1. Agreeing to differ
Written on Aug 2, 2025
From the age of around 16 years my world view (as we often call it nowadays) has been that of humanism. I'll leave for later posts my reflections on how I came to humanism and what humanism means for me. Since my retirement, one of the voluntary activities I have been undertaking, and enjoying very much, is as a school speaker for Humanists UK. Now and again, religious education (RE) teachers ask for a humanist to come to their school and talk to the pupils about humanism. Recently, a RE teacher asked a Christian priest and me to take questions from children in a couple of his RE classes, one theme being why some people believe in God and some don't. So I had to give this question a bit more thought than I had done previously.
I am sure that much research has been undertaken on this question, and entire books have been devoted to it. There are certainly lots of reasons for this difference. If I must give only one answer, it would be based on the premise that 'believing in God' means complete acceptance of the reality of God, not just an intellectual belief but an emotional commitment to a God ever-present in one's life. It is not just believing, it is knowing. (I recall many years ago someone high up in the church hierarchy saying something like, 'I don't believe there is a God, I know there is a God.) So, I say that my friends and acquaintances to whom this applies think in a very different way to those people, like me, to whom it does not (though this does not mean we do not share the same values and moral principles). To the faithful, the existence and presence of God makes absolute sense. But for me and many others, it is alien to the way we set about understanding our world and answering those profound existential questions about how the world and life, including human life came, to exist, and what is our fate as well as moral questions about right and wrong and how we should live our lives.
For people like me, the question 'Is there or is there not a divine creator?' is a valid one and has only one answer, either yes or no. And we see no reason to believe that the answer is yes. But religion will always be with us, and rather than engage in prolonged debates about whether God exists or not, perhaps it is better to respectfully agree that we all think in different ways and what makes complete sense to some people will not do so for others. Certainly we can say that this attitude is fully consistent with humanistic principles.
Caveat: The above represents my way of thinking about this question. Since we all think in different ways, it may not be your way of thinking. And I realise that all this time I have been speaking on behalf of the faithful, which I'm not really entitled to do. So I accept that I may be wrong because I have not enough information about how people of faith think. I am interested in learning more about this.
Some future reflections: How I came to humanism and what it means to me; religion and science; religion and the natural world.
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