james wood reviews sam harris

James Wood Reviews Sam Harris

I don't think you need a subscription to read the whole thing (so do),

because James Wood's review of Sam Harris' Letter to a Christian

Nation is terrific. Wood is a non-believer, but in his usual smart

way, he manages to be kind and respectful to any potential reader,

something that polemicists like Harris aren't interested in. With

half-hearted apologies for the length, here are three excerpts I found

particularly thought-provoking, moving, in order, from critiquing

religion to tackling some philosophy to critiquing the adamant

atheists:

After years of hearing thousands of petitions offered to the Lord,

I cannot recall a single answered prayer.

How would you know, asks the believer, since God's ways are

inscrutable to us? But prayer is one of those cases where an

inscrutability argument will not work, because one knows what one

has oneself requested, and therefore what has been denied. If you

pray for a member of your congregation to get better and she dies,

your prayer was not answered. To retort that God's mysterious way

of answering your prayer--"but God needed her by his side in

heaven, that's why he let her die"--might involve not really

answering your prayer at all is essentially to nullify prayer, to

kill it. I knew that at fifteen. Years later I read Samuel Butler's

The Way of All Flesh, with its extraordinary image of the futility

of prayer: a bee, inside a room, mistaking the floral wallpaper for

the real thing and briefly attempting to extract its illusory

pollen.

***

The model is Bertrand Russell's "celestial teapot," gleefully

quoted by Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion. If, says Russell, I

told you that a celestial teapot was orbiting the sun but that you

could not see it, nobody would be able to disprove me; "but if I

were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved,

it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt

it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense." God is

like the teapot, we are supposed to infer. Dawkins uses Russell to

argue that we cannot prove God's non-existence, but then we cannot

prove anything's non-existence. "What matters," writes Dawkins, "is

not whether God is disprovable (he isn't), but whether his

existence is probable.... Some undisprovable things are sensibly

judged far less probable than other undisprovable things."

I agree with (Richard) Dawkins's conclusion, and consider God

highly improbable, but I dislike the way he gets there. It seems to

occur neither to him nor to Russell that belief in God is not like

belief in a teapot. The referent--the content of the

belief--matters here. God may be just as undisprovable as the

teapot, but belief in God is a good deal more reasonable than

belief in the teapot, precisely because God cannot be reified,

cannot be turned into a mere thing, and thus entices our

approximations. There is a reason, after all, that no one has ever

worshiped a teapot: it does not allow enough room to pour the fluid

of our incomprehension into it.

Interestingly, Dawkins himself seems to agree with this complaint.

In a recent conversation in Time with the geneticist Francis

Collins (who is a believing Christian), a conversation in which

both men spoke eloquently, Dawkins was pushed by Collins to admit

that, in Dawkins's words, "there could be something incredibly

grand and incomprehensible beyond our understanding." That's God,

said Collins. Yes, but it could be any of billions of Gods, replied

Dawkins: "the chance of its being a particular God, Yahweh, the God

of Jesus, is vanishingly small." In other words, the God of a

particular scripture and tradition is a parochial and inherently

improbable notion. But the idea of some kind of creator, said

Dawkins, "does seem to be a worthy idea. Refutable--but

nevertheless grand and big enough to be worthy of respect." To

which one should add: by definition, then, this "grand and big"

idea is not analogically disproved by referring to celestial

teapots or vacuum cleaners, which lack the necessary bigness and

grandeur.

***

(Harris') brand of public atheism is very good at the necessary

disrespecting of religion, and it has a properly hygienic function.

But how worthy of respect is it itself? The problem is that its

bright certainty about the utter silliness of religion leads very

quickly away from philosophy and argument. There is a dismaying

gap, in these books, between the righteous anger of the critique of

the many absurdities of religious belief and the attempts to

account for why people have believed this apparent nonsense for so

many centuries. I would rather that these writers refrained from

speculation altogether than plunge into their flimsy

anthropological kit bag. It is peculiar indeed to read (Richard)

Dawkins's eloquent pages on evolution, and on how evolution may in

the end solve the question of who created us, and then to find that

very evolutionary theory being applied in the most hypothetical,

rampantly unscientific ways to the question of why we have believed

in God for so long.