En Garde!!!! Sam Harris & "The End of Faith"

The customary cheek-slapping  is past, the "seconds" have been named, the weapons have been selected, the meeting place is arranged, all that is left is for the blood-letting to commence.

Sam Harris, author of "The End of Faith" is deadly serious and he desires a quick, decisive and deadly victory  in the duel this book initiates.  He is no novice swordsman either.  For the life of me, his picture and manner brings to mind the most despicable villain ever to grace the big screen, Tim Roth's character, Archibald Cunningham,  in Rob Roy.  He even looks like him a bit.  But, be warned, like Archibald, this man is an expert duelist, highly trained in deadly skills and quite content to skewer his opponent without the slightest trace of remorse.

Cross posted at Gadfly's Muse

The back cover tells us that Mr. Harris is a graduate in philosophy from Stanford University where, (presumeably) he studied both Eastern and Western religious traditions, along with a variety of spiritual disciplines.  He is completing a doctorate in neuroscience, studying the neural basis of belief, disbelief, and uncertainty.  Hmmm.  We had better be getting in shape for this one.

I will attempt to deal with Mr. Harris' thought sequentially and not just jump to the bottom line. 

He grounds his attack, as all good fencers do, on a well balanced, stable footing.  Chapter 1 is entitled "Reason in Exile" and he begins with this observation:

"A belief is a lever, that, once pulled, moves almost everything else in a person's life.... Your beliefs define your vision of the world; they dictate your behavior; they determine your emotional responses to other human beings.  If you doubt this, consider how your experience would suddenly change if you came to believe one of the following propositions:

1. You have only two weeks to live.
2. You've just won a lottery prize of one hundred million dollars
3. Aliens have implanted a receiver in your skull and are manipulating your thoughts.

These are mere words--until you believe them.  Once believed, they become part of the very apparatus of your mind, determining your desires, fears, expectations, and subsequent behavior."

I agree.  This is as fine a synopsis of the practical reality of  "belief" or "faith" as any I have seen.  If "faith" does not issue forth in "works" it is no faith at all.  Furthermore, in the tradition of Jacques Ellul, I agree with Harris that the Christian faith is inherently "revolutionary", that by its very nature it is subversive of the status quo whatever that may instantaneously be.  Whatever the prevailing context, the Christian recognizes that his prayer must still be "thy Kingdom come" because the status quo, no matter how amenable, is yet falen far short of fully reflecting the glory of God in Christ.  Therefore, if the truths of the Christian faith are accepted at the gut level, so that its precepts do in fact govern the "apparatus" of your mind, then like Paul on his entry into Athens (Acts 17:16), one must neccessarily be "provoked" by the idols of false belief that are enshrined in the institutions of society through which one travels or in which one resides.  Mr. Harris is absolutely correct in this.

But,  Mr. Harris recognizes that there are no "desires, fears, expectations, and behavior" that can truly be separated from "belief."  Other than the purely animalistic functions (hunger, thirst, sexual release, fear of falling,  etc.) which motivate all living beings, the higher functionings of the human mind manifest these same categories of response that are determined and conditioned by the a priori expectations that are the basis of all human thought. 

Furthermore, Mr. Harris correctly observers "We cannot live by reason alone.  This is why no quantity of reason, applied as antiseptic, can compete with the balm of faith, once the terrors of this world begin to intrude upon our lives." (p. 43)  But, like Michael Shermer (The Science of Good & Evil) Mr. Harris is convinced that with time and appropriate investigation, that a balm to supplement reason can be supplied through reason.  His idea is that once the nuerological processes are fully understood that appropriate measures can be taken which will provide individuals with all the comforts religion now supplies without all those nasty side-effects, like wars, trials for heresy, burnings at the stake, and the rest.

And it is here that Mr. Harris, after skillful parrying arguments for religion previously noted, makes his first deadly thrust.  "(Many of us have concluded), wrongly, that human beings have needs that only faith in certain fantastical ideas can fulfill. ...  I hope to show that spirituality can be-- indeed, must be--- deeply rational, even as it eluciadates the limits of reason."

It is here that we see the essence of the argument already present.  Mr. Harris is presuming that religious faith is irrational but that spirituality, once understood, is not.  Mr. Harris' entire epistemology is thus revealed as being entirely experiential.  The range and limitations of knowledge are the range and limits of experience.  Reality consists of that which is experienced.  Religion is irrational but spirituality, since it is an observed phenomenon is not.

I can imagine where this is headed.  All that is essentially needed is to achieve the proper neurological balance through chemical or other external stimulation and all that man needs to deal with the awful reality of  a world wherein unhappiness in varying degrees accompanies all of life, shall be provided.  Man will be able to retreat into an induced state of well being  such that pesky questions such as "Why are we here?  What is the purpose of life?  Is there really such a thing as "love"?" will simply stop being a bother.

What Mr. Harris is positing sounds like something that has much more in common with an opium den than it does anything else.  I know that his vision is for a day when beautiful people, filled with intellectual vigor, and motivated by nothing more than a life-fulfilling quest for knowledge pursue lives of strength, conviction and benevolent tolerance, and that doesn't seem too far removed from most pictures of "heaven" that have crossed my acquaintance.

So, at its root, Mr. Harris is proposing to replace religion with a Trojan horse of spirituality.  Only the army hidden within this horse will prove to be more destructive of true humanity than any of the "religions" he so despises.