You cannot, says Karl Barth somewhere, talk about God simply by talking about man in a loud voice. But it may be asked whether, if you talk about man loudly enough, he does not eo ipso become a ‘god’ in some sense - in the sense in which St Paul says that the god of some men is their belly (Jung, rather unkindly, applies the same text to Freud), and in which the Psalmist said that the gods of the heathen were but idols. These uses illustrate the difference between what one might call the objective and subjective meanings of the word ‘God’. The Being ‘who alone exists of himself, and is infinite in all perfections’ (a well-known objective definition of the God in whom Christians believe) is an object of worship, of valuation above all else, for Christians (i.e. is their ‘God’ in the subjective sense). I call a humanist theology the intellectual formulation of a religious attitude which makes man its ‘god’ in the subjective sense. Someone might object that to call this a theology is an abuse of the term; yet such an abuse may be justified in as far it draws attention to interesting, and possibly disturbing, analogues to theology proper.

Men seem to have a disposition to talk about whatever they value most highly in a way comparable to Christian talk about God. As creatures prepared by creation to know and love God, we might be expected, when we do not believe in him or when we temporarily forget him, to apply the concepts we should have reserved for him to other objects. The Austrian biologist Konrad Lorenz finds that he can train goslings of the Greylag Goose to treat him just as though he were their mother goose. H. G. Wells admitted to what he called a ‘Godshaped gap’ in human consciousness; in a similar way there was a gooseshaped gap in the soul of the goslings, which in default of the real goose could be filled by Konrad Lorenz. So much for the justification of the locution ‘humanist theology’. I shall continue with a brief account of the subject, merely sketching its beginnings in Hegel’s philosophy, and giving somewhat more space to its more thoroughgoing manifestations in the work of Auguste Comte and, more recently, Sir Julian Huxley.