Secular Humanism in the United States

Liberal theologians were not the sole architects of twentieth-century humanism. These religionists were also joined by a number of well-respected academic philosophers in the Deweyan tradition, who were either fellow pragmatists or scientific naturalists. The influential Columbia University school of philosophy as well as a number of professors in mid-Western universities actively participated in the humanist movement.

Humanists by and large rejected teleology even as many other early-twentieth-century thinkers, philosophers and religionists alike, embraced it. No deity, the humanists argued, was responsible for the direction of the cosmos, nor did nature and human history have a direction apart from human effort and human will. Mankind, they said, should not look outside of humanity for assistance to their problems; our fate was entirely in our own hands. Although some thinkers who espoused these ideas came to be called futilitarians because of the somewhat pessimistic outlook that this notion of "man alone in the cosmos" seemed to connote, most humanists were not pessimistic. Indeed, one might characterize the humanist movement as driven by a powerful optimism concerning the ability of human beings to make their own future.

One reason that humanists remained optimistic about human progress in the face of an impersonal cosmos was that they held great faith in the ability of human beings to learn and apply their knowledge in rational and ethical ways. Scientific knowledge and technological control of nature gave human beings the power to identify problems and find solutions to them. Democracy and respect for human rights gave people the ethical framework within which to apply this knowledge. As a result, humanists have not been averse to considering technologies that claim to offer solutions to major social issues even when those technologies might otherwise challenge core beliefs about human nature and freedom. In recent years, for example, humanists have advocated psychological conditioning and genetic engineering as solutions to social problems. These ideas have not been unanimously or uncritically accepted by all who consider themselves humanists, but in general, scientific faith and technological optimism lie at the root of humanist thought, in contrast to a more skeptical and restrained approach to science and technology typical among more traditional religionists.