Critique Two - Part Six - Building without Foundations

Education is a topic of great importance to me as I have been blessed with four children, one which I look forward to meeting for the first time in early February, all of which my wife and I have chosen to homeschool. Mr. Kurtz makes a few remarks in his sixth principle of “loose consensus” among secular humanists whose logic is blatantly circular and specifically ignores an issue of great difficulty. In this single paragraph synopsis of his beliefs regarding moral education, Mr. Kurtz states the following:

“It should be noted that secular humanism is not so much a specific morality as it is a method for the explanation and discovery of rational moral principles,” and elsewhere, “We do not believe that any particular sect can claim important values as their exclusive property; hence it is the duty of public education to deal with these values. Accordingly, we support moral education in the schools that is designed to develop an appreciation for moral virtues, intelligence, and the building of character…We do not think it is moral to baptize infants, to confirm adolescents, or to impose a religious creed on young people before they are able to consent.”

There are many issues that are of great concern to me in this area, but I will deal with only two herein. Firstly, on the statement that secular humanism is merely a method of explanation and discovery of rational moral principles. There seems to be one glaringly obvious omission in this statement; namely, does the secular humanist never ask from whence those moral principles came? Secondarily, with reference to the previous discussion on ethics, on what basis would a secular humanist decide what makes a moral judgment rational? The fatal problem in the secular humanists’ position here is that he or she has to first assume that moral choices exist and that they can be rationally determined without ever asking from whence they came. Is the origin of morals irrelevant to the pronouncement and instruction of them? The humanist is trying to build a house without a foundation. It occurs to me the position is the same with young people today and the use of calculators. Why don’t we only teach children the use of calculators in math classes? After all the children would receive perfect marks in their primary math courses of study. They would know to match up the numbers and symbols on paper with those on the calculator and the teachers in class could simply instruct the students on the sequencing of the keystrokes, or “explain and discover the rational calculative principles in math”. I would submit it is because we know that when they enter reality and are working part time behind the register at a local fast food chain and the computer goes down they would be crippled intellectually.

If the origin of ethics is ignored or purposefully excluded in the instruction of children of all ages, in time what we will have is not a society of free-thinking rational moral agents, but rather a generation of adults who are ethically crippled. You can attempt to show people intellectually the how’s of making moral choices, but without origins you cannot tell them the why’s of making moral choices. Relative to morality this is precisely what the Biblical-Christian offers, the why’s of moral choices. Jesus taught exclusively on the why’s of ethics and morals. Jesus did not spend his approximately three years of active ministry holding seminars on the specifics of moral behavior; instead He walked and talked with people, showed them why their actions were sinful, forgave them and left them with the simple instruction: “Go and sin no more.”

The secular humanists' duplicitous position of attempting to smuggle in an ethic and then proposing to have discovered a moral principle using pure intellect carries over into the issue of education. Mr. Kurtz makes the assertion, quite rightly, that no group can claim as their property important values. However, he then makes the unsupportable claim that therefore public education is the only valid arena in which to deal with the issues of morality. Mr. Kurtz has stated that it is not moral to impose any kind of moral creed on young people before they are of consenting age, but this completely negates his statement on public schools, and is contrary to reality. Wouldn’t public schools be a body of adults (Boards of Education, Principles and classroom instructors) teaching children the ‘right way’ to deal with moral issues? Besides we have already established that the instructors could not even address where those morals came from in the first place. What Mr. Kurtz is promoting is not that children be free from indoctrination, but that they be indoctrinated with secular humanist beliefs as opposed to religious ones, with the hollow justification that religions 'force' morals on people and secular humanism is no religion.

Religion is defined by the unabridged random house dictionary as the following: “concern over what exists beyond the visible world, differentiated from philosophy in that it operates through faith or intuition rather than reason; a specific fundamental set of beliefs and practices generally agreed upon by a number of persons or sects; a body of persons adhering to a particular set of beliefs and practices.” Although Mr. Kurtz tries very hard to classify secular humanism as something other than a religion with his usage of wording such as “loose consensus”, “method” and “develop an appreciation;" make no mistake, secular humanism is a religion based on ideas established on faith, seeking to make disciples through evangelistic efforts and proselytization. More on this next time.