The
End of Faith by Sam Harris (2004) presents a brand
of atheism that is quite radical in terms of attitude
and its hatred for God. This is understandable, considering that it emerged out
of the secular age and the vast advances brought about by science which render faith in God dispensable and intellectually
superfluous. In this paper, I will summarily dismiss the contentions of Harris by
presenting the unity of faith and reason in the secular age.
Ethics and Religion
Harris claims that religious faith
distorts our view of the world, although he also suggests that the influence of
religion in the West is benign. He criticizes as ridiculous the suggestion of Tom
DeLay that the Columbine HS shooting is due to the teaching of evolution in
schools. He also accuses US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia as an advocate
for theocracy for saying that the government derives its moral authority from
God.
Harris says that religion infringes
upon the rights of men to be happy. He cites the example of marijuana. He says
that the drug should be legalized, as it is wrong, he claims, to punish freedom
loving men for their private pleasure. He also criticizes the position of
conservatives on stem cell research, saying that embryos don’t feel any harm.
He finds as absurd that the embryo is accorded all the protections of a fully
developed human being.[1]
Harris dismisses all the claims of religion
and their relevance to the ethical life of man. For Harris, the pervasive idea
that religion is somehow the source of our deepest ethical intuitions is
absurd.[2] He
says that concern for others was not an invention of any prophet.[3] He
rejects theology is a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, he says, it is
ignorance with wings.[4]
Citing Richard Dawkins, he agrees with the idea that what can be asserted
without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.[5]
Ethics for Harris is based on moral concern.
He writes: “How is it, after all, that a Nazi guard could return each day from
his labor at the crematoria and be a loving father to his children? The answer
is straightforward: the Jews he spent the day torturing and killing were not
objects of his moral concern.”[6] He
rejects moral relativism, suggesting that suicide bombing is wrong in the absolute
sense. The omitted premise in this contention by Harris is that for him all
suicide bombers are Muslims. He must have missed the story of the Japanese Kamikazes who flew their planes to
suicide bombing missions in honor of their emperor during the last world war. It
goes without saying that suicide bombing is wrong because it is a violation of
human rights. Harris’s claim that only Muslims can be suicide bombers is more
of a popular prejudice and is unfair to other Muslims who work peacefully in
society.
Harris rejects relativism on the
basis of religious tolerance. For example, the stoning to death of an
adulterous woman or the honor killing of a girl is unacceptable. Given the
requisite belief about honor, Harris says that a man will be desperate to kill
his own daughter upon learning that she was raped.[7]
Harris says that we are all in agreement regarding this, for “to say that we
can never agree on any question of ethics is like saying we can never agree on
any question of physics.”[8] If
there are some unsettled moral issues, Harris tells us that respect for
diversity is nothing but an intellectual holding pattern.[9] For
him, for ethics to matter, the happiness or suffering of others must matter to the
individual.[10]
Religion and Spirituality
For Harris, the alternative of
spirituality exists. According to him, some experiments in consciousness
support the idea that meditation is a source of happiness. He argues that consciousness
is the sole basis of our judgments. The contents of consciousness, including
the self, for him, are mental acts of representation. He cites that the wisdom
of the East, its mysticism, supports the unity between reason, spirituality and
ethics. As against the above view, Harris notes that religions are hostile to
one another. Thus, he says that “the God of Abraham is not only unworthy of the
immensity of creation; he is unworthy even of man.”[11] Harris
ends the book by saying:
No personal God need be
worshipped for us to live in awe at the beauty and immensity of creation. No
tribal fictions need to be researched for us to realize, one fine day, that we
do, in fact, love our neighbors, that our happiness is inextricable from their
own, and that our interdependence demands that people everywhere be given the
opportunity to flourish. The days of our religious identities are clearly
numbered. Whether the days of civilization itself are numbered would seem to
depend, rather too much, on how soon we realize this.[12]
Science, Religion and Morality
Harris intends to show, firstly, that
religious faith is dangerous, for our belief in a transcendent lawgiver may
lead us to kill one another. Secondly, he argues that religious faith is
unfounded or without basis in reality. Harris tries to prove the first argument
by citing the 9/11 attacks as a product of Islam, suggesting that Muslims
around the world are against non-Muslims. He explains the second argument by
comparing religious faith to science, the latter being founded on empirical evidence
and logical consistency. However, Ravi Zacharias quotes:
Proverbs 18:17: “The first to speak in
court sounds right – until the cross examination.”
Zacharias in The End of Reason writes that “Harris’s biggest complaint against
God is that so much suffering is experienced by humanity in the name of God’s
sovereignty and goodness; yet in his own little world he would, I suspect, turn
a blind eyes to any incidental pain in order to freely proclaim liberation from
falsehood.”[13]
In addition, I think that a world without God being promoted by Harris is cold,
uncompassionate and arrogant. Zacharias, who responds to Harris from a
Christian perspective, says that “eventually, belief in a world birthed by
accident, a life that has no purpose, morality without a point of reference
except for those absolutes that have been smuggled in – well hidden behind the
mask of relativism – and death that ends in oblivion made me prefer the
possibility of this oblivion to the sheer weight of the emptiness of a God-less
world.[14]
Albert Einstein (1984) writes that “the desire for guidance, love and support
prompts men to form the social and moral conception of God.”[15]
Harris
has not given sufficient explanation as to the origin of the universe or if he
has an alternative. If he wants to dismiss the claims of religion as false,
then Zacharias believes that Harris must account for the beginning of a
God-less universe. Zacharias notes that “Big Bang cosmology, along with
Einstein’s theory of general relativity, implies that there is indeed an ‘in
the beginning.’ We know quite well that this singularity is not really a point;
it is the whole three-dimensional space compressed to zero size.”[16]
He adds, convincingly, that Bertrand Russell’s suggestion that the universe is
just there is clearly not a scientific explanation.[17] Science,
in this regard, has no incontrovertible proof against God’s existence.[18]
Zacharias emphasizes the idea that
nothing that exists (or that is) can explain its own existence.[19]
In order to argue that a random universe or a universe that emerges out of
nowhere is impossible, he mentions Donald Page of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. Page, according to
Zacharias, has calculated the odds against our universe randomly taking a form
suitable for life as one out of 10,000,000,000124 - a number that
exceeds all imagination.[20]
Thus, Zacharias is saying that “one
would have to conclude that the chance of the random ordering of organic
molecules is not essentially different from a big fat zero. Perhaps that’s why
they call it singularity, because it is without definition or empirical explanation.
That is the zero to which Sam Harris gives credit for everything; that’s his
explanation for why we are here.”[21] Below,
Zacharias strongly asserts:
“If life is random,
then the inescapable consequence, first and foremost, is that there can be no
ultimate meaning and purpose to existence. As individuals and collectively as
cultures, we humans long for meaning. But if life is random, we have climbed
the evolutionary ladder only to find nothing at the top.”[22]
Now, while Harris puts all the blame
on religion with regard to the greatest evils in the world, it is wrong to
suggest that a religion-less world is a better alternative and will guarantee
human well-being. As Zacharias points out, “atheists can’t have it both ways.
If the murder of innocents is wrong, it is wrong not because science tells us
it is wrong but because every life has intrinsic worth – a postulate that
atheism simply cannot deduce.”[23] The
arrogance of Harris is reflective of today’s contemporary nihilism, of a man
who is self-confident that values and everything else depends upon human
choice. Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly have described this attitude in All Things Shining (2011):
The man of confidence
is often a compelling figure. Driven and focused, he is committed to bringing
the world into line with his vision of how it should be. He may believe that
his vision for the world is a good one, that the world will be a better place
if he can shape it to his will for the better. But there is danger to this
attitude as well. Too often it turns out that the blustery self-confidence of
such a person hides its own darker origins: it is really just arrogance
combined with ambition, or worse yet a kind of self-delusion.[24]
Harris, like Peter Singer, being a
consequentialist, does not recognize the inherent value of human life. Harris
advocates the use of torture to extract information from suspected terrorists
in order to save people, so he is no different from those who tortured people
in the medieval period in their witch hunts. But what if this person is
innocent? Harris blames all Christians for the Holy Inquisition. Harris blames
all Muslims for 9/11. So what has happened to individual accountability? What
has happened to the capacity of each to make valid moral judgments? Should we
blame all Germans, without exception, during the time of Hitler, including
Oskar Schindler, for the Nazi atrocities?
While from a purely humanist point of
view, people can be good though they might not believe in any deity, still as
noted by Zacharias, there is no logical explanation for how the intuition
toward morality could develop from sheer matter and chemistry.[25]
Belief in God, following this point, does not make us evil as suggested by
Harris, for the existence of a God who is a law-giver does not contradict our
judgments on good and evil. Zacharias writes that "when you assume a moral law, you must
posit a moral lawgiver – the source of the moral law."[26]
The Distinction between Faith and
Reason
Let
us proceed to the second question, what is the distinction between belief and
faith? According to Msgr. Dennis Villarojo, “Harris does not make a clear
distinction between belief and faith. He lumps belief together with faith,” and
that faith for Harris means “adherence to a particular truth-claim without the
backing of evidence.”[27]
Msgr. Villarojo adds that for Harris, “faith is a form of belief whose specific
object is the existence of God,” and that “since the existence of God is
unverifiable, he considers such belief as unjustified.”[28]
Msgr. Villarojo explains that since
Harris requires scientific evidence for all-truth claims, he is a realist in
this regard, one who believes in objective reality.[29]
Msgr. Villarojo explains the incongruence in this kind of logic, for while
“science is verifiable by its own method, why would faith be verified by
science?”[30]
Harris is suggesting that the only acceptable standard is scientific
verifiability, which means that the existence of God should also pass empirical
or scientific verifiability. Msgr. Villarojo further explains that Harris “accepts
scientific intuition but rejects metaphysical intuition,” for instance, that
there is “order in nature”, an order that points to a Creator which
evolutionists, according to Msgr. Villarojo, “simply replaced with chance and
randomness.”[31]
For Harris, all religious claims,
including the immaculate conception of Christ, the resurrection and
trans-substantiation, are bereft of any evidence and must therefore be
rejected. For him, since there is no empirical proof for the existence of God,
faith in God must be dismissed. In addition, what Harris suggests in his book
is that religion is squarely to blame on all these atrocities committed by
terrorists, and culture, politics and even economic hegemony have nothing to do
with all the ills in the world. Harris simply missed the redeeming aspect of
faith – faith is ultimately about persons.
Our Christian faith has taught us that many
people have sacrificed themselves for the sake of others, for instance, we can
cite the case of the young Jesuit scholastic Ritchie Fernando who died
shielding young children from a grenade blast. In contrast, a world without God
is dangerous for humanity. A world without God is dangerous to defenseless
unborn children. Maybe, Harris has forgotten that a God-less Hitler has caused
the extermination of six million Jews, a God-less Stalin has killed a million
Ukrainians through forced famine when they refused his farm collectivization
program and that a God-less Pol Pot has massacred more than two million
Cambodians during the Khmer Rouge regime. Zacharias writes:
Harris is using the
same kind of bizarre logic used by Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa. On the Senate
Floor, in support of embryonic stem cell research, he took out a pad paper, put
a dot on it and said, “What I’ve just put on that piece of paper is a dot, a
little dot. That is the size of the embryos that we’re taking the stem cells
from.” Does Senator Harkin remember that a dot is all he was when he started
off? Should he therefore be flung onto the garbage heap if he becomes
brain-dead someday? No, because the past tense of his life demands that we
respect the future of his mortal remains. The past tense of every human being
is that dot.[32]
Religious Pluralism and Tolerance
There
are plausible reasons for human solidarity even in the plurality of religions. Sam
Harris does not seem to understand religious pluralism. He does not understand the
idea of ‘freedom of conscience’ which characterizes the liberal attitude of
freedom-loving people in many democratic states. Harris disrespects the belief
of people and ergo, he is dismissing the rights of people to practice their
religion.
Harris is intolerant of the belief of others
while not recognizing his own arrogance and his apparent hatred for a group of people
whom he accuses of crimes on the basis of their religion. Harris must
understand that innocent Muslims too have suffered, for instance during the
Kosovo war where the men of Milosevic massacred 8,000 innocent Muslim men and
children, their dead bodies run over by tanks, on the basis that they were
Muslims and nothing else.
The
End of Faith has shown nothing that promotes peace. It has too much belief
in secularism without recognizing the value of our faith in God even in this
post-modern age. Faith and reason can have a unique relationship that fosters
solidarity. There is nothing unreasonable in the idea of inter-religious
dialogue as a way to promote a culture of peace among diverse peoples. What
Harris does is he foments hatred and prejudice against a group of people who
are born, by natural lottery, a Muslim. He fails to recognize that while we may
worship different deities, there exists an absolute in us – our humanity and
the capacity to recognize the inherent moral worth of each.
It is in the recognition of our
inherent humanity and the respect for basic human rights where inter-religious
dialogue can take place. The idea of compassion and love for humanity promote
peace and not our hatred for others. Thus, Zacharias is correct in saying that
“the disrespectful way in which Sam Harris has addressed Muslims makes me
wonder whether, if he were to make these same statements publicly in a Muslim
country, he would leave unscathed. His prejudice is recognizable a mile away,
and the mutual antipathy is literally a dead end.”[33]
[2]
Ibid., 171
[3]
Ibid., 172
[4]
Ibid., 173
[5]
Ibid., 176
[6] Ibid.
[7]
Ibid., 188
[8]
Ibid., 182
[9]
Ibid.
[10]
Ibid., 185
[11]
Ibid., 226
[12]
Ibid., 227
[13]
Ravi Zacharias, The End of Reason,
(Michigan: Zondervan, 2008), 15.
[14]
Ibid., 26
[15]
Albert Einstein, As I see it, (New
York: Citadel Press Books, 1984), 26
[16]
Zacharias, The End of Reason, 31
[17]
Ibid., 32
[18]
Ibid.
[19] Ibid.
[20]
Ibid., 35
[21]
Ibid.
[22]
Ibid., 39
[23]
Ibid., 51-52
[24]
Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly, All
Things Shining, (New York: Free Press, 2011), 5.
[25]
Zacharias, The End of Reason, 55
[26]
Ibid.
[27] Msgr.
Dennis Villarojo, “The Dialectics of Faith and Reason,” in PHAVISMINDA Journal 8:2009, 106.
[28]
Ibid.
[29] Ibid.,
106
[30]
Ibid., 107
[31]
Ibid., 106
[32] Zacharias,
The End of Reason, 109-110
[33]
Ibid., 77
