Review of "The End of Faith" by David Eller Ph.D.

Chris OConnor

I could have sworn I posted this review a few weeks ago, but it doesn't seem to be anywhere in this forum. So here it is again.

Reason’s Unreasonable Defender, Faith’s Unlikely Friend:

A Discussion of Sam Harris’ The End of Faith

David Eller

There are certain book titles that should be permanently banned, including those that start with “the end of” (as well as any of its variations, such as “the twilight of,” like the contrary and off-the-mark volume The Twilight of Atheism by Alister McGrath) and those that start with “the culture of.” Both of these titles have been done to death, and frankly they show a lack of imagination that should alert the potential buyer and reader of such texts. Sam Harris breaks this rule with his new book; unfortunately, this is not the only manner in which he displays a lack of imagination and a dependence on exhausted and bankrupt themes.
As a rationalist and a non-theist—an overt atheist, in fact—I was happy to see Harris’ book arrive and receive the remarkable attention that it has received. Not many treatises on the subject of the negativity of religion get much publicity in America, especially these days of religion ascendant. The comments and reviews by secularists had been overwhelmingly positive. As I began to read it, I had high hopes, which were initially supported, then disappointed, and ultimately dashed. I think Harris missed a major opportunity with this book, and I have not yet decided what its popularity means as a commentary on the Atheist community. Perhaps little more than starvation.
Harris’ work is actually three books in one—no mean feat for a text of 227 small-trim pages. The first mini-book considers the general problem of faith as an impediment to good decision making. The second focuses on the violence that religion does, with special emphasis on Islam. The third and final turns to a disquisition on morality and spirituality. In short, the first mini-book is useful, even quotable; the second is tired and cliché; and third is just dead wrong.

Book 1: What’s Wrong with Faith?
The first roughly eighty pages of The End of Faith are promising. In it he makes a strong case for the destructiveness, not just politically but intellectually, of religious faith. He accurately asserts that it is not religious extremism alone that is the problem, nor any specific religious ideology, but rather the very phenomenon of faith itself. In some nice turns of phrase, he says such things as “Faith is what credulity becomes when it finally achieves escape velocity from the constraints of terrestrial discourse—constraints like reasonableness, internal coherence, civility, and candor” (65) and “Believing strongly, without evidence, they have kicked themselves loose of the world. It is therefore in the very nature of faith to serve as an impediment to further inquiry” (45).
Anyone who knows anything about the intellectual history of Christianity knows that these statements ring true. The early church fathers were rather explicit in their views. Tertullian wrote: “When we come to believe, we have no desire to believe anything else, for we begin by believing that there is nothing else which we have to believe…. I warn people not to seek for anything beyond what they came to believe, for that was all they needed to seek for.” He continued by claiming that, “In the last resort, however, it is better for you to remain ignorant, for fear that you come to know what you should not know…. Let curiosity give place to faith, and glory to salvation. Let them at least be no hindrance, or let them keep quiet. To know nothing against the Rule [of faith] is to know everything.” Augustine after him opined: “There is another form of temptation, even more fraught with danger. This is the disease of curiosity…. It is this which draws us to try and discover the secrets of nature, those secrets which are beyond our understanding, which can avail us nothing, and which man should not wish to learn.”
Harris makes a good case, for those who have not already heard it, that faith is dishonest and mentally debilitating, depriving us of the very curiosity and critical attitude that we need in order to make empirical progress and to sort out the true from the false. Even worse, he points out the political or social dangers in faith, including the “larger set of cultural and intellectual accommodations we have made to faith itself” (45). In perhaps his strongest formulation, he concludes: “Give people divergent, irreconcilable, and untestable notions about what happens after death, and then oblige them to live together with limited resources. The result is what we see: an unending cycle of murder and cease-fire” (26).

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Chris OConnor

This is no doubt true, but it already presages problems with the direction he intends to pursue. First of all, the “cycle of murder” is only one—if the most dramatic—of the troubles with faith, one that he will stress ad nauseum throughout the book. To place such stress is to leave the impression that if religion could be shorn of its violent side, it would be okay. However, this goes against not only everything we rationalists understand about religion and faith but also against the mainstream of Harris’ own argument—that faith is inimical to clear thinking, whether it is malignant or benign. Also, we see here for the first time the confused and indulgent approach to religion itself; religion or faith is not uniquely about “what happens after death,” and to say so is to underestimate religion’s scope and hold on the human mind. There is an awful lot that happens before death that has the stain of religion on it too.
The most worrisome thing we hear in the first section is an anticipation of the spirituality/mysticism stuff to come later. Early on he claims that mystical or spiritual experiences “are relatively rare (unnecessarily so), significant (in that they uncover genuine facts about the world), and personally transformative” (40). A complete critique of this position will appear below, but suffice it to say that all three claims are suspect at best and vacuous—and “faithful”—at worst. This was my first warning that I was not in the presence of steady reason.
My other warning was that no definition or description of reason, or of faith for that matter, occurs in this book. This might be excusable in a “popular” text which is not going to be too technical, or perhaps in one that can assume its audience already knows all about it. However, his vague and sloppy use of terms like reason and reasonableness, let alone faith and belief and spirituality and mysticism, makes it clear at least to me that he is operating with a primitive conception of all of these notions. This impression was borne out in full as I proceeded.

Book 2: Violence Again (and Again)
The middle third of Harris’ book is an extended thesis on the violence that religion does. To those who do not know much about the Inquisition or the Holocaust, there is arguably some worthwhile information in these chapters. However, two objections to this use of valuable print space need to be made. The first is that the violence-and-religion connection has been made so many times, and so much better, elsewhere that Harris’ choice here is a real misstep. It is a cheap and hackneyed ploy that some lesser freethinkers enjoy but that really proves nothing. James Haught, Karen Armstrong, Mark Juergensmeyer, and an army of others have already made this point, and it was tired and cliché when they made it. Finally, if the goal is to shake religionists out of their dogmatic slumber, then this strategy is the least likely to obtain results. They can respond that not all religion is violent and that not all non-religion is non-violent—both true and salient points. Harris almost seems to grasp this point at moments; he quotes Rudolf Hess and Will Durant on the damage done by absolute certainty and unquestioning loyalty, independent from any religious content. On this count, Harris would have done well to read and refer to Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer which likewise makes the cogent argument that religion is not the fundamental issue; religion is only one manifestation (if the purest manifestation) of humanity’s propensity to differentiate into hostile camps, believe absurd things, and condemn those who do not belong to the camp and share the belief.
The second objection is that this whole branch in Harris’ presentation contradicts the main branch of the first section of the book. There he insisted that the irrationality of faith was its main problem and that its violence was just one undesirable manifestation. In fact, Jainism and Buddhism (most of the time) tend to be fairly non-violent, but they are still just as irrational and still continue to be, as he phrases it, “a fathomless sink for human resources (both financial and attentional)” (149). A passing treatment of the violence issue is certainly merited, but to switch gears so abruptly and place all the burden on the violence effectively forgives religion for its “minor” crimes against reason.
The book comes in seven chapters, and far and away the longest is chapter four, “The Problem with Islam,” weighing in at almost 50 pages (that is, just under one-quarter of the entire volume). Again, he provides some interesting and headshaking information about this religion, including extensive quotes from both the Qur’an (which he anachronistically calls the Koran) and the Hadith or traditions of Muhammad and his successors. The conclusion that he attempts and desires to support is that Islam is unique among religions in its capacity for violence. Here I think he is being trendy at best, narrow-minded at worst. Surely Islam is a religion of conviction and conflict, although he misunderstands the Muslim concepts of dar al-Islam and dar al-Harb. The dar al-Islam is the “world of submission” the “domain of peace.” It is the realm in which the true religion and obedience to the true god reigns and therefore where righteousness exists. The dar al-Harb is the “world of struggle,” the “domain of conflict.” It is not necessarily a place where open war exists, even against the domain of Islam. Rather, it is a realm where life is hard and everything comes with difficulty due to its lack of conformity to the righteous order of god. The people there may even mean well, but being out of compliance, things just don’t work out well there.
Now, it is true that Islam recognizes the reality, even the virtue, of struggling against this domain of godlessness; where truth is not known or practiced, it should and will be. It is also well to remember that Islam was from its first days a political religion in a way that Christianity was not until some three centuries into its history. As a faith and a politics, Islam married faith and power from the start, and it used that power to advance that faith. Christianity may be overestimated as a religion of peace, even powerlessness (“blessed are the weak”), but only by emphasizing its initial condition over its eventual condition. Once Christianity attained political power, in the later Roman Empire, the persecutions, forced conversions, Crusades, and Inquisitions followed quickly. If there is a “problem with Islam” (at least a unique one), it is that the power and the faith—the “church” and the “state”—were never separated in its case. It can be said, and I think it is important and accurate to say, that Islam is what Christianity would be if the Reformation and the Enlightenment had not happened in Europe. There is nothing superior about Christianity compared to Islam; all the respite we have in the Western world from the full fury of religion comes from the dilution of religion with a strong dose of reason and “toleration.”
Harris seems to grant this to a degree, since he follows up the 50-page Islam chapter with a 16-page Christianity chapter. However, the message is made: some religions are “better” than others (although not more rational, I would presume), a theme that he develops, wholly wrong-headedly, in the final section of the book.

continued...

Chris OConnor

Book 3: In Which Reason Leaves by the Back Door
I was mildly bored and disappointed by the second mini-book in Harris’ mini-trilogy, but I was only slightly prepared (although in retrospect I should have seen it coming) for the collapse of all reason in the third part. Here Harris, allegedly a major in philosophy, shows his most sophomoric side in his complete disregard for reason when it comes to his pet beliefs and theories, as well as his penchant to lecture on subjects that he has no expertise on and that do not advance his main cause in any way.
The two major subjects in the two chapters that comprise this section (other than the short epilogue) are morality and spirituality. These are topics that rationalists should tread warily in. Morality is a tar pit that sucks in everything it touches, and spirituality, as I and others have argued in these very pages, is a matter that rationalists should eschew altogether. But Harris rushes in where rationalists fear to tread.
Everything that he has to say about the two subjects is wrong. Starting with morality (in a chapter whose title is ironically shared with Michael Shermer’s book The Science of Good and Evil—and just about as confused), he announces the plan to establish a rational foundation for ethics. Of course Kant and others have already attempted this (and in their minds no doubt succeeded). What this leads him to do is to define morality as the pursuit of happiness and the avoidance of suffering (Kant defined it as duty, demonstrating that the rational approach to morality is as doomed as the irrational approach). After fifteen pages, even he has to admit that there is more to happiness than morality and more to morality than happiness (190); what he does not admit is that the association of two is problematic and faulty. First, happiness is relative; it makes carnivores happy to eat meat, although this entails imposing a degree of suffering on the world (I do not know if Harris is a vegetarian, but if he is not, then he is inconsistent if not hypocritical). Even more so, it makes some Muslims happy to spread the true faith by jihad, and it makes some Christians happy to think about the end of the world in a fiery apocalypse. Ultimately, to return to the here and now, it makes the “moral majority” happy to outlaw gay marriage, abortion, and contraception, although these same things make others unhappy.
Second, not all if even most of morality is about happiness. Frankly, there are a number of things that make us happy (like sex) that are strictly immoral by certain standards. But the serious point is that morality is difficult, it is about self-denial and opposing baser instincts and such. In some cases, morality can be downright austere, even self-mortifying. In a certain utilitarian sense it might be argued that even beating yourself with whips and chains or starving yourself conveys some pleasure, but it is not what most of us mean or seek as “happiness.” And third and finally, religion is not co-extensive with morality. This is an approach tried and failed by Stephen Jay Gould in his Rock of Ages, in which he attempted to assign science and religion to their respective “magisteria” of empirical knowledge and moral truth. The problem with this partition is that religion obviously makes empirical claims too (like when and how the earth or humanity first appeared, or what kinds of beings exist) and that morality is not always dependent on religion (there are philosophical, cultural, natural, and even rational bases for morality). Worst of all, as Nietzsche told us over a century ago, there is no such thing as “moral truth” at all.
Harris cannot allow that, however, since he explicitly rejects moral relativism. This is incidental to his case against faith, but it illustrates another flaw in his thinking that actually aligns him more closely with the faithful than the rational. He flatly pronounces that “most forms of relativism—including moral relativism…are nonsensical” (17

. This attitude is understandable because he so completely misunderstands relativism. According to him, relativists “believe that truth is just a matter of consensus” (181) and “believe that all cultural practices should be respected on their own terms” (179).
There may be some epistemological or metaphysical relativists who hold the first position (which is incoherent), but I can tell him as a practicing moral and cultural relativist (a professional cultural anthropologist) that moral/cultural relativism neither does nor can say such a thing. What moral/cultural relativism says is that all judgments of good or bad, moral or immoral, or normal and abnormal, or valuable or not valuable, are made in reference to some standard of goods or morals or norms or values. This is indisputably true. How do you determine if X or Y behavior is moral or normal, etc.? You hold it up against some “yardstick” of morals or norms—that is, the judgment of morality or normality or value is “relative to” some set of morals or norms or values. The only important question is whether or not there is more than one such standard or set, and the answer is of course there is. There are many many different standards or sets or codes of morality. Each religion, each culture has or is one. They may agree on few or many specifics, but they constitute discrete moral/norm/value systems. Which one of these systems you judge the behavior against (“relative to”) affects the judgment. Polygamy is bad in mainstream American society, but it is good, even ideal, in the vast majority of societies. Sticking out your tongue is an insult in America but a greeting in some other societies.
Is polygamy really bad? The question is as meaningless as asking whether sticking out your tongue is really an insult. It is an insult to those who learn to take it as an insult, and polygamy is bad to those who learn to take it as bad. Even further, we must ask the question, “Bad for what?” Polygamy might be good for men and bad for women. It might be good for having lots of children and for sharing household labor and bad for keeping down household expenses or getting all men married (obviously, if some men have multiple wives, other men have none). In fact, the same behavior or institution can be good for some men and bad for others, or good for men in some ways and bad for men in others. A “moral” claim like “X is good/bad” is meaningless not because it is false but because it is incomplete; until you specify the context and criteria, it is simply a sentence fragment. It is like saying “X is big”—big compared to what, “relative to” what?
Cultural or moral relativism does not apply to factual or propositional claims, however, because those matters are not cultural or moral. A statement like “The earth is round” is propositional and therefore either true or false. How do you decide which? By careful observation and equally careful interpretation of those observations. That is, propositional questions are settled by appealing to external reality. They are not relative to the viewer or culture: the earth is not round for you and flat for me. But moral claims are not propositional, although they look suspiciously like propositional ones. Rather, they are judgments, which cannot be arrived at by appealing to external reality. You can hold a sphere up and compare it to the earth; what would you hold up for comparing a moral claim against? The only answer is one of the multitude of moral systems.
But Harris’ confusion allows him to assert that some religions and “worldviews” are better than others, which is what he was apparently planning to do all along. A clear-thinking rationalist and relativist would have to ask, or explain, “Better than others at what, and for whom?” Any criterion could do equally well for this purpose, and each criterion chosen once again would yield different judgments. Missionary monotheisms are better at converting members than other religions. Islam is apparently quite good at getting people to die as martyrs, and fundamentalist Christianity is quite good at getting people to vote certain ways. It all depends on what your goals are—that is, it is relative.
Then finally comes the left-field defense of spirituality, first introduced as “intuition.” However, in order to make a space for intuition/spirituality, reason must be demoted and distorted. Harris maintains that intuition, without ever really defining it, is “the most basic constituent of our faculty of understanding” (183). That would be false if it made any sense. His conflation of intuition, “brute fact,” axiom, and other non-intuitive things is truly spellbinding, as is his demonstrated ignorance of science as method or body of knowledge. For instance, he states that scientists never “feel the slightest temptation to ponder” the notion of cause, which is absurd: since Aristotle rationalists have been pondering cause, and advances particularly in quantum physics have opened up the entire idea of cause to re-examination.
Contrary to what he seems to think, a fact is not an intuition, an axiom or principle is not an intuition, and reason is not an intuition. Incredibly, he even argues that the only objection to the intuition of magical thinking is “the intuitive content of rational thinking” (184). I cannot imagine a more muddled position—except when he suggests that experimentation and statistical analysis, even logic itself, are merely intuitive. Why do these forms of thought “convince at all”? For him, presumably for no other reason than our faith in them. But this is to misrepresent reason so thoroughly that it might as well be religion. Controlled observation and statistics and logic are valuable and trustworthy because they can be demonstrated empirically and conceptually to produce sound conclusions, or at least to avoid unsound ones. In fact, they are demonstrations, and demonstration is the very essence of reason: do not accept as true what cannot be demonstrated, from evidence and logic, to be true. To think any other way is to think irrationally.

Continued...

Chris OConnor

The damage is done, so spirituality can be imported happily now. This key concept too is not defined, at least not consistently. At one point it is “cultivation of happiness directly” (192), at another point introspection and the study of consciousness (209). It is synonymous with mysticism, and as we were forewarned in part one, mysticism/spirituality is “significant” because it uncovers “genuine facts about the world.” There are two problems with this. One is that a “science” of consciousness, let alone of happiness, does not inform about the world but at best about the self or the society; I cannot assume that my experience (especially my altered experience) of the world really says more about it than it does about me. That would be akin to saying that, if I take a psychoactive drug, I am seeing a different aspect of reality, when I am rather seeing the same reality in a different condition as a receiver or experiencer. This leads us to the second problem, which is well documented in John Horgan’s Rational Mysticism, a book Harris would have been wise to read before he made his pronouncements. Horgan, a science writer, interviewed a wide variety of “spiritual seekers” from Huston Smith to Ken Wilber to Stanislov Grof to Michael Persinger. The one thing he comes away with is that mystical encounters are as different as the people who have them: some are ineffable while others are highly specific, some are positive while others are negative, some are profound while others are trivial. Contrary to what Harris asserted earlier, they are not even always “personally transformative.”
There are a number of other gratuitous and probably false claims in this chapter, including a defense of dualism, an attack on pacifism, a denial that consciousness is a brain function, and a conclusion that mysticism is “rational.” Not only that, but a few things he says now openly contradict things he has said previously, some of these contradicted things being the very heart of his book. The most astounding one, in his broadside against pacifism, is that “I believe we must accept the fact that violence (or its threat) is often an ethical necessity” (199). With that his entire house crumbles, for the first two-thirds of the book were dedicated to a condemnation of religion as a source of violence, and even most of the final third was a paean to love. But I’m sure many jihadists, crusaders, terrorists, inquisitors, and gay-bashers would wholly agree with his last statement and would offer it themselves as their motivation. By the time he concludes, on the penultimate page of the text, that “we are the final judges of what is logical” (226), my despair as a passionate rationalist was complete.

Conclusion: One Man’s Reason is Another Man’s Religion
The End of Faith, despite its worn out title, has some things to say that are worth hearing; I heartily recommend that rationalists and Atheists read the first third or even half and then dispose of the rest. Harris’ heart is in the right place, but hearts are not thinking organs. The end of faith is a good goal, but the retreat from reason that he takes to get there is wrong and dangerous—even if “the retreat from reason” is probably a more accurate description of the current historical situation.
Harris gets some things right, so why is it so important to focus on what he gets wrong? The answer is at once simple but consequential. His book is ostensibly a plea for clearer thinking, and it rightly identifies faith as an obstacle to that process. However, faith is not the only such obstacle, any more than it is the only inspiration for violence. In an odd twist, he has overestimated the importance of faith and underrepresented the nature of reason. A well-meaning but novice rationalist could and would come away from his or her reading experience with a tainted conception of reason and no actual guidance on it at all. Harris insists that mysticism “requires explicit instructions,” but it has none; in fact, my main criticism of mysticism and religion as a type of knowledge is that they utterly lack methodology and therefore cannot produce verifiable or confident knowledge. Reason too requires explicit instructions—humans do not appear to do it well instinctively—but we do not get any help with those instructions here. Rather, we get an equation of reason with intuition. If it feels good, think it? Harris completely fails to appreciate that human intuitions are largely culturally acquired, but reason, if it is anything, ought to be cross-culturally valid.
While this book starts out hopefully as a devastating critique of religion, it ends up not only re-inserting (one particular brand of) faith but also crippling reason in order to do so. I would encourage readers—and the writer—to apply the lessons of the first mini-book to the contents of the last mini-book and to take the middle one with a grain of salt. While “spirituality” and “morality” are feel-good words (unless someone else’s are shoved down your throat), they are not the grounds for nor the results of a rational approach to the world. Honesty is perhaps the first requirement of critical thinking, and honesty compels us to admit that “spirituality” is no more rational or benign—and no less “faithful”—than any other species of religion.

* * *

Any opinions on this review? ::204

MadArchitect

Chris, I think you have posted this before, but something seems to have happened to the first post.

I only have one point to make, and it's a point that I've made a number of times before, so I won't labor it overmuch here. Eller says that the first third of the book, which argues for the danger faith poses to reason, is the soundest section, and that the last third in some degree betrays the probity of the first. In regards to that last part, he writes:

Contrary to what he seems to think, a fact is not an intuition, an axiom or principle is not an intuition, and reason is not an intuition. Incredibly, he even argues that the only objection to the intuition of magical thinking is “the intuitive content of rational thinking” (184). I cannot imagine a more muddled position—except when he suggests that experimentation and statistical analysis, even logic itself, are merely intuitive. Why do these forms of thought “convince at all”? For him, presumably for no other reason than our faith in them. But this is to misrepresent reason so thoroughly that it might as well be religion. Controlled observation and statistics and logic are valuable and trustworthy because they can be demonstrated empirically and conceptually to produce sound conclusions, or at least to avoid unsound ones. In fact, they are demonstrations, and demonstration is the very essence of reason: do not accept as true what cannot be demonstrated, from evidence and logic, to be true. To think any other way is to think irrationally.

I don't know what Harris means by "intuitive", nor what Eller takes him to mean, but I do question Eller's conception of what it means to reason.

All rational discourse is founded on some premise that is taken as given, a premise which we do not derive by demonstration and which we can only substantiate by testing it in reference to some other a priori premise. This fact was established in the 19th century by David Hume, and so far as I know, it has never been satisfactorily disputed. Even causality, says Hume, is an assumption which no rational examination can demonstrate -- there's no evidence that should serve as logical evidence that events in the past are a reliable to indicator of what events will be in the future.

This is something that we tend to forget, if we ever acknowledge it at all, and the structure of modern scientific method has had the incidental effect of burying that simple truth. We feel entitled to our conclusions because the assumptions and demonstrations which bear them up are so closely linked. Follow the chain far enough back, though, and you'll find that the first link is an assumption with its basis in faith rather than reason.

I wouldn't make that statement as the basis for an argument against science. Nor do I think it impies that science and religion are ultimately interchangeable. But I do think it should give pause to those who would argue that we've dispensed with the need for faith, or that there is something detrimental endemic to faith itself. Arguments like those presented here need to be more precise in defining when, precisely, faith is to be rejected. Without faith, there is no handhold for knowledge.

riverc0il

I am currently reading David Eller's "Natural Atheism" (great book, check out the reviews on Amazon.com) and Eller really rails against the whole mysticism concept. A full review of Eller's work is forthcoming once I am done. Just wanted to chime in that I appreciate Eller's criticism. Many of the issues Eller touches upon were covered during our discussion of "End of Faith." Eller is a much better spokesperson for Atheism in print than Harris. Then again, I think most atheists would be better spokes persons than Harris.

JulianTheApostate

Chris, thanks for posting that review, which I hadn't seen before. Eller's views are rather similar to mine, though he's much better informed than I am, and his opinion of the first third of the book is more charitable than my impression.

Mad:
All rational discourse is founded on some premise that is taken as given, a premise which we do not derive by demonstration and which we can only substantiate by testing it in reference to some other a priori premise.

Actually, Eller seems to agree with that stance, as can be seen in his defense of relativism. Harris would disagree, which was of the reasons I was underwhelmed with his discourse.

Chris OConnor

I'll shoot Eller an email and see if he would like to interact in this thread/discussion.


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