The surprising atheist
This week I finished reading The End of Faith by Sam Harris. It was
the final leg of a tripod of books starting with Daniel Dennett's
Breaking the Spell and Richard Dawkin's The God Delusion.
Some reviewers lumped these three books together, because each
attempts to make a strong argument for reason and science and against
supernatural religion, and because they came out at about the same
time. But having read all three books, I can say that the "unholy
trinity' as some have called Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris, are in fact
more different from each other, and more surprising than their critics
have claimed. Harris is perhaps the most surprising of the three.
Dennett is the most scholarly, and the most charitable, inviting
readers to consider the possibility that religion is a cultural
phenomenon that evolved naturally, and presenting a variety of
explanations of how this might have happened. Once we realize that
religions are products of cultural evolution, it becomes possible to
study, evaluate, and criticize them in a scientific way.
Dawkins takes a different tack, spending quite a bit of effort trying
to demolish traditional arguments for the existence of God, and trying
to provide evolutionary explanations for the universe and life without
resorting to a God concept. He also tries to build a case for viewing
religious indoctrination of children as a form of child abuse, a case
which he blunts needlessly by dismissing child sexual abuse as
relatively unimportant. On this point Dawkins is simply wrong. All
forms of child abuse are harmful, it isn't necessary to trivialize one
form of abuse to recognize another. But the rest of his book is a
fairly conventional argument for atheism.
Sam Harris takes an entirely different course. For Harris, the
questions of whether God exists or how religions evolved to their
present form aren't worth spending much time on. He is more interested
in discussing which religious ideas are most likely to kill us, by
producing terrorists who are compelled by faith to accept beliefs
without evidence and to want to destroy those who believe differently.
Harris has plenty to criticize about moderate Christianity and even
Buddhism, but he sees Islam itself as a particular threat to
humanity's survival.
A foundational assumption to Harris' thesis seems to be that beliefs
completely determine how a person acts in the world. He is almost
right about this but not quite. A more accurate statement would be
that beliefs determine how a person judges the actions of others, and
visualizes or idealizes how they themselves should have acted or
should act. But reasonable people weigh their beliefs against
real-world concerns and attachments like family and career and life
itself.
It is this disconnect between belief and action that is the world's
greatest reprieve. For example, Harris reports that an alarmingly
large numbers of Muslims support suicide bombings against Israel and
America. If everyone who held this belief ACTED on it, terrorism would
be 1000 times worse than it actually is. But it is not. In the end,
few of us are willing to sacrifice our lives for what we believe. Most
people, whatever their religious ideas, want to live. This is a good
thing.
I'm sure that Harris' idea that belief determines action is
responsible for some of his surprising opinions that under certain
conditions, torture is as justified as collateral damage in modern
war, and pacifism is immoral. In a world where belief determined
action, it would not be enough to challenge, confront, and debunk
dangerous ideas. Their adherents would have to be fought and actively
resisted. Failing to do so would be immoral. But we don't live in such
a world.
Harris surprises again in his approach to spirituality. While terms
like faith and religion get his goat, spirituality and mysticism do
not. Harris believes that spiritual experiences are worth looking
into, and that atheists should be more curious about them. I agree.
This segment from a recent speech seems representative:
One problem with atheism as a category of thought, is that it seems
more or less synonymous with not being interested in what someone
like the Buddha or Jesus may have actually experienced. In fact,
many atheists reject such experiences out of hand, as either
impossible, or if possible, not worth wanting. Another common
mistake is to imagine that such experiences are necessarily
equivalent to states of mind with which many of us are already
familiar--the feeling of scientific awe, or ordinary states of
aesthetic appreciation, artistic inspiration, etc.
As someone who has made his own modest efforts in this area, let me
assure you, that when a person goes into solitude and trains
himself in meditation for 15 or 18 hours a day, for months or years
at a time, in silence, doing nothing else--not talking, not
reading, not writing--just making a sustained moment to moment
effort to merely observe the contents of consciousness and to not
get lost in thought, he experiences things that most scientists and
artists are not likely to have experienced, unless they have made
precisely the same efforts at introspection. And these experiences
have a lot to say about the plasticity of the human mind and about
the possibilities of human happiness.
So, apart from just commending these phenomena to your attention,
I'd like to point out that, as atheists, our neglect of this area
of human experience puts us at a rhetorical disadvantage. Because
millions of people have had these experiences, and many millions
more have had glimmers of them, and we, as atheists, ignore such
phenomena, almost in principle, because of their religious
associations--and yet these experiences often constitute the most
important and transformative moments in a person's life. Not
recognizing that such experiences are possible or important can
make us appear less wise even than our craziest religious
opponents.
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