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A Review of
Sam Harris' The End of Faith Part V
May 25, 2007, Wausau, Wi— The
previous parts (I, II, III, IV ) of my review of Sam Harris’ The End Of Faith: Religion, Terror,
and the Future of Reason,
focused on how distorted Harris’s view of religion was, and pointed out that
his critique does not really apply to Christianity. In part
IV we looked at how
Harris tried to support his erroneous views with an erroneous understanding of
scripture. But Harris not only has
problems with his views of religion and the Bible, he also has problems when it
come to the alternative he is supporting.
Towards the
end of his book Harris says that “it is possible to have one’s experience of
the world radically transformed.” He then charges that “The problem with
religion is that it blends this truth so thoroughly with the venom of
unreason.” As an example of unreason, he
cites that Jesus was “the Son of God, born of a virgin, and destined to return
to earth trailing clouds of glory.” (pg.
204) But why are these beliefs unreasonable? We saw in part
IV of this review,
that it was Harris’ use of the Bible in an attempt to discredit the belief in
the virgin birth that was itself grounded in error and irrationality. Earlier in
his book he simply dismisses the virgin birth as “an untestable proposition.” What
he means by untestable is not clear.
It is
certainly is untestable in the sense that we cannot duplicate the virgin birth
in a laboratory, as by definition all miracles are untestable in this sense. They
are unique acts of God, not repeatable events governed by natural law. In a similar fashion all of history is made
up of a series of unique acts of men. We cannot put the holocaust into a
laboratory and run experiments on it to see if we can duplicate it, nor would
we want to if we could. But to deny the holocaust is correctly seen as itself
irrational. Some believe in the
Holocaust because they suffered through it. Most believe in the holocaust
because of the historical evidence, i.e. the records and sources, which because
of examination are deem to be reliable and trustworthy. When the last holocaust
survivor dies this will be the only way.
This is
normally how we get all of our history. It is the same for the virgin birth,
Christians deem the writers of the Bible to be not only reliable and
trustworthy, but inspired by God. Not
only is this proposition testable, as I show in my book, Evidence for the Bible, it is the rational conclusion to
reach. And despite Harris, testing is not a concept foreign to the Bible. After all Paul wrote in 1 Thessalonians 5:21
“Test everything, hold on to the good.” In 1 Corinthians 15, writing about some
who rejected the resurrection, he pointed out that Jesus “appeared to over five
hundred of the brother at the same time, most of whom are still living, though
some have fallen asleep.” Paul clearly saw the resurrection, not as some
abstract theological belief, but as a testable historical event, and there was
a implicit challenge in his reference to “most of whom are still alive” that if
you do not believe it, you should go and talk to the hundreds who saw it. Of course with the passing of the first
century, and the death of the last eyewitness, all that we have left are the
sources, but the fact is that there are more sources for Jesus than we have for
most events in antiquity and with the discoveries made during the twentieth
century, once again it has been the critics that have had to revise their view
of the Bible, and believers who were supported.
In fact,
when you look at the arguments for and against the reliability of the Bible
critically, as I point out in my books, the critics have a huge problem for at
best their arguments are based on an a priori rejection of the supernatural and
at worst are circular. When you get past
all the blustering, and boil it down, they start with the belief that there is
no supernatural. Since there is no supernatural, there can be no real miracles.
Since the Bible contains descriptions of miracles, either the writers did not
know what really happened or they lied. Either way they are unreliable, and
thus we cannot trust anything they say unless it shown to be true by other
means. This is a nice and neat little package and everything flows from the
initial premise, but notice that no actual evidence is required. Sure evidence is often thrown in, often
haphazardly as we saw in part
IV with Harris’
attempt to refute the virgin birth from scripture, but it is really just window
dressing and not really needed to reach their conclusion.
What Harris
neglects is that all worldviews have fundamental propositions that must to some
extent be based on faith. Within the
confines of his worldview, the automatic rejection of things like Jesus really
being “the Son of God, born of a virgin, and destined to return to earth
trailing clouds of glory.” (pg. 204) may
seem unreasonable leaps of faith. But
that does not change that fact that Harris also must have faith in his fundamental
premises. As such, in many respects, is
argument is self-refuting.
This is
Elgin Hushbeck, asking you to Consider
Christianity: a
Faith Based on Fact.
Part I Part II Part III Part IV Part VI
See www.consider.org for additional information.
The book and press materials are available upon request.
To schedule an interview with Elgin Hushbeck, Jr.
contact Aletheia at 715-849-8328