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Signs of the Times Australia / NZ edition — lifestyle, health, relationships, culture, spirituality, people — published since 1886 |
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T he title of Sam Harris’s book, The End of Faith , is also his hope. This hope will be realised, this dreadful disease called faith will only be cured, when people realise that terrorism and war are not unnecessary by-products of religious fanaticism but intrinsic to the way that all religions encourage their adherents to perceive themselves as a chosen people against unbelievers.
The main culprits are the three that sprang from the Holy Land—Judaism, Islam and Christianity—due to the particularly violent nature of some of their holy books, their insistence on these books as having dropped intact from the hand of God, and their dogged refusal to change their beliefs in the light of reason.
Harris has, of course, his own bias.
He’s a doctoral candidate working in the field of neuroscience and he has fascinating things to say about the workings of the brain. But modern theorists caution us against assuming that scientists operate in an atmosphere of neutrality. Harris is clearly an atheist who thinks the workings of the brain can explain most (even all) of our consciousness, and his writing is geared accordingly.
As it turns out, he’s not against all religion. He thinks there’s something in mysticism, especially of the Buddhist kind, because its teachings on meditation seem to match current scientific thinking about the way consciousness is con structed. It follows reason.
The seeming unreason of religion gets up Harris’s nose. He thinks that understanding should be based on evidence , but that religious believers ignore what science teaches and retreat to archaic myths for their understanding of the world and, worse still, justification for intolerance and violence.
You can picture the poor man tearing his hair out over the stupidity of his fellow human beings. He compares religious belief to belief in the reality of cartoon characters, Santa’s reindeer or the gods of Olympus. He writes that religious belief “allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy.” To prove this, he takes certain passages from the Bible and the Koran to suggest that God sanctions and even encourages violence against unbelievers and, importantly, those who encourage moderation. These texts, that have both now and previously been used to justify oppression and terrorism, can’t be simply waved off by religious moderates as irrelevant. The texts need to be explained and reasons given for why we in the 21st century don’t follow them to the letter. Harris is right to interrogate religions regarding violence committed in their name, but he uses some elastic logic to deduce that the choice must be between that violence and atheism.
A major problem with the book is that Harris places faith in opposition to reason. But this is a misunderstanding of what faith actually is.
First, he describes religious belief in terms that are similar to what is called God-of-the-gaps, whereby anything that our present stage of learning can’t explain is ascribed to divine machinations. However, the Jewish and Christian traditions view God as behind everything that happens in our universe, not merely a plug for the holes of knowledge.
Second, faith (and I refer to the faith I know, Christianity) relies to some extent on evidence. The writers of the four Gospels were at great pains to prove that there were many witnesses to the things Jesus did, including rising from the dead.
Besides, the point of the Resurrection is that it was not a normal occurrence.
Christians believe that this extraordinary occurrence proves Jesus was who He claimed to be.
This focus on a man in the Palestine of 2000 years ago reinforces Harris’s argument that religion typically doesn’t progress. But Christians have generally believed that God offers us insights through the natural world and therefore we need to read Scripture in the light of more recent scientific insights. To take a rather obvious example, we now understand that Earth is not the centre of the universe. For medieval peoples this was a matter of theology, not merely astronomy, but we now understand the issue to be irrelevant to salvation. So, in this sense, Harris is not correct. But in another sense, he is comparing apples and oranges. We don’t complain that Plato’s writings don’t progress. They help our understanding of the world and remain relevant, but they are grounded in a particular historical moment. So Jesus’ life— His teaching and His resurrection—is grounded in a historical moment, which we return to for meaning.
Harris does have a point when he tackles moderate pluralism. He berates Western liberals for holding the somewhat problematic belief that people have a right to believe whatever they choose, and that asking for some sort of proof is imperialist. This lets radicals off the hook. To repeat, religions should be prepared for scrutiny. Therefore, it is appropriate to take to task religions for the atrocities he describes in gruesome detail, such as the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition. But he is quick to insist that these horrors resulted from merely acting on what holy books tell us to do. But is it that simple? There are, in places, bloodthirsty texts in the Old Testament that are puzzling.
But they have a historical context that the Spanish Inquisitors ignored, twisting the texts for their own perverse ends. In the light of Jesus’ teachings, there is no way they can be justified. The Inquisition was religion unmoored. Much of Kierkegaard’s fury was fuelled by the way religion can pervert faith, and Jesus Himself warned against the dictates of religion getting in the way of our relationship with God. But Harris seems to miss this distinction between “religion” and “faith.”
Having established the irrationality of religion (or faith), he offers his own solution— an ethics based on reason, illustrating it with the debate over stem cells and abortion, which he believes has been hijacked by obstructionist (and unreasonable) religious groups. A 30-cell embryo cannot have the same worth as a more developed human being, but strict sloganeering about the sanctity of life ignores such rational thinking. But, again, this isn’t the whole story. Some of the arguments against for-the-greater-good morality are made by professional ethicists who try to protect the vulnerable from the idea of a hierarchy of human worth that’s often used in these cases.
Such complex moral issues aside, his solution has a why-can’t-we-all-just-getalong Utopian naivety. He makes the dubious claim that if humankind were to start again, we’d ideally ditch religion.
But across the globe and throughout history, peoples instituted religion to explain a yearning for the spiritual.
Harris would argue that this is from a neurological need to explain consciousness, but that doesn’t preclude the explanation that we need to connect with something or someone beyond the physical processes of our world.
Harris’s faith-free solution would happily take on board Jesus’ moral teachings (like the golden rule), but he believes that our deifying Jesus makes His teachings harder to aspire to. This is a common modern approach that ignores a lot of what Jesus said—statements that don’t make much sense if He wasn’t God. If we take Harris’s advice, we should be interrogating those texts where Jesus makes it clear He’s either God or slightly loopy.
At the core of Harris’s solution is a confidence (or maybe merely a hope) that we have the capacity to create a peaceful world on our own. It seems to me, looking back on history and observing the behaviour of my fellow human beings, that we need some help from above.
A minister I know says the further we get from Jesus, the more blurry things get. Indeed, there is plenty about the Christian religion that can cause conflict and doubt. But to focus on Jesus as God is the best way we can do what God wants, which is to all get along.
Sam Harris, The End of Faith, Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, Free Press, 2005.
Extract from Signs of the Times, March 2006 .
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