They maintain that this model of political system must be...

They maintain that this model of political system must be confined to a time when human beings lacked the knowledge or experience to organize their social order and were in need of religion to arrange their legal, economic and cultural relationships. However, secularism is not a doctrine that merely addresses the relationship between religion and politics. Essentially, it is a radical approach to the role of religion and revelation in shaping human knowledge.

Secular rationality maintains that the human intellect is capable of forming its own knowledge independent of revelation. According to this, reason in itself is self-sufficient and autonomous. Hence, mankind is capable of constructing natural and human sciences as well as philosophy, law and ethics without the aid of God or religion. Secular thinking, therefore, leaves very little scope for religion.

According to secularist thought, every instance in which the human intellect is capable of gaining knowledge exists as part of the exclusive realm of the human being, without any need for faith or revelation. Such reasoning constrains the role of religion to regulating the individual relationship between man and his creator, while isolating it from the social and political order.

This is because social relationships form part of “human” affairs and not “divine” affairs; they are “extra-religious” as opposed to “intra- religious”. Law, economy and political decisions as well as the formations of our social structures and systems of rights and duties are all considered as merely dealing with the relationship between man and man, not man and God. Therefore, religion in these cases must delegate everything to human reasoning and science.

This concise overview of secular thinking illustrates that the reduction of secularism to a political doctrine, which purely insists on the separation of faith from politics, is incorrect. The isolation of religion from politics is but one of the many accomplishments of secular rationality. Advocates of this view insist on the disengagement of religion, not only from politics, but also from ethics, art, law, philosophy and the sciences.

Consequently, they advocate not only a secular state, but secular laws, a secular culture, a secular science and so on.