The Folly of Sam Harris

Newsweek features a conversation between atheist Sam Harris and Christian pastor Rick Warren:

Harris: [T]here are many testimonials about miracles, every bit as amazing as the miracles of Jesus, in other literature of the world's religions. Even contemporary miracles. There are millions of people who believe that Sathya Sai Baba, the south Indian guru, was born of a virgin, has raised the dead and materializes objects. I mean, you can watch some of his miracles on YouTube. Prepare to be underwhelmed. He's a stage magician. As a Christian, you can say Sathya Sai Baba's miracle stories are not interesting, let's not pay attention to them, but if you set them within the prescientific religious milieu of the first-century Roman Empire, suddenly miracle stories become especially compelling.

I find this response fascinating. The prescientific religious milieu has nothing to do with the compelling nature of miracles. We do our ancestors a tremendous disservice when we make them out to be total morons. Take, for instance, the story of Lazarus. It didn't take very much scientific knowledge for the Jews to ascertain that when Jesus raised him from the dead something unusual had occurred. In point of fact, the Pharisees, so opposed to the strange preacher from Nazareth, never denied his miracles. They simply attributed them to Satan. Which is, incidentally, precisely what I would do when it came to the miracles of the Indian guru.

Harris: I'm not at all a moral relativist. I think it's quite common among religious people to believe that atheism entails moral relativism. I think there is an absolute right and wrong.

But Harris does not tell us where this comes from. Nor can he. And this is the fundamental flaw of atheistic systems of morals and ethics. Nietzsche, the most logical and lucid of the atheistic philosophers, had it right: if God is dead, morality is wholly subjective. From the chaos and the cacophony may come the Superman, but make no mistake about it, atheism, if widespread, will lead to moral anarchy.

Harris: This really is one of the great canards of religious discourse, the idea that the greatest crimes of the 20th century were perpetrated because of atheism. The core problem for me is divisive dogmatism.

Given the fact that 1) the 20th century was the world's bloodiest; 2) although atheism has been around for ages, it became fashionable, especially among "intellectuals" during this same century; and 3) the three bloodiest ideologies: communism, feminism--due to the tragedy of mass abortions, and nazism, were all partaken by those who had rejected Judeo-Christian morality, many of whom were explicitly atheist, I should think this is all readily obvious. If dogmatism was truly that problematic, history should have demonstrated that religious dogmatism leads quickly to hell, something it--Christianity especially--seldom does. In fact, Communists, Nazis, and pro-abortion feminists are divisively dogmatic, showing just how much human beings hate the vacuum which occupies the space left by the rejected objective moral code. As even Harris must realize, dogma is essential if he is to have his absolute right and wrong. The important thing is not that it is dogmatic; it must be so. The important thing is that the dogma is correct. That would be my one great complaint with so many of the ideologues of the 20th century.

Harris: No society in human history has ever suffered because it has become too reasonable.

Unfortunately this is completely untrue. For, as Chesterton points out so brilliantly in the first chapter of Orthodoxy:

Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination... Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion, like the physical exhaustion of Mr. Holbein. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.

The point is plain, and hardly needs to be expounded upon. Sooner or later, Harris may take his reason to its logical extreme and see his head split. It is reasonable to attack religion in general and Christianity in particular; most religions are absurd, most Christians are somewhat ridiculous. I happen to feel that even absurd religions and ridiculous followers are, at the very least, instinctually approximately correct in their gropings at higher truths, not accessible by human reason alone; but it is not really reasonable to take reason all the way in regards to atheism. There ends the chaos of Nietzsche's superman, the wholly subjective will-to-power. For Nietzsche himself, that brilliant German philosopher, ended in madness.

As for me, I prefer not to end in madness, so I'll just end right here.