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Sam Harris: Science Must Destroy Religion

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Robert Tulip

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Sam Harris: Science Must Destroy Religion

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A short 2011 essay by Sam Harris called “Science Must Destroy Religion” is at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-harri ... 13153.html Here I comment on Harris’s essay line by line.
Sam Harris wrote: Most people believe that the Creator of the universe wrote (or dictated) one of their books.
That is a gross exaggeration and caricature of the nature and extent of religious belief. Even if people gave assent to this simplistic formulation, most believers do not have the level of arrogant certainty that Harris here implies. Nonetheless, Harris is diagnosing a significant cultural problem.
Sam Harris wrote: Unfortunately, there are many books that pretend to divine authorship, and each makes incompatible claims about how we all must live.
Yes, true. That is a good illustration of the need to update religious consciousness to make it compatible with scientific truth. However, the implication Harris draws from this observation of a generalised attack on all religion in the name of science is not coherent.
Sam Harris wrote: Despite the ecumenical efforts of many well-intentioned people, these irreconcilable religious commitments still inspire an appalling amount of human conflict.
Is it really the religious beliefs that inspire conflict? Only to some extent. Religion is a proxy for economic and social differences between communities as much as the direct cause and inspiration for conflict that Harris alleges. People across Asia are not going to start living without religion any time soon. In opposing religion on principle Harris is not suggesting any practical way to reduce conflict or promote social reform. Social evolution is about making religion rational, not opposing religion.
Sam Harris wrote:In response to this situation, most sensible people advocate something called “religious tolerance.” While religious tolerance is surely better than religious war, tolerance is not without its liabilities.
The problem with tolerance is that it can lead to relativism, the idea that contradictory statements can both be true. In the politically correct tolerant world of relativism, objective truth does not exist and we cannot judge between conflicting claims. Relativism is logically false, since it contradicts the logical argument that a statement cannot be true and false.
Sam Harris wrote: Our fear of provoking religious hatred has rendered us incapable of criticizing ideas that are now patently absurd and increasingly maladaptive.
I am not sure that it is a “fear of provoking religious hatred” that is in play here. There is actually a lot of criticism of stupid religion. But the problem is that the stupid false ideas are embedded within complex social traditions, and often have a metaphorical content which gives them a power and meaning that is hard to disentangle. For example, Saint Paul claimed that the salvation provided by the blood of Jesus repaired the damage caused by the fall of Adam. So that means without Adam and the Young Earth Creationist theory about the fall from grace, traditional Christianity finds it hard to see the point of Jesus Christ. But I think that just pointing out that YEC is false does not even enter the terrain of the psychology and culture of this topic, and of the hold that the myth of redemption through the cross has on believers.
Sam Harris wrote: It has also obliged us to lie to ourselves — repeatedly and at the highest levels — about the compatibility between religious faith and scientific rationality.
Harris is making a really important point about the sociocultural impact of delusion, the trauma and suffering caused by false belief generated by fear. My view is that God is a metaphor for the natural order of the cosmos. What I term the traditional ‘entification’ of this metaphor, converting a symbol into a purported existing entity, is delusional and harmful. Belief in God is a psychological projection of human desires, not a revelation coming from a divine supernatural entity. Psychoanalysis is needed to discuss what people really mean by God, and to make metaphorical language more acceptable, as a process of conversion from the supernatural to the natural. As soon as we say miracles are possible, for example, we have taken a step along a false path. Here the Bible metaphor of the hard and narrow path that leads to salvation is valuable as indicating scientific method, while the broad and easy road to hell is typified by the acceptance of false metaphors as referring to supernatural entities.
Sam Harris wrote: The conflict between religion and science is inherent and (very nearly) zero-sum.
No, that is a really dumb comment from Harris based on a false and partial theory on his part of the nature of religion. What is needed now is a new reformation of religion to make it compatible with science. The idea that humans could do away with religion is a bit like saying we could survive without a cerebellum. A zero sum conflict means that the advance of science involves the retreat of religion. But that is not at all what is required. Instead, religion has to evolve to adapt to the emerging environmental niche created by scientific knowledge. It is not possible to maintain that the same statement is true and false. That means that literally false statements in religion, as proven by science, have to be reinterpreted, not simply abandoned. Cultural progress occurs through evolution, not revolution.
Sam Harris wrote: The success of science often comes at the expense of religious dogma; the maintenance of religious dogma always comes at the expense of science. It is time we conceded a basic fact of human discourse: either a person has good reasons for what he believes, or he does not.
This simplistic either/or binary logic fails to engage with the reality of religion. Psychological comfort can be a “good reason” for holding a belief that is literally false. So Harris’s “basic fact of human discourse” is anything but: a good reason for a person in a comfortable rich and safe place is very different from a good reason for belief in the context of poverty and conflict.
Sam Harris wrote: When a person has good reasons, his beliefs contribute to our growing understanding of the world.
Harris is using this term “good reasons” as a mythological totem, standing for scientific knowledge, which Harris wants to extend into a worldview. I agree that advancing scientific values is a good thing, but the question of how to do that is complex, and is not helped by denigrating people of low education. Social protection and solidarity can be a good reason to hold a false belief that prevents scientific advance. The whole debate between science and religion has to be seen against the complex terrain of human tribal identity, not just as an intellectual debating exercise. That means the real challenge is to reform religion, not to adopt some purist scientific line of claiming that religion could be abolished. In fact, Harris’s totemic use of ‘good reason’ is a religious statement on his part.
Sam Harris wrote: We need not distinguish between “hard” and “soft” science here, or between science and other evidence-based disciplines like history. There happen to be very good reasons to believe that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941. Consequently, the idea that the Egyptians actually did it lacks credibility.
The point that Harris trying to make here is entirely religious: he is asserting that human life can rely solely upon evidence as a basis for all decisions. Unfortunately, that is ridiculous, since we constantly have to make decisions on incomplete data, and must therefore trust other people about things we cannot verify in practice. This social trust and loyalty and belonging and respect for authority, assuming good faith, means that the evidential ethical framework of atheism, basing values solely on facts, is an impossible ideal.
The idea from Stephen Jay Gould that science and religion are what he termed ‘non-overlapping magisteria’, facts and values, is an interesting starting point, but in practice the domains of fact and value constantly overlap as soon as people say some facts are more important than others.
Sam Harris wrote: Every sane human being recognizes that to rely merely upon “faith” to decide specific questions of historical fact would be both idiotic and grotesque — that is, until the conversation turns to the origin of books like the bible and the Koran, to the resurrection of Jesus, to Muhammad’s conversation with the angel Gabriel, or to any of the other hallowed travesties that still crowd the altar of human ignorance.
Now unfortunately Sam is getting going in his atheist pulpit, using rhetoric to imply that faith is grotesque. Unfortunately, the reality is that sane human beings do rely merely on faith to decide specific questions of historical fact, such as the literal existence of Jesus Christ. In a context where a fantasy provides a useful and comforting belief, for Harris to engage in the polemical language of calling this fantasy a travesty promotes a polarisation and vilification that is unhelpful in promoting dialogue and understanding.
Sam Harris wrote: Science, in the broadest sense, includes all reasonable claims to knowledge about ourselves and the world. If there were good reasons to believe that Jesus was born of a virgin, or that Muhammad flew to heaven on a winged horse, these beliefs would necessarily form part of our rational description of the universe.
Again, Harris engages in a sort of unconscious myth-making here, regarding what is a rational description of the universe. The myth of the virgin birth is recognised as scientifically false, and yet it has enduring social and psychological power regardless of the facts. The problem here which religion answers is that rational description is not sufficient to tell a story of human identity and purpose. Just pointing out that a myth is literally untrue is the start of the conversation, not the end of it.
Sam Harris wrote: Faith is nothing more than the license that religious people give one another to believe such propositions when reasons fail.
This rhetorical flourish of “nothing more” fails to engage with the social purpose and meaning of faith. Mark Twain’s caricature of faith as “believing things you know aint so” has become an atheist meme. Faith is much more than a social licence to believe error. It is a glue that binds a community together and provides a common sense of direction, meaning, loyalty, trust, purpose and belonging. These are essential values for social stability and unity, and through religion these values have evolved upon the basis of myths. That means that rejecting the myths puts at risk the stability of society. A far more complex psycho-social evolutionary analysis of the function of myth is needed before we heed the idea that atheism can establish a brave new world without myths. And indeed, Shakespeare’s phrase, a brave new world, was used by Huxley to illustrate precisely this point of the dangers of hyper-rationalism.
Sam Harris wrote: The difference between science and religion is the difference between a willingness to dispassionately consider new evidence and new arguments, and a passionate unwillingness to do so.
Now that is a stupid comment by Harris. The difference between science and religion is actually the difference between knowledge of facts and belief in values. All knowledge of facts is intrinsically scientific, while all belief in values is intrinsically religious. Condemning religion as congenitally irredeemable in this way serves his social polemic of vilification, but closes off avenues of cultural dialogue.
Sam Harris wrote: The distinction could not be more obvious, or more consequential, and yet it is everywhere elided, even in the ivory tower.
I can appreciate Harris’s frustration, because this point that people avoid conversation about religion and its difference from science is very true. The complete failure of all universities to engage with recent academic research on the existence of Jesus Christ is an excellent demonstration of Harris’s observation regarding the relation between science and religion. It illustrates that we live in a time of cowardly crisis of conscience regarding human identity, where people are simply unwilling to speak about the big underlying philosophical issues confronting the world. Richard Carrier should be appointed Professor of Religion at Harvard or Yale or Princeton or Oxford or Cambridge. Then we might see some dialogue.
Sam Harris wrote: Religion is fast growing incompatible with the emergence of a global, civil society.
Here the phrase “fast growing” might imply that religion is changing, when in fact religion is largely staying the same, fossilised in rigid brittle isolation. The broader society is evolving towards use of knowledge, evidence and logic as its core values, leaving the obsolete beliefs behind which then become more reactionary. The beliefs need to change to become relevant to reality.
Sam Harris wrote: Religious faith — faith that there is a God who cares what name he is called, that one of our books is infallible, that Jesus is coming back to earth to judge the living and the dead, that Muslim martyrs go straight to Paradise, etc. — is on the wrong side of an escalating war of ideas.
This caricature of the nature of faith unfortunately has enough traction to make it an accurate and pertinent criticism. But the problem is not with faith as such, it is with the delusion on the part of both sides that the literal surface claims exhaust the meaning of faith when in fact the real significance is concealed.
Sam Harris wrote: The difference between science and religion is the difference between a genuine openness to fruits of human inquiry in the 21st century, and a premature closure to such inquiry as a matter of principle.
This generalisation about religion is unfair, with its implication that social progress involves a simple replacement of religion by science, without regard to the observation that science is the collection of facts while religion is primarily about shared values. Saying we can replace values with facts falls into the old positivist trap of believing there is no meaning outside science, an idea whose logical result is the nihilist absence of values.
Sam Harris wrote: I believe that the antagonism between reason and faith will only grow more pervasive and intractable in the coming years.
I disagree on this claim of intractable conflict. Reason and faith can be reconciled. There is a challenge here to look dispassionately at faith as a social phenomenon, recognising that polemical opposition to faith on principle is a limited and dangerous perspective.
Sam Harris wrote: Iron Age beliefs — about God, the soul, sin, free will, etc. — continue to impede medical research and distort public policy.
And the answer to that is to find the scientific meaning behind these beliefs, not simply to assume that these beliefs can be abandoned as false.
Sam Harris wrote: The possibility that we could elect a U.S. President who takes biblical prophesy seriously is real and terrifying; the likelihood that we will one day confront Islamists armed with nuclear or biological weapons is also terrifying, and it is increasing by the day. We are doing very little, at the level of our intellectual discourse, to prevent such possibilities.
There is a clash between popular stupid religion, such as in the belief of 40% of Americans that God made the universe less than ten thousand years ago, and the possibility that these false myths have some meaningful content. The risk that Harris describes of stupid religion causing catastrophe is high, but it is not addressed by imagining that anti-religion will reduce that risk. The challenge is to define smart religion.
Sam Harris wrote: 

In the spirit of religious tolerance, most scientists are keeping silent when they should be blasting the hideous fantasies of a prior age with all the facts at their disposal.
Scientists are not a new priesthood. Blasting religious beliefs with facts is useless when what is required is to enter on the terrain of values.
Sam Harris wrote: To win this war of ideas, scientists and other rational people will need to find new ways of talking about ethics and spiritual experience.
Yes, this should be the main key point. But the weapons of smug disdain and factual correction of obsolete error are not adequate when the error is embedded in a durable and stable meme. The religious meme itself has to evolve to become compatible with facts.
Sam Harris wrote: The distinction between science and religion is not a matter of excluding our ethical intuitions and non-ordinary states of consciousness from our conversation about the world; it is a matter of our being rigorous about what is reasonable to conclude on their basis. We must find ways of meeting our emotional needs that do not require the abject embrace of the preposterous.
And again, that demand for reasonable ethics is about analysing how religion can evolve, not about the headline proposition that science must destroy religion.
Sam Harris wrote: We must learn to invoke the power of ritual and to mark those transitions in every human life that demand profundity — birth, marriage, death, etc. — without lying to ourselves about the nature of reality.
Yes, but a recognition that ritual is central to life is itself religious. Scientific knowledge has no place for ritual, which exists solely within the domain of values, of things that are important to us. The removal of hypocrisy from religion is in fact something presented as a clear goal of the Gospels.
Sam Harris wrote: I am hopeful that the necessary transformation in our thinking will come about as our scientific understanding of ourselves matures.
And again, the idea of scientific maturity and transformation must involve dialogue about spirituality, including how traditional religious symbols such as the myth of Jesus Christ contain allegorical meaning. The headline idea of destroying religion offers no hope for necessary transformation in thinking.
Sam Harris wrote: When we find reliable ways to make human beings more loving, less fearful, and genuinely enraptured by the fact of our appearance in the cosmos, we will have no need for divisive religious myths.
The implication being that all myths are divisive. My opinion is that this worthy goal Harris describes can best be achieved by recognising how myths can evolve to become inclusive.
Sam Harris wrote: Only then will the practice of raising our children to believe that they are Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or Hindu be broadly recognized as the ludicrous obscenity that it is.
These labels are about cultural identity, and what is ludicrous here is the idea that a loving enraptured society must abandon its heritage. The goal should be to transform religious identity to make it compatible with knowledge, not to abandon that identity.
Sam Harris wrote: And only then will we stand a chance of healing the deepest and most dangerous fractures in our world.
This essay by Harris is a glorious polemic, a clarion call to destroy religion. I am reminded of metaphors such as the fight between Hercules and the hundred headed hydra which grows a new head as soon as one is chopped off. Religion is like the hydra, infinitely adaptable. The idea that it could be destroyed is quixotic. But religion should change, it should grow some spine and engage with scientific materialism in honest dialogue, without insisting its old metaphors are literal. By presenting science as an extreme antithesis of religion, Harris opens the path to a conversation that could define a synthesis between faith and reason, a middle way able to integrate facts and values.
Last edited by Robert Tulip on Fri Apr 29, 2016 8:46 am, edited 1 time in total.
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