The clowns of reason
This month's Wired Magazine featured an interesting article by Gary Wolf entitled "The Church of the Non-Believers". Considering that it was written by a self-confessed disbeliever, it was remarkably free of the foam-flecked rhetoric that dribbles so freely from the New Atheists featured in the article, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett.
It's hard to decide which of the images painted rather skillfully by Wolf is the most informative. The painful naivete of Harris, the bitter celodurismo of Dawkins and the avuncular arrogance of Dennett are all sketched in brief, but vivid detail, but in the end, I found the comparison between the grim, pedestrian joylessness of Atheists United and the "moving spectacle" of a charismatic church service to be the most damning.
Of the three jesters at the Court of Reason, Harris is clearly the sad-faced slapstick and pratfall guy. His ignorance is profound; he opens "The End of Faith" with a convincing demonstration of his lack of knowledge of the history of suicide bombing. After painting a clichd portrait of an Islamic bus bomber, he writes: "Why is it so easy, then, so trivially easy - you-could-almost-bet-your-life-on-it easy - to guess the young man's religion?"
It is easy, so trivially easy - one-finds-oneself-cringing-at-the-punctuation easy - to display Harris' superficiality. Having already rejected Pascal's Wager, the hapless Harris seems prone to staking his life on foolish bets since he has apparently never heard of the Tamil Tigers, "an adamantly secular group with Hindu roots" that University of Chicago professor Edward Pape, the author of "Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism," describes as "the leading purveyors of suicide attacks over the last two decades."
Of course, it's understandable that such a deeply profound public intellectual like Harris would never have heard of this obscure little group, since they don't blow up buses in global media centers, they merely assassinate prime ministers of the world's second most populous nation.
Harris also demonstrates reasoning skills that are as poor as his historical knowledge. Indeed, he is so rationally incompetent that he inadvertently makes a case against that which he wishes to defend instead of his intended target. In describing the growing danger that religious belief poses to mankind, he writes:
Our technical advances in the art of war have finally rendered our religious differences - and hence our religious beliefs - antithetical to our survival. We can no longer ignore the fact that billions of our neighbors believe in the metaphysics of martyrdom, or in the literal truth of the book of Revelation, or any of the other fantastical notions that have lurked in the minds of the faithful for millennia - because our neighbors are now armed with chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. There is no doubt that these developments mark the terminal phase of our credulity. Words like "God" and "Allah" must go the way of "Apollo" and "Baal," or they will unmake our world.
But this is a neo-Luddite attack on science, not an atheist argument against religion. As Harris admits himself, these "fantastical notions" have been around for millennia without imperiling the world, it is the chemical, biological and nuclear products of Reason encapsulated in the methodology of science that pose the actual danger. Even if one could magically sweep out every fragment of religious faith and supernatural superstition from every human mind, the clear and present physical danger to the world from those weapons would remain exactly the same.
And when one considers that an estimated 89.2 percent of all the wars in history were fought for reasons unrelated to religion, one cannot even argue that the probability of those weapons being used would be significantly reduced in a perfectly secular scenario.
Harris then goes on to assert that two myths protect religious faith from rational criticism, first that "there are good things that people get from religious faith that cannot be had elsewhere", and second "the terrible things that are sometimes done in the name of religion are the products not of faith per se but of our baser natures."
One is tempted to respond by stating that it is a demonstrable absence of rational critics that protects religious faith from rational criticism, but even a clown deserves a fair critique. First, anyone who has attended an American university in the last 40 years knows that religious faith receives more than its fair share of rational criticism, and it is evolution that is legally protected from uncomfortable questions by the courts in the United States, not Christianity, Judaism or Islam.
Second, the myths themselves are simply not mythical. For individuals and nations alike, the advantages of religious faith are increasingly being made manifest in a manner amenable to scientific study. And one would have to be unaware of 100 years of events ranging from the French revolutionary terror to the killing fields of Kampuchea to even consider taking his second myth seriously.
Sam Harris may be last and least in this trinity of clowns, but I have to confess, I'm rather looking forward to his new book, "Letter To A Christian Nation." I think he has a real shot at replacing Scott Adams as the leading American comic of the 21st century.