Sam Harris'
The End of Faith is perhaps the most directly challenging and antagonistic of the recent swell of best selling atheist tomes. That's odd to say when comparing any book to Christopher Hitchens'
God is not Great, but while Hitchens is happily argumentative and frequently condescending (in his book and his public speaking), he does it with a wry sense of humor and a twinkle in his eye. In contrast, Harris' tone is deeply serious, even somber, and he isn't just playing about with philosophy and theories here. He offers numerous serious policy suggestions, and in the step that's garnered him the most antagonism, (check out how many of
his 1-star reviews are of the "I'm an atheist but..." variety) he directly attacks the religious moderates, and even atheists who are less committed to the cause than himself.
In Harris' view, people of lukewarm faith (most of the world's population) are enabling the violent and fanatical fringe, by honoring the concept of faith. People who say that it's okay to believe in things that don't exist, or that don't have any supporting evidence, make it possible for the people who really take the religions seriously to exist. Harris views it as analogous to terrorism or an armed uprising; only a small portion of a population might actually carry guns and fight, but the fighters rely on the material and emotional support of the others.
Harris isn't just attacking for fun, though. He thinks the struggle between faith and reason is the most important challenge in the world today, thanks to the proliferation of nuclear weapons. There have been constant religious war for all of human history, with generally horrible results (as all wars create), but this has become a greater danger than ever before, now that a few committed individuals can kill thousands, or millions, with the right weaponry. In this light, Harris' highly combative and in-your-face views are the only rational response to the persistence of fanatic-enabling faith, and the fact that most of us don't share his urgency, even if we agree with him on substance, is largely an indictment of humanities' general, "Nothing bad will happen to me." mentality.
To the scores:
The End of Faith, by Sam Harris, 2006
Concept: 6
Presentation: 6
Writing Quality: 7
Presents/Explains the Topic Clearly: 8
Entertainment Value: 7
Rereadability: 7
Overall: 7.5
I was surprised at the quality and depth of this book. I didn't know much about Harris going in; I'd watched a few of his speeches on Google Video, and thought he made some good points, but he seemed clearly a few steps below Hitchens and Dawkins in rhetorical flair and content. In
his video appearances, Harris is clearly intelligent and committed, but he has somewhat the vibe of a barely-contained maniac; like he's itching to rant at the crowd in a "Why won't you people listen!" fever. I also thought he made fewer interesting points and analogies, but really, it's unfair to compare any public speaker to Hitchens and Dawkins, who are both especially skilled/gifted at it.
In that light, I was pleasantly surprised by
The End of Faith. It's got more good arguments, more clever points, and a lot more depth than I expected. Harris earned his undergrad degree in philosophy, he's working on his PhD in neuroscience, and in this book he combines those fields, with a lot of general knowledge of history, anthropology, science, culture, and more. A lot of atheism is just applied philosophy, when you get right down to it. If a personal philosophy is a description of how an individual views the world, and the sorts of actions that view motivates them to take, then there's clearly a large philosophical component to atheism, or religious belief, of anything in between. Harris delves deeply into that area, and brings in his neuroscience background by analyzing how people think, and why, and especially what people are doing when they think they feel the presence of God.
Harris writes about that state, the transcendental, numinous, feeling of enlightenment, and analyzes how that sort of bliss has been achieved, whether through religious belief, meditation, or psychotropic drugs. Harris is a realist and a rationalist about human emotions, and he recognizes that prayer, or a feeling of oneness with God/the universe, is an enormously powerful experience for most people. People from all cultures and societies have felt this sort of thing, and it's a real phenomena, measurable in CAT scans and brain chemistry, though the technology does not yet exist to replicate it (and may never, after all, orgasms are not dissimilar brain events, and they're quite well researched, but there's still no way to use brain stimulation or chemicals to instantly induce one into a patient). The interesting thing is that humans interpret a moment of transcendence through their own cultural filter. Christians think it's rapture and feel the presence of Christ within them, Buddhists feel at one with the universe, and when one of those hobos out scrounging in your dumpster scores some LSD, he's, "Like wow, man..."
The clear scientific conclusion from this evidence is that there's nothing supernatural or magical or religious about what's often called a "religious experience." It's a physiological process in the human body, mostly about brain chemistry, but since it's so uncommon and powerful that we can't process it or contain it rationally we have to find some mystical explanation for it. Harris examines what this can teach us about our brains, and our need for supernatural explanations for unsettling events.
That's enough of a general overview of the work. I highly recommend it, and my library had a copy, so yours probably will too. I'm now going to touch on a few of the most interesting and novel arguments in his book, for my own notes as well as your edification.
An old argument for atheism is the one about how religions, Christianity and all the rest, only exist now since they were created back then, and since they're perpetually transmitted to the minds of young people before they reach the age of reason. I've often heard Hitchens make the point that religion is our first, and therefore worst, surviving attempt at philosophy and explanation. Harris builds on this point with a interesting thought exercise. Imagine, he posits on page 23, that everyone in the world came down with amnesia. If, "...all six billion of us wake up tomorrow morning in a state of utter ignorance and confusion. Our books and computer are still here, but we can't make heads or tails of their contents. We have even forgotten how to drive our cars and brush our teeth. What knowledge would we want to reclaim first?"
Pretty clearly, we'd need to figure out how to feed and clothe ourselves, and operate the machines that power our cities, etc. But what about religion? Harris doesn't go that deeply into the whole scenario (which I think would make a fascinating SciFi novel), but questions if anyone would spend that much time worrying about whether or not Jesus was really born of a virgin, or was resurrected, or boasted other magical powers. Leaving aside the fact that our amnesiac selves would be unable to ignore the sheer abundance of Bibles lying around everywhere, would we expect anyone to give the Bible, and the various creation myths of other religions, or their cosmologies, any serious credence?
...like the "fact" that Isis, the goddess of fertility, sports an impressive pair of cow horns. Reading further, we will learn that Thor carries a hammer and that Marduk's sacred animals are horses, dogs, and a dragon with a forked tongue. Whom shall we give top billing in our resurrected world? Yaweh or Shiva? And when will we want to relearn that premarital sex is a sin? Or that adulteresses should be stoned to death?
[In finding ways to get along as a society]...There may even be a few biblical passages that would be useful in this regard -- but as for whole rafts of untestable doctrines, clearly there would be no reasonable basis to take them up gain. The Bible and Koran, it seems certain, would find themselves respectfully shelved next to Ovid's Metamorphoses and the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
...most of what we currently hold sacred is not sacred for any reason other than that it was thought sacred yesterday. Surely, if we could create the world anew, the practice of organizing our lives around untestable propositions found in ancient literature -- to say nothing of killing and dying for them -- would be impossible to justify. What stops us from finding it impossible now?
On page 39 Harris makes a hell of a point about our elected officials.
...we live in a country in which a person cannot get elected president if he openly doubts the existence of heaven and hell. This is truly remarkable, given that there is no other body of "knowledge" that we require our political leaders to master. Even a hairstylist must pass a licensing exam before plying his trade in the United States, and yet those given the power to make war and national policy -- those whose decisions will inevitably affect human life for generations -- are not expected to know anything in particular before setting to work. They do not have to be political scientists, economists, or even lawyers; they need not have studied international relations, military history, resource management, civil engineering, or any other field of human knowledge that might be brought to bear in the governance of a modern superpower. They need only be expert fund-raisers, comport themselves well on television, and be indulgent of certain myths. In our next presidential election, an actor who reads his Bible would almost certainly defeat a rocket scientist who does not. Could there be any clear indication that we are allowing unreason and otherworldliness to govern our affairs?
Hard to argue with that one, eh?
On page 66 Harris makes an nice observation about the necessity of faith in the absence, or presence, of evidence.
But faith is an impostor. This can be readily seen in the way that all the extraordinary phenomena of the religious life -- a statue of the Virgin weeps, a child casts his crutches to the ground -- are seized upon by the faithful as confirmation of their faith... There is no way around the fact that we crave justification for our core beliefs and believe them only because we think such justification is, at the very least, in the offing. Is there a practicing Christian in the West who would be indifferent to the appearance of incontestable physical evidence that attested to the literal truth of the Gospels? Imagine if carbon dating of the Shroud of Turin had shown it to be as old as Easter Sunday, AD 29. is there any doubt that this revelation would have occasioned a spectacle of awe, exultation, and zealous remission of sins through the Christian World?
His point is that the "faithful" only say that faith is so important because they don't have evidence or proof. Scientists, doctors, chemists, architects, mathematicians, and others in fact-based professions lack that clerical luxury, which is why faith has no value in any fact-based profession or endeavor. You can pray that God blesses your new skyscraper, but you sure as hell aren't designing it with angels instead of I-beams and double welded joints.
Incidentally, in one of his countless endnotes, Harris points out that three labs independently tested pieces of the Shroud of Turin, and all concluded it was a Medieval forgery dating between 1260-1390. There were dozens of supposed "shrouds" touring around Europe in those days, along with countless reliquaries full of saints' bones and teeth, chunks of wood from the true cross, spears of destiny, and so forth. Most of those objects of fundraising veneration were lost or thrown away once the gimmick wore off, though quite a few churches in Europe and the Middle East still house crypts with saints' names on top and cow and dog bones inside. As for the Shroud of Turin, there's no telling it if was one of the better shrouds, or just the only one that happened to survive into the modern era. At any rate, there's no question that it was never associated with Jesus. It's well over one thousand years more recent, it's dark where it should be light and vice versa, and chemical testing has revealed that it's drawn not in
blood, but in vermilion, red ochre, tempura and various other paint pigments commonly used in the middle ages.
Harris makes an argument about the time sink that is religion on page 149.
Think of all the good things humans will not do in this world tomorrow because they believe that their most pressing task is to build another church or mosque, or to enforce some ancient dietary practice, or to print volumes upon volumes of exegesis on the disordered thinking of ignorant men. How many hours of human labor will be devoured, today, by an imaginary God? Think of it: if a computer virus shuts down a nation's phone system for five minutes, the loss in human productivity is measured in billions of dollars. Religious faith has crashed our lines daily, for millennia.
There are lots of other interesting bits; his analogy of the neighbors who spend every Sunday digging in their backyard since they believe there's a diamond the size of a refrigerator buried there is particularly amusing, but I've quoted enough. Harris' isn't the best of the recent slew of atheist best sellers, but this book is an informative, insightful, and challenging read.
Labels: atheism, book review, sam harris
