ISSN 0014-1690 The Ethical Record Vol. 99 No. 3 £1 March 1994 THOUGHTS ON EVOLUTION. Cynthia Blezard 2 THE CONCEPT OF AN ETHICAL SOCIETY Peter Heeles 3 GOD AND BERNARD SHAW. Barbara Smoker DANTE AND THE PURPOSE OF LIFE. Diane Webb 11 ETHICAL SOCIETY PROGRAMME 1 6 EDITORIAL — BLIND FAITH For all their much vaunted claims to objective truth and universality, religions' readiest recruits are the children of existing believers. Richard Dawkins' Viruses of the Mind (BHA, 1992) reminds us of this endemic feature of religion. World maps of religious belief by country would not exist if all children could excercise an educated choice from among all the world's religions and philosophies. This rationalist Ideal is perhaps achieved when the child of religious parents chooses to be an atheist. Is that why the government is so anxious to keep humanism off the school syllabus? Of course, conversions from one religion to another also occur — we shall be examining this on 20 March (see page 16). C> ' But why do young children automat- Lce= " ` ically adopt the parental religion? Dawkins notes that computers, which Qv° o do not understand the meaning of what they do, readily obey the instruction to COPY the material offered to them. Thus programmes (whether useful or mischievous!) can proliferate like , viruses amongst the computer population. Similarly, young children copy, take as gospel and interiorise what is said by their parents, with whom they have a strong emotional co s Q;Ara bond. An enhanced susceptibility to their parents' lore has (historically) been very useful, allowing fairly rapid (in geological terms) adaption to new conditions. However, is it now too conservative to cope with the even more rapid changes in thought demanded by the scientific revolution and an over- crowded planet? 0 0 Phil Gyford's illustration, prompted by Dawkins' thesis, asks Has blind faith thoughnow ye see him not outlived its utility? yet believing ye rejoice greatly SOUTH PLACE ETHICAL SOCIETY Conway Hall Humanist Centre 25 Red Lion Square, London WC IR 4RL. Telephone: 071-831 7723 Appointed Lecturers Harold Blackham, T F. Evans, Peter Heales, Richard Scorer, Barbara Smoker, Harry Stopes-Roe, Nicolas Walter. Officers Honorary Representative: Nicolas Walter. General Committee Chairman: Barbara Smoker. Treasurer: Don Liversedge. Editor, The Ethical Record.- Norman Bacrac. Librarian: Edwina Palmer. Registrar: Marion Granville. Secretary to the Society: Nina Khare. Tel: 071-831 7723 Hall Staff Manager:Stephen Norley. Tel: 071-242 8032 for Hall bookings. Head Caretaker:David Wright. Obituary We regret to announce the death of Bill Keable; a memorial meeting was held on 7 March at Conway Hall; and Professor Leopold Kohr, Conway Memorial Lecturer in 1970. THOUGHTS ON EVOLUTION by Cynthia Blezard A grey February afternoon, an exhausting shopping expedition completed (tinned cat- victual gets heavier as the years pass), a pot of Assam tea, music on the radio and my hand strays to the poetry section of the bookcase. The American poet, Edna Vincent Millay seems an appropriate match for Rachmaninov's Second Symphony. Recollecting that Mike Howgate (of TV and Radio dinosaur fame — step aside Spielberg!) will shortly begin his evening course, "The Challenge of Creationism", and will, from the programme details, include further debate on those pre-historic creatures; I know that SPES members will enjoy being re-acquainted with one of Millay's poems (written in 1934) from the sonnet sequence "Epitaph for the Race of Man". Cretaceous bird, your giant claw no lime From bark of holly bruised or mistletoe Could have arrested, could have held you so Through fifty million years of jostling time; Yet cradled with you in the catholic slime Of the young ocean's tepid lapse and flow Slumbered an agent, weak in embryo, Should grip you straitly, in its sinewy prime. What bright collision in the zodiac brews, What mischief dimples at the planet's core For shark, for python, for the dove that coos Under the leaves? — what frosty fate's in store For the warm blood of man, — man, out of ooze But lately crawled, and climbing up the shore? NATIONAL SECULAR SOCIETY ANNUAL DINNER, 16 April 1994. Main Speaker: Peter Atkins, author of Creation Revisited at the Bonnington Hotel, from 7.00 pm. Ticketsg20 from NSS, 47 Theobalds Road, WCI. LONDON STUDENT SKEPTICS AGM. 7.30 pm Monday 14 March, Room 3C, ULU, Malet Street, WC1. 2 Ethical Record. March, 1994 THE CONCEPT OF AN ETHICAL SOCIETY: PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE Peter neatest Based on a lecture to Sowh Place Ethical Society. 24 October, 1993 As we advance through our bicentennial year we become aware of decisions which have to be taken which will influence our future. One of these decisions is: What kind of society should SPES seek to become in the future? Such a decision is intimately connected with our choice of a new name. I am sure that all our members would agree that our future should evolve from our past; that in the future we should remain an "ethical society". The question is: what precisely do the words "ethical society" mean? Which features of our past should we build on and which should we abandon? All the practical decisions about our future, our name, how we operate, the basis on which we seek new members, seem to me to hang on the way we conceive ourselves. Radical Atheism and Religious Evolution Our past seems to span two historical strands which have come together to create the current Humanist movement: radical atheism and religious evolution. Radical atheism embraces both philosophical/scientific opposition to religious belief such as that pioneered by T.H. Huxley, and the fight against religion as an instrument of political oppression and social injustice for which men like Bradlaugh and Holyoake are justly famed. All forms of radical atheism sought to bring about change by confrontation with believers and, more especially, with their institutions. Much of what we applaud in Britain today owes much to the battles fought by the radical aiheists. Evolution from religion was necessarily a quieter process, with a much lower profile. It was a slow, but inevitable, development among thinking people with religious affiliations. It was characterised by the progressive recognition of the inadequacies of religious dogma coupled with a reluctance to surrender what were felt to be the good points of personal religious beliefi a sense of identity and communion with others at a "spiritual" level. The outmoded concept of a "rational religious sentiment" makes very good sense in this context. The two paths moved in similar directions and had much common ground, but there was antagonism too. Both would claim to be atheistic in the literal sense of living without reference to God who might intervene in human affairs. The radical atheists were also agnostic in T.H. Huxley's original and powerful sense of that word. The religious evolutionists, by contrast were reluctant to surrender concepts of metaphysical or supernatural reality. Most of the ethical societies which emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were evolutionary in concept. They attracted a membership that wanted to take a step away from conventional religion rather than to oppose it. The BHA came into being as a regrouping of surviving societies in the old ethical movement. It therefore has closer historical ties with the religious evolutionists than the radical atheists. Its present position is a synthesis, combining elements of radical atheist phiolosophy with an ethical society ethos. Ethical Record, March, 1994 3 SPES was in litct the first to adopt the style "Ethical Society" in 1888. The adoption of the new title, under the leadership of Stanton Coit, represented the culmination of years of dissatisfaction with religious affiliation and a slow shedding of the trappings of religious worship. There was no discernable change in its corporate life at the time. The "congregation" clearly wanted to preserve all those things which made the Institute at South Place a centre for their personal development. The Sunday morning meetings were probably the most important part of the activity, but there were other lectures, the newly emerging chamber concerts to feed emotional and "spiritual" needs and social activities. It supplied to its members exactly the congenial cocial and intellectual environment that churches provided for their believing members. The London Ethical Society At about the same time as SPIES came into existence, moves were afoot to create another "ethical society" based on quite different ideals. The plans came to fruition in 1891 with the establishment of the London Ethical Society, at University Hall, the Unitarian College in Gordon Square. The key figures wereJohn Muirhead (1855-1940) and Bernard Bosanquet (1848-1923). This new concept had a very specific object, namely to propagate the ethical philosophy of T.H. Green and FAL. Bradley. These noted Oxford philosophers derived their position from the metaphysical philosophy of Hegel. They were particularly impressed with his principle of the evolution of the human spirit. It provided the bedrock on which their theoretical and practical ethics were built. They eschewed conventional religious affiliations and laid claim to a rational approach to religious questions. Their new philosophical thrust exercised a powerful influence in many aspects of public life in the late Victorian years. To some it was unwelcome. Naturally, they were strongly opposed by academic radical atheists. The London Ethical Society functioned as a learned society. Its meetings consisted mainly of philosophical discussion. It had an 'educational' role in that it sought both to promote an understanding of a specific approach to ethics and to raise the intellectual level of ethical discussion. In practice its 'educational' success was limited because it became a somewhat elitist society for philosophers and academics.