The Philosophy of Humanism
By Corliss Lamont (1902-1995)
Critical Review of the Humanist Worldview
Doctor of Religious Studies
Department Biblical Studies and Theology
By
Richard Jones
"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."
A worldview is a set of beliefs through which one interprets all of reality and provides a person with a means to explain the world around them. When evaluating the Humanist worldview, you do not go far before you run into Corliss Lamont and his book The Philosophy of Humanism. Educated at Harvard and Columbia, Lamont obtained his Ph.D. in philosophy from Columbia in 1932. During an active career that spanned nearly a century, he authored sixteen books and hundreds of pamphlets and taught at Harvard, Cornell, and Columbia. Lamont believed that teaching the proper philosophy was the only way to begin the long struggle toward peace. This "proper philosophy" according to Lamont was Humanism, a philosophy that is naturalistic, scientific, and democratic. His most famous works were The Philosophy of Humanism and The Illusion of Immortality.
In reviewing Lamont's book The Philosophy of Humanism, the intention of this article is to address how he formulates the Humanist worldview and how one might argue against these claims from a theistic worldview. Lamont argues from four basic perspectives: (1) mind (personality) and body, (2) reliance on reason and science, (3) from nature and the theory of the universe, an ...