This view is disheartening to read knowing full well how disappointing humanity often is.
It wasn't what directly converted me, but a distinct realization that I could not, in fact, have faith in humankind was part of my gradual turning away from naturalism and "humanism." The background of faith I have now comes with the realization that the realities of attempting to insist in faith in humankind always have negative consequences, sometimes potentially devastating ones.
From a Christian standpoint, the belief in faith in humankind is reminiscent of, if not distinctly part of, satanism. Satanists don't necessarily worship Satan, but rather the ideals that he put forth - as in, the desire to be one's own "god." The flaws of faith in a broken people with naturally sinful hearts should be quite clear. We know full well how disappointing, flawed, and undependable a large chunk, if not all, of humankind really is - this insistence on being able to "have faith" in it is quickly revealed to be naive, if not in fact dangerous.
Faith in humankind is distinctly the mindset that people (typically murderous tyrants) had when they attempted to "make humanity better." The majority of attempted human-made utopias, if not all of them, have resulted in bloody disaster - and not by mere coincidence. The very idea that we could have faith in humanity to better itself, to somehow become better not through an immovable moral standard or understanding of something greater than us, but rather the very idea that there is nothing greater than us, will invariably fail. It will fail guaranteed, and usually with very dystopian consequences.
The human heart is naturally wicked. Darwinists and materialists have everything completely backwards: they tend to proclaim that humankind is naturally good, that humans will naturally feel compelled to do the right thing. This is not untrue - as humans, we were created in the image of the Almighty God and have His moral goodness written in our hearts, as hard as we try to deny it. However, humanity has fallen, and is naturally drawn toward wicked behavior. We know what is good and right because God literally told us. But denial of the objective moral goodness of the one true God will easily lead a person to disaster - which is precisely what humanism does. We used to be perfectly both body and spirit, but because of the fall, humankind fell victim to the sins of the flesh. This is explained easily by the understanding of our natural instincts - we are naturally selfish. We want to eat, breed, and win on our terms and usually at the expense of others. It is the aspect of spirit - the true existence of spiritual reality, something beyond physical flesh - that allows us to realize when it's not right to do these things. Unfortunately, denial of spiritual reality easily leads to an inability to differentiate between what is actually right and what we have merely justified and believe is right, but is objectively wrong.
Allow me to take a moment to address the inevitable "good without God" argument. I chose my words carefully, if attention is paid - denial of the objective moral standard of God does not necessitate a descent into evil behavior, it merely makes it much easier. You can certainly be good without believing in God, but that goodness comes from God whether or not you admit it. When you deny the existence of an objective morality, it simply makes truly awful things like genocide and mass murder more palatable. The majority of people simply do not have the time, resources, or motivation to commit mass genocide, but the capacity for this evil truly does lie within us. When you accept the objective morality of God, it is a barrier against such evil deeds. Removing that barrier will make such evil deeds easier to access, but it does not necessitate that you will choose to access them. My argument here, however, is that a genuine belief, adherence to, and participation in "humanism" makes the likelihood of compliance with or actual performance of such evil deeds even more prominent.
Unfortunately, humanists and materialists often believe that they are doing the right thing because they have justified their selfish desires without the guidance of God's objective moral goodness. I'll refer to C.S. Lewis for more insight:
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
The very nature of fallen humankind leads ultimately to the terrible failure of any attempts to "make humanity better," or create "utopias." If we have the idea that we could do better - not with the guidance of, and this is important, a power greater than us but - through our own efforts, decisions, and actions, then we will ultimately end up creating something just as broken as we are. We are broken, thus if we create something in our image, it will be broken, too.
The very belief that we are the greatest power is flawed to its core. We are not, we cannot be. It's astounding to look at how disappointed we are with others and how frequently people make mistakes and then turn around and have someone who often witnesses these horrible failures of humanity declare that they believe that those flawed people could somehow make humanity better. How would they even pull that off? Without a standard higher than ourselves - and I'll reiterate that "ourselves" are naturally flawed, and evidently so - how could we get somewhere better?
If your starting point, if your basis for moral standards, laws, freedoms, practices, and what is good and allowed, is from its very basis flawed, then you cannot "go higher." You can't get somewhere better if your mission was flawed from its very conception. You must place your standards on a power higher than yourself if you ever intend to make yourself better. You cannot even know what "better" is without have a "worse" to compare it to. If we are already the pinnacle - the best, the highest power - then how are we to make that "better" anyway?
Let me perhaps use an analogy. Let's say you have a dilapidated house and you want to make it better. Do you utilize the materials already within the house - the broken, rotted, and molded pieces already making up that house - or do you go somewhere else, somewhere outside of the house, and get better pieces?
Hopefully this analogy is clear: the house is us. Attempting to rebuild the house without finding new materials is us trying to make humanity better with the rotted and molded materials already making us up. Choosing to go out and find better materials would be acceptance of a higher power - a higher standard than what we started with.
We can't take the broken, naturally sinful, flawed and unreliable aspects of humanity and somehow just... reorganize them, thus making humanity better. It won't work. It should be clear from the fact that it has never worked. History is important - pay attention.
It has never worked for a reason. We cannot have faith in ourselves. When left to the ideas of humans as their own god, we end up with millions of dead innocents - more than any religious war, even the sum of all religious wars. The 20th century has been the bloodiest in recorded history - it is also the most secular. This is not a coincidence. When we set the highest standard possible at the demonstrably flawed and corrupt level of humankind, we cannot possibly set our sights above that bar.
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