Steve Allen

From Philosopedia

Allen, Steve (26 Dec 1921 - 30 Oct 2000)

Steven Valentine Patrick William Allen was a noted American humorist, musician, and television star whose “Tonight” telecast contained a blueprint for all subsequent talk shows: first, an opening monologue, a band with a band leader as the straight man (Skitch Henderson was one such), a desk, guest chairs, and casual talk. His guests included such varied persons as poet Carl Sandburg, comedian Lenny Bruce, jazzman Coleman Hawkins, the Three Stooges, The Muppets, and Elvis Presley. In a 1977 PBS series, “Meeting of the Minds,” he made small talk with Sigmund Freud, attorney Clarence Darrow, and Greek philosopher Aristotle.

A one-time disk jockey, he starred in the title role of the 1956 movie The Benny Goodman Story. Allen wrote the music and lyrics for Sophie, a Broadway musical based on the life of Sophie Tucker, but it ran in 1963 for only eight performances. He appeared on Broadway and in soap operas; wrote essays, commentary, and more than fifty books, including Dumbth! And 81 Ways to Make Americans Smarter (1989), Meeting of Minds (1989), and Steve Allen on the Bible, Religion, and Morality (1990), in the latter of which he states that he is a “theist” but cannot believe that a just God would have committed all the crimes listed therein. In the book, he included,

• It was only when I finally undertook to read the Bible through from beginning to end that I perceived that its depiction of the Lord God--whom I had always viewed as the very embodiment of perfection--was actually that of a monstrous, vengeful tyrant, far exceeding in bloodthirstiness and insane savagery the depredations of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Attila the Hun, or any other mass murderer of ancient or modern history.

Allen recorded more than five thousand songs including “This Could Be the Start of Something Big,” “Impossible,” and “Gravy Waltz.”

In “Dumbth!”, Allen wrote:

• Although my own bias on this question (as to the existence of God) ought to be essentially irrelevant to you, I will satisfy your curiosity on the point that I am among the majority who assume that a God does exist.

Then why, secular humanists have asked, is he one of the Council for Secular Humanism’s laureates in their International Academy of Humanism? Is it because Paul Kurtz, his publisher, added his name as a reward for helping raise needed money for Kurtz’s Council for Secular Humanism, as some have claimed? Why is he not better categorized as a being a “theistic humanist” or a “humanistic theist”? Allen’s response is found in Steve Allen on the Bible, Religion, and Morality:

• I am, as a result of the present study, now of the firm opinion that to the extent that the total goodness of God can be defended as a philosophical proposition, the last place to which the devout believer should turn for supporting evidence is the Bible. There is better evidence in Nature herself—in the inherent order, enormous scale, largesse of air, water, food, sunlight, breathtaking beauty, in the human capacity for love and virtue—than in the familiar accounts of assorted slaughters, sex crimes, atrocities, murders of infants, torture, and other abominations we read about in the Old Testament.

• If all such crimes were committed by men the scriptural authors pointed to as evil, if they were condemned in some manner, some enlightening moral might be drawn. But a great many, the devout believer is told, are performed either by God himself or by esteemed leaders and kings on his personal, clear-cut instruction!

• Although I, like most believers, interpret the word God as implying perfection, it is more than understandable that atheists such as Kai Nielsen, professor of philosophy at the University of Calgary, [would not.] [Allen lists others such as Sidney Hook, Paul Edwards, Michael Scriven, Walter Kaufmann, Sigmund Freud, Erich Fromm. John Dewey, and Bertrand Russell.]

• I assume that existence of a Supreme Being; therefore, on grounds that will no doubt seem peculiar to some rigorous scholars, belief in God seems to me slightly less preposterous than its opposite.

He continues that if there is a God,

• it is nothing more than a convenience of common speech to refer to that divine being as a masculine entity. Perfectly orthodox theologians invariably describe God as pure spirit. It is obvious that such a spirit can have no physical characteristics whatever, and since masculinity and femininity are physical characteristics, that would seem to settle the question.

When in the 1970s his son Brian joined a cult, Allen in Beloved Son: A Story of the Jesus Cults (1982) described the intense and sad effect upon the family. Allen’s first marriage, to Dorothy Goodman, ended in divorce but produced three sons. In 1954 he married actor Jayne Meadows, they had one son, and the marriage lasted for forty-six years. Told by physicians in 1986 that he had colon cancer, he quipped that, yes, his condition was critical: “critical of nurses, critical of doctors, critical of the food, critical of the prices.” When the hospital changed his condition to stable, he joked, “Well, you know what the condition of the average stable is.” At the time of his death from a heart attack, he had eleven grandchildren.

Martin Gardner [[1]] in 1990 wrote that Allen, like Thomas Paine, stirs up opposition by his books, concluding that a careful reading of the Bible by people “to find out for themselves whether every absurdity and horror Allen refers to is really there . . . may even lead a few away from their narrow biblicism and back to God.” Gardner, himself a deist of some kind, categorized Allen as a theist, not a humanist. Some classify both men as behind-the-times-deists with a strong link for one reason or another to the secular humanists. Allen, a Catholic during his childhood, might better be classified as a borderline deist-pantheist, close to being a religious humanist of the quasi-Unitarian variety. At the 1988 Tenth Humanist World Congress he was presented with the Distinguished Humanist Award. A signer of Humanist Manifesto 2000, he strongly supported efforts by the Council for Secular Humanism and on 9 June 1995 helped dedicate the Center’s new building.

In Allen’s last interview, with Jon Kalish for National Public Radio, Allen described himself as an agnostic. “All that means is that I really don’t know,” he said. “I assume there’s a God because I can’t figure out how anything, much less the whole universe, could have gotten here with no cause at all.” He then added,

• There are all sorts of dumb beliefs that sometimes careless thinkers think and become dignified simply because you put the word religious on them. And that’s a serious mistake. That’ll get you into big trouble. To me, the whole world seems like one endless straight line. There is an essential absurdity to human life and to humanity itself. One good result of that mind-set is it keeps your humor ever fresh because there are new outrages and new absurdities always. We’ll never run out of them.

{New York Daily News, 3 Nov 2000; HNS2, The New York Times, 1 Nov 2000}