Worldview Paper – Secular Humanist Worldview
The Secular Worldview is a religious worldview in which “man is the measure” — mankind is the ultimate norm by which truth and values are to be determined. According to Secular Humanism, all reality and life center upon human beings. In fact, we act as God. The Secular Worldview is a comprehensive view of the world from a materialistic, naturalistic standpoint. Therefore, the Secular Humanist sees no place for the supernatural or immaterial. “There is no place in the Humanist worldview for either immortality or God in the valid meanings of those terms.
Humanism contends that instead of the gods creating the cosmos, the cosmos, in the individualized form of human beings giving rein to their imagination, created the gods. ” Secular Humanists believe that there is no God, that science and the scientific process have made God obsolete. Humanists believe that only matter – things we can touch, feel, prove, or study – exists and has always existed. Man is only matter (no soul or spirit). No supernatural explanation is needed for the existence of this matter. Naturalism says that only matter exists , things you can touch, feel, and study.
The Humanist trusts the scientific method as the only sure way of knowing anything, so if something cannot be observed, tested, and experimented on, it doesn’t exist. Since you can’t observe God, hell, the human mind or spirit, or conduct experiments on them they can’t, and don’t exist. Since the Secular Worldview rejects the existence of God, human beings get to decide on standards and values. Humanists believe that science, reason, and historical experience are sufficient guides for figuring out what is right or wrong in any situation.
These standards will not always be the same, as each person has a different background and reasoning. Therefore, the standards and values – ethics – are relative. The Humanist Manifesto II states, “We affirm that moral values derive their source from human experience. Ethics is autonomous and situational, needing not theological or ideological sanction. Ethics stems from human need and interest. ” The theory of Neo-Darwinism purports that natural selection acts on genetic variations within individuals in populations and that mutations (especially random copying errors in DNA) provide the main source of these variations.
Because positive mutations seem to be rare, Neo-Darwinism contends that evolution will be a slow, gradual process. Without naturalistic evolution, there is no Secular Worldview. Anything else would demand a Creator, which would mean that man is not the source of all things. Secular Humanists believe that science has proven the theory of evolution to the extent that it is no longer a theory but a scientific fact. According to this “fact,” man is the most highly evolved of all creatures, and is now responsible for directing and aiding the evolutionary process
