Monday, September 24, 2007

Sam Harris on The Sacrifice of Reason

Awhile back I said that I wanted to throw out some ideas about Sam Harris's op-ed "The Sacrifice of Reason." Well, here goes:

First, I'm not religious, as many of you well know. And I've been fairly anti-religion for most of my life, and strongly anti-religion for long stretches of it. I'm afraid I'm rather contrarian, though, so maybe it's the fact that atheism is suddenly a little bit chic that's giving me the urge to defend religion. But let's ignore the boring psychological stuff and go right for the logic of the matter: essays like Harris's--that is, essays in which stupid, evil, and vicious religious practices are cited as evidence--make me wonder what conclusion is being argued for.

Harris cites, for example, vakatoga, a Fijian sacrament that required that the victim's limbs be cut off and consumed in his presence. And he asserts that "It is essential to realize that such impossibly stupid misuses of human life have always been explicitly religious." I'm a little unclear on two things here: first, whether that assertion is true and, second, what is supposed to follow from it.

As for the first point: people have done countless stupid and brutal things for non-religious reasons. The Nazis and Japanese conducted "experiments" on innocent prisoners of war during WWII, the Khmer Rouge invented many ingenious types of mental and physical torture, and so forth. Some torture and murder has been given a religious spin, just as some has been given a scientific or political one. What's unclear is whether religious evil differs from other kinds merely in something like degree, but not in kind. My guess, for what it's worth, is that such evil is largely a product of an innate human capacity for or inclination toward brutality (innate, that is, in some people, though not in all). It finds a religious expression, but it's largely there already. I find it, for example, hard to believe that vakatoga or Aztec mass murders were the result of good people simply being misguided by crazy religious theories. That there was some of that is beyond doubt; but my guess is that the causal arrow often points strongly in the other direction. Religion is a handy outlet for brutality, and it can amplify it and generate some of its own--but it's unlikely to be solely responsible for all exotic forms of brutality, contra Harris. That is: I expect that people with torturous inclinations were eager to promote and engage in vakatoga, and I'm sure many less evil people went along with it because of its religions overtones...but I suspect that the evil inclinations would have largely come out in other ways if nobody had thought of vakatoga. Religion is as often an excuse for evil, not the sole creator of it.

I have another guess, too, for what it's worth, and that's that religion is also responsible for a lot of good in the world. As with the evil it precipitates, religion probably serves more to focus and direct the good that's already present in people than to create it ex nihilo. Some humans have an inclination to seek supernatural justifications for their good impulses just as they seek supernatural excuses for their evil ones.

And that brings us to the question: what conclusion is Harris arguing for? If it is, as I suspect, the conclusion that religion is an irredeemably bad thing, or a bad thing overall, I doubt that he can get there using the premises and arguments he provides. Even if it turns out to be true that there are some uniquely religious evils, it doesn't follow that religion can't be improved, nor that it's overall a bad thing. What follows is something more like: it needs to be abandoned or reformed. But I think most sensible parties to the debate recognize that.

So, anyway, though I'm basically on the side of the New Pop Atheists, I've got my differences with them too.

15 Comments:

Blogger Myca said...

maybe it's the fact that atheism is suddenly a little bit chic that's giving me the urge to defend religion.

Yeah, but here's a useful standard: "Is atheism chic enough for an avowed atheist to stand a ghost of a chance at national office?"

If the answer is no, then religion is doing just fine at defending itself.

---Myca

6:50 PM  
Blogger Myca said...

Okay, okay, that having been said, I agree with the meat of your post.

It's just that lately atheism is perceived as the new hotness . . . and all that I think that that has really lead to is that atheists gets shit on for being trendy as well as shit on for being godless and morally corrupt.

6:54 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

This is a broad spectrum question, but I've just come across your post and I'm wondering, can a self-respecting philosopher claim with degree(s) of certainty that God does not exist?

7:24 PM  
Blogger The Mystic said...

There are two kinds of atheists, and that post makes it clear that the distinction needs to be made:

Positive Atheists: Those who affirm that God does not or cannot exist.

Negative Atheists (Agnostics): Those who believe that God's existence cannot be known with the present information available.


All the positive atheists I've ever met have been total morons - shouting about how stupid people are to believe in God, and then showing themselves to be just as foolish by believing it impossible for God to exist.

Not to say there aren't good reasons to believe certain portrayals of God are ridiculous - once someone qualifies "God" with characteristics that render it unlikely or impossible, then that's fine to contend against. The strong atheists I've met, however, start off demeaning Christians and wind up demonstrating their own ignorance not only of Christian doctrine on occasion, but of any idea of God other than Abrahamic.

Anyway, negative atheism is pretty rational, positive atheism is complicated, as it has to be clarified every time the idea of God is denounced as impossible. There is no way of showing that no characterization of God is possible, so I suppose there's no universal positive atheist who can show, or even hope to show, that the most basic concept of God (maybe an intelligent, creative source of the Universe?) is impossible.

That's my understanding, anyway.

8:52 PM  
Blogger lovable liberal said...

Yep, WS, you are a contrarian - suspicious of all rushes to judgement. In any society that channels both its good and its evil through every handy institution, religious, scientific, whatever, real contrarians are very valuable even if they are often despised or even hated. Any society? Really, every society.

When I think of contrarians, I think about the common characters from folklore of hermits and wizards and other weirdos. They don't get carried away by mob psychology, though sometimes they do get carried away by the mob to be killed. Still, enough must survive that the ability to stand apart can be passed down through genes or culture.

The value of a contrarian is that a monolithic culture always fails. It lacks the flexibility to overcome inevitable change. A contrarian or two can provide a margin of "odd" thinking that saves the day, though no contrarian should expect to get credit.

Based on past discussions, you may not think me a contrarian, and in fact I prefer free thinker. In any case, we are both outliers, as are many Philosoraptor denizens.

Jesus was a contrarian, too. It's not solely that he ministered to the poor - Mother Teresa did that without stepping outside her indoctrination (at least not willingly). Jesus also subverted the savage laws of the Hebrew Bible, not to mention the authority of its keepers. That's what made him dangerous and brought the whipped-up mob to kill him.

Paul was no free thinker, more an institutional revolutionary. Even Protestantism is marked by the dogmatic ossification of Paul.

Both Jews and Catholics have mostly escaped Old Testament savagery through gradualism, as have mainstream Protestants. (Well, Catholics did have several centuries of corrupt sectarian murder to learn repentance, and Protestants joined the battle, too.)

Fundamentalists, far from learning, have retreated to the vicious "morality" of tribal survival that fills the Old Testament in particular. They just don't put people to death for eating lobster. Islamic extremists may have mistaken Islamic society's present mean state as damning modernity and justifying their own retreat to savagery.

Where does that leave me? I'm an atheist. I don't believe God exists. I'm not quite fully to the disbelieving end of The Mystic's taxonomy of unbelief, however. I'm still willing to weigh evidence for the existence of God. But I've concluded that the likelihood of any God remotely resembling a person is nil, and that, based on every piece of evidence I've seen so far, the fundamentalists and even more liberal Christians are dead wrong about a personal God known from this one very local myth, a myth whose each day in the modern world more strenuously alienates it from its rigid ties to the culture of its origin.

10:11 PM  
Blogger Jim Bales said...

WS wrote:
'"It is essential to realize that such impossibly stupid misuses of human life have always been explicitly religious." I'm a little unclear on two things here: first, whether that assertion is true and, second, what is supposed to follow from it.'

I think, WS, that you have ably shown that such abuses are not always explicitly religious, at least as far as recent history is concened. (His examples stretch back much farther than the 20th century counter-examples you noted.)

I think the statement also fails your part 2, that is, I don't see how that one sentence is essential to the rest of harris's essay.

If one were to excise the offending sentence from the essay, how would you, WS, consider the ammended essay?

5:35 AM  
Blogger Jim Bales said...

Mystic,

I would add to your listing what I would call "Laplacian Atheists", those who, when asked of God's existence reply "I have no need for that hypotesis."

You are welcome to classy the Laplacian atheists in with your negative atheists, although I see a distinction between saying that God's existence is an open question to saying that it not helpful to ask the question.

5:43 AM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

Fair question, Anonymous.

The Mystic has laid the terminological groundwork necessary to start an answer.

First, if one believes that there is an absence of evidence for the reality of God, one might consider oneself either an agnostic or an atheist, depending on what one thinks about the appropriate epistemic response to such a state of affairs. I consider myself an atheist, though I'm not wedded to the term.

Furthermore, the case of God is significantly different than the case of, say, space aliens. One might say "well, there's no evidence FOR the existence of space aliens, but none AGAINST it, either." Be that as it may, there seem to be internal contradictions in the Christian theory of God. (E.g. one person dying to atone for the sins of another person, the trinity, transubstantiation etc.) [Note: there are, of course, very complicated attempts to explain away these contradictions.] Given those problems, there is something like positive evidence AGAINST the existence of the relevant conception of God.
[Another note: 'positive' here means 'non-negative', not 'conclusive.']

12:13 PM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

Let me try to be clearer:

I think it's very unlikely that Bigfoot exists.

I think it's really, really, REALLY unlikely that ghosts exist.

I think it's really, really, REALLY REALLY unlikely that the cartoon version of God (very old male humanoid w/ white beard, very powerful, very mean) exists.

I think it's virtually IMPOSSIBLE that Jesus was God and atones for the sins of others with his death.

I think there are almost certainly no round squares.

Now, am, to twist the terminology a bit, an atheist or an agnostic about Bigfoot? About God? About Jesus? About round squares?

8:18 PM  
Blogger Random Michelle K said...

Just to clarify before I begin, I'd classify myself as a monotheist. If you want a complicated discussion I can tell you how I came to that state. :)

The problem with "negative" perceptions of religion to me at least, is that it's a lot like airplane crashes. You never hear about all the airplanes that land safely each year, but if there's a crash anywhere in the world, it's all over the news.

Just the same, the wacko extremists of all religions make the news, be they Islamists, Christian fundamentalists, or any other brand of fanatic. Very rarely do you hear about those whose religious call leads them to help others, Mother Theresa being the exception to that rule.

Which is kinda saying what you were saying, only in a different way. A few wackos, be they Christians, Muslims, or Atheists, give the everyone else who subscribes to that believe a bad name.

Essentially, I believe there is far, far more good out there being done in the name of various Gods and religions than we can possibly imagine. It's just that unlike the wackos, most people who do good, try to do so quietly, without drawing attention to themselves.

And Winston? Everything is possible. It's just that far fewer things are probable. :)

10:14 PM  
Blogger Aa said...

When I write Atheist, or say I'm an "Atheist", what I'm really saying is that I'm an atheistic agnostic.

I'm an agnositic in the sense that I can't prove or disprove the existence of a supernatural being. Perhaps one day humanity will answer this question empirically (i.e., with evidence), but currently it does not have an answer. Is there a God? I don't know, but until I see overwhelming evidence to the contrary I relegate God (or gods) to the same realm as Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny. I seriously doubt if there is one, or many, but I can't prove with empirical evidence there is or isn't (though WS makes some interesting arguments against in a comment above).

I do not say there is no God (see above), though that is one definition of atheism. I'm an atheist in the sense that I do not express a belief in any sort of supernatural being; whether that being be Aphrodite, the God of the Bible, the God of the Quran, the gods of the Hindus, or (insert religion here).

So Atheistic Agnostic...Atheist for short.

And if someone does provide empirical evidence I am, of course, willing to revise my position.

As for the good/evil argument, I defer to Stephen Weinberg

[Without religion] "Good people will do good things, and bad people will do bad things. But for good people to do bad things-that takes religion."

10:33 AM  
Blogger Tom Van Dyke said...

For the past year or so, I've been having a colloquy with Jonathan Rowe at his blog and at his groupblog, Positive Liberty. [Props where they belong.]

The discussion has been about the religious beliefs of the Founding Fathers, a subject that remains far from settled after the 19th century made them all Christians and the 20th made them all atheists. John Locke, too, their common touchstone.

Jon likes Dr. Gregg Fraser's description of Jefferson, John Adams, Washington and Madison [B. Franklin, too, most times] as "theistic rationalists."

I have some reservations, but a close reading of the term (and component terms) yields a lot of light. What they were'nt were "Deists," which is interesting in its ownself. Tom Paine was a deist. If there is a God, he's really not involved with us, and makes no difference, really.

In contrast to the Founders [even Jefferson] who believed in a providential God, who is involved.

"Theistic," in philosophical terms, leaves open most any claimed aspect of God, including that He revealed Himself through scriptures, while at the same time accepting none of the claims---including scripture---as fact. Who knows?

"Rationalist" is even more interesting if you compare it to "empiricist." Empiricists demand incontrovertible proof. I'll believe in God if you can provide it.

Not bloody likely. It would defeat the whole purpose of faith, especially blindly leaping into it. And even when scientific observation observes something occurring in the brain during a religious experience, the nature of that experience (real? hallucination?) will never be beyond dispute.

(May we note here that accounts of religious experiences have never been permitted in philosophical discussions. St. Teresa, The Little Flower? Off the table.)

Rationalism offers a promising avenue, however. What Charles Sanders Peirce offered as food for musing was that altho we can observe God only indirectly at best (if at all), we can observe man directly, and the religious impulse seems to be one of the few universals in man's nature---not simply attributable to culture, or as Richard Dawkins would have it, "memes," ideas that spread like infections. You'll find God most everywhere and anywhen (altho like all things, there have been exceptions).

The rationalist asks why. He also wonders about the fragments of apparent design he sees in nature, and also the exceptions that make it possible. (Look this one up for a thrill---why does the carbon atom behave so funkily? Why are its properties so exceptional, see Fred Hoyle. Sorry to assign homework.)

The rationalist also asks, is there providence, small p or "P?" [See Harry Harrison's Deathworld. Wow, that place sucked.]

No answers here, as your mileage will vary. But the best questions I've run across.

[Cheers to all, I've been out of town for a few weeks. Why does God hate America so much? Or does He love us, which is why He sent us the Clintons?]

9:11 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Empiricists demand incontrovertible proof."

This is incorrect. Empiricism demands falsifiability or concordance based on sensory observation. It only eschews a priori truths and is skeptical of truths arrived at by pure logical reasoning.

The difference is not the *standard* of proof (e.g. incontrovertible, relative certainty a la inductive logic etc.), but rather the *medium* of proof or basis of evidence. It does not discount the limitations of our perception in the way say, Hume did. That is perhaps pure empiricism's biggest fault; it takes no account of the potential shortcomings of human perception.

12:06 PM  
Blogger Tom Van Dyke said...

Thank you for the correction. How 'bout that carbon atom, eh?

2:10 PM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

1. Yeah, I think "theistic rationalists" is a pretty apt term--not that I really deserve to have an opinion on the subject. My guess (having half-assed tried to figure out the answer to the question a couple of times) would be: probably not Christians on any very strict definition of the term. Not Jefferson and Madison, anyway. Washington? I dunno, but I guess I've usually assumed he *was* a Christian...though I can't think of any evidence off the top of my head...

2. Anonymous is right: empiricists can admit of varying degrees of evidence. They just give some kind of primacy to experience. It's a vaguer and more confusing position than most think. Contra Anonymous: empiricists need not even demand falsifiability. You can still be an empiricist even if you think that all we can get is *some* (non-conclusive) evidence that some propositions are false. What you've got to deny, I guess, is that reason is an independent source of knowledge. So, e.g., no *a priori* knowledge that isn't just tarted up knowledge of analytic truths.

But the empiricist/rationalist distinction just ain't as clear as everyone thinks...or so I'm told by reliable sources. (A colleague of mine is notorious for classifying DesCartes as an empiricist...)

1:03 PM  

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