Listen to the MP3

May 4, 2007, Wausau, Wi— I pointed out in Part I of my review of Sam Harris’ The End Of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, that rarely have I encountered a book which starts out with so many errors in so few pages.  Further reading has not changed my opinion. In fact the detailed analysis and review I had intended will have to be abandoned as there are simply too many errors (often several per page) and it would take far too long to catalogue them all.

 One of the problems is that Harris’ style leads him to make frequent bold and clearly false statements with very little justification. For example in one paragraph Harris claims that “The idea that any one of our religions represents the infallible word of the One True God requires an encyclopedic ignorance of history, mythology, and art even to be entertained.” (p16)   To support this Harris simple points to evidence of “cross-pollination” among religious beliefs.  There are numerous problems with this claim, but the simple fact is that there are many people who do not have encyclopedic ignorance in these areas, but to the contrary are quite well informed, and yet who not only entertain, but believe that the One True God has given us his infallible word in the Bible.

Harris then closes this paragraph by making the claim that “There is no more evidence to justify a belief in the literal existence of Yahweh, and Satan, than there was to keep Zeus perched upon his mountain throne or Poseidon churning the seas.” (p 16)   Again, the facts are contrary to Harris’ claim.  Skeptics have for hundreds of years attempted to undermine Christianity, and as I detail in my books, contrary to Harris claims, the evidence for Christianity has grown stronger, and it has in fact been the claims of the early skeptics that have been show to be lacking, and have often been refuted by more recently discovered evidence.  For example, given the strength of the evidence, few would now argue that Jesus never existed.  Where is all the similar evidence for Poseidon, or Zeus?  Such false, but bold claims may be music to the ears of Harris’ fellow skeptics who love to see religion bashed and ridiculed, but it hardly make for the sound reasoning that Harris claims is the alternative to religion.

So rather than a detailed refutation of Harris’ errors, perhaps of more interest would be to apply one of Harris questions to him. Harris asks “How is it that, in this one area of our lives, we have convinced ourselves that our beliefs about the world can float entirely free from reason and evidence?” (p 17)  To apply this question to Harris, just how is it that he, while claiming to uphold reason can become so irrational and detached from the evidence when it comes to religion?

We can begin to see this process at work in his classification of religion.  Harris first states that people of faith fall onto a continuum, from those who accept diversity to those who would “burn the world to a cinder” to destroy heresy.  But Harris immediately proceeds to ignore this and present religious belief as just two groups, moderates (those who accept diversity) and extremists (those who would presumably burn the world to a cinder).  Though a highly artificial division, this by itself, this would not necessarily be a problem, except that Harris then goes on to describe moderates in ways that do not fit his previous classification, and herein lays a major error.

Harris claims that 35 percent of Americans believe that the Bible is the literal and inerrant word of God. The problem is that clearly 35 percent of the American people do not fall into his category of extremists. In fact very few if any Christians would. Harris tries to justify this, by claiming most Christians and Jews do not read their Bible enough.  While it is undoubtedly true, that still does not explain the millions who do read and study their Bible do not fall into Harris category of extremists.  In Short Harris’s categories simply are not an accurate description of reality.

This is the first of several key problems with Harris’ attack on religion.  Harris treats religion as if it were, fundamentally, a single entity, centered around a belief in God.  In my book “Christianity and Secularism” I go into detail about want is a religion and the errors with views such as Harris.  There are simply too many different religions with too many different views to treat them all as a single whole. And yet this is what Harris does as he links extremist suicide bombers to tolerant faithful believers as if they were at the core one.  So while Harris’ arguments may seem devastating to skeptics, they are not refuting anything any one person actually beliefs in.  

A refutation of some abstract construction called religion is not a refutation of what Christians actually believe. A refutation of some abstract construction call “God’s word” is not a refutation of the actual word of God found in the Old and New Testaments.  In short Harris’ arguments are aimed at something that “can float entirely free from reason and evidence” and not at Christianity.

Part I   Part III     Part IV   Part V    Part VI

Listen to the MP3

April 20, 2007, Wausau, Wi— I recently began reading  Sam Harris’ The End Of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason.  It is billed on the back cover as a “sustained nuclear assault” on religious belief by one reviewer, while another reviewer claims “Even Mr Harris’s critics will have to concede the force of an analysis which roams far and wide.” While I have only started the book and may yet to have encountered this analysis, rarely have I encountered a book which starts out with so many errors in so few pages.

For example, after opening his first chapter with the story of a suicide bomber, Harris begins by claiming that “A glance at history, or at the pages of any newspaper, reveals that ideas which divide one group of human beings from another, only to unite them in slaughter, generally have their roots in religion.” (p 12)   Perhaps Harris is stressing the word “Glance” because any real consideration of the historical evidence show that throughout history people have kill their fellow human being for any number of reasons, greed, power, land, glory, food, self-defense, and others in addition to religion. Even many of conflict attributed to religion have many other and often more important roots.

For example the conflict between the English and Irish in Northern Ireland is often portrayed as a conflict between catholic and protestants. Yet this ignores that the conflict preceded the Reformation which gave rise to this religious split.  In fact the conflict, rather than being caused by religion difference, is more likely a cause of the religious difference in that the Irish remained Catholic when England became protestants so as to be different from the English. 

So to claim that most killing has its roots in religion is simply false. Then there are all the efforts of religion to stop or at least limit wars and conflicts, such as the effort of the church during the middle ages to resolve the conflicts that arose between rulers and limit the killings, particularly of civilians. Such efforts makes matters even worse for Harris’s claim. So while religion sadly has nowhere near a spotless record in this area, but instead has much to answer for, it hardly comes close to playing the central role Harris claims.

From this false claim, Harris immediately goes to what is at best a misleading claim, when he writes, “Our situation is this: most of the people in this world believe that the Creator of the universe has written a book.” While there is some dispute about the actual statistic,  it is probably true that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (the only major religions about which such a claim would be considered true) together make up a slight majority of the world population.  However, given the variety of religious beliefs in the world, and the related history of the three monotheistic faiths, it really is a distortion to classify this as the norm for all religions, nor is it correct to classify a slight majority as if it were a general rule.   

Harris then further compounds his error when he builds on this to further claim that  all religions  are in “‘perverse agreement’” that God does not endorse respect for unbelievers.”  What one wonders, would Harris say about 1 Peter 3:15 which says Christians are to give “The reason for the hope that you have, but do this with gentleness and respect.”  

Strangely Harris then proceeds attack the “intolerance” of religious believers  against those with differing views on religion, which presents the interesting paradox in that Harris also shows little tolerance against those with views on religion that differ from his.

In fact to him “an immediate problem” is not that religions are attack too much, but that they are not attacked enough, making the claim that “criticizing a person’s faith is currently taboo in every corner of our culture.”  One can only assume that Harris does not get to too many corners of our culture, as Christianity, in particular conservative Christians and Catholics are routinely criticized and disparate in most of the mainstream culture. In fact a very good case could be made that conservative Christians and Catholics are among the very few groups that are “open season” in our culture when it comes to criticism.

As these errors form the foundation for the argument that Harris is going to make, they do not make for a very promising start.  But then this type of straw man argument is very typical of those who criticize Christianity.  It hardly makes for the “sustained nuclear assault” the cover of the book promised.  We will see if Harris does any better as he attempts to develop this argument.

 Part II    Part III     Part IV   Part V    Part VI