PhilosophersAuguste Comte

Auguste Comte

Know only facts: the positive age of science.

Positivism1798 – 1857 FrancePositivist philosopherFounder of sociologyFormer student of the École polytechniqueFounder of the Religion of Humanity
Positivist Catechism (1852), conversations 1 and 11

The Religion of Humanity

What it claims

Humanity definitively takes the place of God.

Why

People need a religion, but God cannot be demonstrated; Humanity, which is real, can fill the same role.

Valid with an implicit premise

Comte is not a mere opponent of religion. He thinks people need it: to come to terms with themselves and to unite with each other. What he rejects is God. His idea: keep the function and change the object. Instead of an invisible being, people will love and serve Humanity, the whole of human beings past, present and future. He even has a cult, a calendar and priests. Is a religion without God still a religion, or the last shadow of the old one? Note: Comte does not first say "God does not exist". We file the argument under atheism because it judges belief in God indemonstrable, even chimerical, and replaces it.

P1Modern reason can no longer be led by indemonstrable and chimerical opinions, such as every theology inspires.
P2Yet people need a religion, whose function is to regulate each individual nature and to rally all individuals.
P3Science, completed by the study of the human order, offers a real object for this function: Humanity, an immense and eternal being, which one can love and serve.
P4 · implicit premiseIf a religion is needed, the object of the old religion is indemonstrable and a real object can fill the same function, then the real object must take its place.
Therefore Humanity definitively takes the place of God.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P4, the computer finds a case where a religion is needed, God is indemonstrable, Humanity is a real object able to fill the same function, and yet God keeps his place: for example a believer for whom faith needs no proof, as with Pascal or Kierkegaard.
With P4, the argument is valid. P1 sets God aside, P2 keeps religion, P3 proposes the replacement object. P4 joins the three: it is the heart of the reasoning, which Comte states without proving. A believer could keep P1, P2 and P3 and deny P4: the object of religion is not a mere "replacement" chosen because it fills a function. Note too what the argument does not say: it does not prove that God does not exist. It shows that there is no good reason to believe, and that we can do without. A reader may therefore find it closer to agnosticism, since Comte judges the question inaccessible to science. We file it under atheism because P1 calls theological doctrines "indemonstrable" and "chimerical", and the conclusion replaces God.
Analogy. An old house still stands, but its walls are cracked and nobody can prove they are sound. Comte builds a new house next to it, with the same rooms (a place to meet, festivals, rules for living together) and in verifiable stone. The critic asks: is it a house, or only a plan that looks like the old one?

Objections

3

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859) and Auguste Comte and Positivism (1865) 1859 · attacks the conclusion

Mill, an admiring reader of the Course, rejects the end of the work. As early as On Liberty (1859), he charges the System of Positive Polity with aiming at a despotism of society over the individual; later, in his Autobiography (1873), he would see in it the most complete system of spiritual and temporal despotism ever to come out of a human brain. A clergy regulating opinions, feelings and acts in the name of Humanity would destroy the freedom of thought that science requires. Making an idea an object of worship protects it from criticism.

no reply
summary: their text is not yet in our corpus
No reply possible: objection raised in 1859, after the author's death (1857).
The debate goes on (our summary) Comte died in 1857, before these books. Lines of the Catechism go in the direction of the objection: "positivism recognises in no one any other right than that of always doing his duty" (conversation 10, §3), and Humanity is served there by a priesthood. Mill nuances it, however: in an essay published after his death (1874), he judges that a "religion of Humanity" can fill the role of religion without the supernatural. What he rejects is the clergy and the authority Comte attaches to it. Mill's texts are not yet in our corpus.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, § 132, and The Gay Science, § 108 1881 · attacks premise 4

Nietzsche targets Comte by name: the French free-thinkers, from Voltaire to Comte, wanted to equal the Christian ideal, and even surpass it; with his formula "vivre pour autrui", Comte "out-christianised Christianity" (Daybreak, 1881). A year later he writes: God is dead, but for thousands of years his shadow will still be shown in caves, and his shadow too must be overcome. Putting Humanity in God's place, with a cult, priests and a duty of altruism, would keep the form of the Christian religion under another name. The real work is to do without what it left behind.

no reply
No reply possible: objection raised in 1881, after the author's death (1857).
The debate goes on (our summary) In Twilight of the Idols ("Skirmishes", § 5), he also attacks those who get rid of the Christian God but keep Christian morality, aiming at the English, George Eliot first. Comte could reply that his morality, "living for others", is presented as a fact of man's social nature ("living by others"), not as a command from elsewhere. Nietzsche would answer that it comes to the same thing: a duty that is not up for discussion.
A
Augustine, Confessions 400 · attacks premise 3

A finite being, however immense, cannot fill the human heart. Our restlessness comes from our being made for someone who does not pass away. Humanity is a collection of limited beings, who age and die: one can serve it, but one cannot rest in it. For Augustine, the object of religion must be greater than we are, not just greater than each of us.

no reply
We have not yet found a direct reply by Comte in the texts.
The debate goes on (our summary) Comte does not answer Augustine by name. He writes, through the Priest, that Humanity's struggle against the fatalities that dominate it offers "a better spectacle" than the all-powerfulness, necessarily capricious, of its theological forerunner (conversation 1, §35). So he prefers a finite being that struggles to an almighty God, but he does not discuss the need to "rest" in God that Augustine speaks of. It remains to ask whether one can love "without rest" a being that does not answer, and whether that is a merit.