Humanist Advocacy
Hoffmann was chairman of the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion from 2003–2009 and was senior vice president of its parent organisation, the Center for Inquiry. Although Hoffmann has been an opponent of the so-called "New Atheism," he took the contra position toward the existence of God in a debate at Florida State University with Richard Swinburne, formerly the Nolloth Professor of Philosophy of the Christian Religion at Oxford.
Hoffmann had welcomed the attention drawn to debates about early Christianity by the documentary film The Lost Tomb of Jesus (2007), but rejected the filmmakers' conclusion that the Talpiot Tomb was the burial place of Jesus and his family. He has also criticised the sensationalism attached to The Da Vinci Code as a confusing blend of history and fiction.
In his non-academic work as a proponent of humanism, Hoffmann has been critical of the so-called "New Humanism," associated especially with Harvard's humanist chaplain, Greg Epstein. Hoffmann attacked Epstein after he had criticised the work of atheist authors Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins as "atheist fundamentalists", claiming in a letter posted online that Epstein was confused and abusing the Harvard name to stake out his own divisive position. While claiming that humanists had as much right as religious persons to speak about a "spiritual dimension," Hoffmann has suggested that the new humanism was "insufficiently skeptical" of religious truth claims and coined the phrase "spiritual libertarians" to describe the new movement. In frequent contributions to the philosophy webzine "Butterflies and Wheels," he has advocated a philosophical and political delineation between secularism and religion, but has also supported the non-confessional teaching of religion as a core subject in colleges and universities. Hoffmann criticized the work of atheist writers Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett as being historically naive in a 2006 Free Inquiry article.
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“As one who knows many things, the humanist loves the world precisely because of its manifold nature and the opposing forces in it do not frighten him. Nothing is further from him than the desire to resolve such conflicts ... and this is precisely the mark of the humanist spirit: not to evaluate contrasts as hostility but to seek human unity, that superior unity, for all that appears irreconcilable.”
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