This Journal has printed a number of definitions of humanism, mostly from other chapters. The AHA prints a card which can be handed out to interested people with its own definition. I include it here because it seems to me to be as good as any I have seen:

Humanism affirms the inherent dignity and worth of every human being and asserts that individuals are responsible for the realization of their aspirations and that they have within themselves the power of achieving them.

Humanism is free from any belief in the supernatural and is dedicated to the search for meaning and values for individuals on Earth through reliance upon intelligence and the scientific method, democracy and social empathy.

Humanism contends that humans have emerged as a result of continuous evolutionary process, and that all their values--religious, ethical, political and social--have their source in human experience and are the product of their culture.

To summarize, humanists believe in (1) the ideal of the perfectibility of humankind, (2) the scientific method of obtaining knowledge, (3) in the evolutionary process, and (4) in human experience as the source of values and ethics. Everything else follows from these four main points.

In this issue of the Journal, I will discuss briefly the Scientific Method. In subsequent issues, I hope to follow with other three. (Better still, perhaps I can find someone else to do it who is more qualified.)

I had some difficulty finding information about the scientific method. Many books write about it, none seemed to give an explanation of what it actually was, so I went back to original sources. This explanation of the scientific method is from the book Right Thinking - A study of its principles and methods, by E.A. Burtt (1928, 1931, 1946), whose analysis is derived from John Dewey's How We Think (1910). Both are signers of A Humanist Manifesto. I also took some information from Webster's dictionary.

There are a total of six steps:

Step One: Occurence of a Perplexity

To perplex is to be unable to grasp something clearly or to think logically and decisively about something.

Step Two: Clarification of the Perplexity

To clarify is to be free of confusion and to make understandable.

Step Three: The Appearance of Different Solutions

Or working hypotheses of the perplexity. To hypothesize is to form a tentative assumption made in order to draw out and test its logical or empirical consequences.

Step Four: Deducing Implications of the Suggested Hypothesis

A deduction is the deriving of a conclusion by reasoning, specifically of an inference in which the conclusion follows necessarily from the premises.

Step Five: Verification of the Chosen Solution

By some action or observation, engaged in the purpose of determining which, if any, of the suggestions as developed, offers an adequate solution of the perplexity.

Step Six: A Reiteration of the Preceding Thinking

To uncover any inadequacies that might be corrected.

Not long ago I told an old friend, an active LDS, that I had become a humanist. His reply was, "Well, it depends on who you believe has the authority," which is the kind of answer I would expect if he was comparing one religion to another, and I wasn't sure that he understood me.

Perhaps he didn't, but maybe he did, because authority is a central question. To the LDS, authority is the Priesthood and the source is God. To the humanist, authority is the scientific method and the source of nature.

These two means of acquiring knowledge have been at war with each other probably from the very first time someone asserted that they spoke for some supernatural being, and someone else discovered from the observation of nature that something to the contrary was the truth.

Corliss Lamont, in his book The Philosophy of Humanism, which is given to all new members who join the AHA, writes:

An objective study of science shows that all knowledge, even the simplest mathematical proposition, springs originally from human experience within this natural world. Scientific method operates without any dependence on or need for supernatural mental faculty in man that gets in touch with a supernatural truth-giving Being or that draws ideas out of some mysterious realm beyond Nature. There is no ground, either, for alleging that "scientific" truth originates in the this-earthly experience of man, but that "spiritual" or "ethical" truth comes from on high in an altogether different way. It is the Humanist contention that all truth or knowledge has the same natural status and origin.

Lamont also states:

Humanism believes that the greatest need of our age is the application, insofar as it is possible, of the method and spirit of science to all human problems and that the acquisition of this method and spirit constitutes a training of the mind far more important than the assimilation of any number of individual facts.

--Bob Green