have conditioned people to associate value with transcendence and distrust moral autonomy.
- Losing religion could therefore create a temporary crisis because people have been taught that life without God is meaningless.
- Ratzinger then mistakes this disorientation for proof that religion was necessary all along.
- Nietzsche’s critique gives this argument the logic of an abusive relationship: religion cultivates dependence, then treats the difficulty of independence as evidence we cannot survive without it.
- Ancient Greek and modern secular ethics show coherent this-worldly morality is possible.
- This supports the liberal view that humans can stand on their own two feet morally.