Sam Harris Strikes Again

Thanks, once again, Sam Harris!

Paul Campos pens a God-awful column in today's Rocky Mountain News, in which he gets to slam secularists as sadistic pedophiles thanks to the good offices of my favorite atheist mystic, Sam Harris. I haven't the time or the inclination to rip it completely to shreds, but I'll note some of the highlights. Time for a fisking.

Campos, pretends that (1) the fact that human beings can disagree means that knowledge from evidence and logic (as opposed to blind faith) is impossible, and (2) that the mysticism of Sam Harris (which I detail more in the first link) is "the" alternative to said blind faith.

'If you talk to God," the psychiatrist Thomas Szasz observed, "that's called 'prayer.' If God talks to you, that's called 'schizophrenia.' " Szasz was making an ironic observation about how the definitions of concepts like "reason" and "madness" are controversial and politicized.

In his much-discussed book The End of Faith, Sam Harris says something that sounds similar, but lacks Szasz's ironical nuance: "Jesus Christ - who, as it turns out, was born of a virgin, cheated death and rose bodily into the heavens - can now be eaten in the form of a cracker. A few Latin words spoken over your favorite Burgundy, and you can drink his blood as well. Is there any doubt that a lone subscriber to these beliefs would be considered mad?"

What irony can be found in Harris' polemic, which is dedicated to proving that religious belief consists of irrational superstitions which are increasingly dangerous in this technologically advanced age, is almost exclusively of the unintentional kind.

Harris wants us to reject "faith" and embrace "reason," by which he pretty much means the philosophical view known as materialism, with a dab of vaguely Buddhist mysticism thrown into the metaphysical mix.

Even if Campos had discarded Harris's gratuitous Buddhism and focused his attack on "materialism", he would have had an easy go at smearing secularism. One of the most common misconceptions about a non-mystical view of the universe is, after all, that it necessarily entails the sort of deterministic, "billiard-ball" notion of causality we see in the next paragraph. This is patently absurd when one considers the idea that free will is a different type of causation. Free will manifestly exists. The fact that we cannot explain it yet does not invalidate reason as a means to knowledge, nor does it mean we can just make up whatever else we like while we're ignorant about the point.

Materialism is the view that at bottom reality consists of nothing but particles in fields of force, and that all events are caused solely by the operation of mindless physical laws. Several things should be noted about this belief. First, believing in materialism is an act of faith like any other. The ultimate nature of reality isn't a scientific question, and anyone who expects science to provide answers regarding such matters doesn't understand either science or religion.

Campos is correct when he says that "The ultimate nature of reality isn't a scientific question...." This is something I, a secularist and a scientist, have pointed out myself. But in doing so, I have pointed out that many sloppily substitute terms like "science" or "materialism" -- or both, in the case of really sloppy writers like Campos -- for "reason". Indeed, it is the faculty of reason that allows man to grasp the nature of reality through the appropriate discipline, the discipline of philosophy, of which religion is at best a primitive first stab. Later on, I will deal with Campos's assertion that rejecting faith as a means of knowledge (or, as he phrases it, "believing in materialism") is, in and of itself, an "act of faith".

Now, so far, it would seem that I am being a tad bit unfair to Campos. Certainly, if this were all he said, that would be the case, because Sam Harris, who claims to be a neuroscientist and is famous for having written The End of Faith, is certainly guilty of scientism. But as you will see, Harris's sins allow Campos, in condemning them, to pose behind the mask of piety while cashing in on Harris's crimes against intellectual honesty.

In fact, Campos begins in short order.

Second, the debate about whether the world is ultimately a meaningless flux or something more has been going on for thousands of years. The belief that materialism is a product of post-Enlightenment thought in general and modern science in particular is itself a product of historical ignorance.

Third, while Harris is quite right that many religious doctrines sound outrageous to nonbelievers (they often sound outrageous to believers as well), those who worship in the temple of materialism fail to consider how outrageous their beliefs can sound to the uninitiated.

Consider three statements: 1. Torturing a child for one's own sexual gratification is evil. 2. Shakespeare is a better writer than George Lucas. 3. Human beings have free will. An intellectually honest materialist must reject all these claims. At most, he can recharacterize them in much weaker forms. So, for example, he can observe that in our society sadistic pedophilia is considered evil, and that it's this social judgment that determines the content of morality.

Harris's comments on the strangeness of various religious doctrines are mostly on the money and come from the implicitly rational first parts of his book. In the later, new-agey sections, Harris makes all kinds of hokey statements, like when he smuggles in altruism while attempting to discuss a "rational" foundation for morality, and ends up spouting off the following nonsense:

[W]e can see that one could desire to become more loving and compassionate for purely selfish reasons. This is a paradox, of sorts, because these attitudes undermine selfishness, by definition. (!) (191-192)

Things like this makes him, as a "defender" of secularism, easy prey for someone like Campos, who wants to use problems caused by Harris's fundamental irrationality to attack his rational facade.

Campos tosses in the argument from intimidation for good measure when he says that, "An intellectually honest materialist must reject all these claims." Were Campos himself intellectually honest, he might go about proving why any one of these claims necessarily contradicts a secular outlook. Or, since he later discards proof as necessary, perhaps he could explain to us why his "belief" that these positions are incompatible with secularism should be accepted above all others. Or, at least, since he seems to think that secularism is not necessarily false, he could explain why he took the time to write this column and get it published. (The level of evasion professional writers can get away with in our current cultural climate positively flabbergasts me! Would electroshock treatments or a lobotomy perhaps further my writing career? But I digress....)

I'll take just one of the three points I supposedly can't defend as an example. Harris never defines man as "the rational animal", ties morality to man's life as a standard of value, or explains that political freedom is the foundation for a proper society because it allows man to use reason, his tool for survival, unhindered by others. This is what makes Harris and his ilk unable to explain why, exactly, torturing a child for one's sexual gratification is evil (and criminal), for example. The criminality of this act is easier to explain: It violates the child's rights. The act is immoral on several counts it would take too long to explain fully. Among them: (1) Since torture is not part of life proper to a human being, the torturer damages his own psychological welfare. (2) The torturer invites self-destruction via criminal penalties or acts of defense on behalf of the child. (3) He is injuring someone else outside the context of self-defense. Pedophilic torture isn't just "considered evil", Mr. Campos, it is evil, and I know exactly why. The question is whether Campos really does.

Contrast this with what Campos has to say.

But this recharacterization fails utterly to capture what most people mean when they say sadistic pedophilia is evil. What they mean, although they might not articulate it in these terms, is that torturing a child for sexual pleasure is an outrage to the moral order of the universe. It is not evil because a particular society considers it evil: it is simply evil.

How would Campos know this? And how does he know that everyone else (or anyone else) knows this? And, except for the deterrent of capture (which even the stupidest criminals seem to grasp), what does any such moral injunction have about it to motivate compliance? Suppose some perv finds a "consenting" child and a way not to get caught? He has no clue about what a proper life is all about and is thus less likely to consider psychotherapy or even such measures as chemical castration to prevent himself from performing this monstrous act. Why? Because he won't understand why this is a monstrous act. He'll just have a list of do's and don't's, and maybe a fairy tale about eternal hellfire he may credit.

And on a related note, consider torture in the context of adults. Is torture "just wrong" or might it be moral in some circumstances? How would we know when it is alright to torture someone? I don't "just know". Just yesterday, I noted how people who think things are "just wrong" are mucking up the ongoing national debate over whether America ought to outlaw the torture of captured terrorists.

Or consider any other moral issue. Oops! I guess that's why Campos had to choose such an easy moral question -- or at least one that most people would be afraid to open up for debate. If something is "just wrong", you really can't marshal any arguments for why it shouldn't be done. I guess that's why the likes of Campos find reason so unnerving that they have to set straw men like Sam Harris ablaze. "Gosh! If people start stringing too many syllogisms together, they'll toss out morality!" Better to abandon reason than to, say, apply it to morality, these types are basically saying.

Interestingly, Campos no only echoes Jonathan David Carson in attacking the straw man of scientism, he also starts sounding a lot like Lee Harris, who argued, based on subjectivism, that it is legitimate to hold a debate about whether Creationism or evolution accurately describes biodiversity! Note the bold.

Materialism, as a philososphical doctrine, has the great advantage that it reduces the catalog of things that actually exist to those which can be investigated by science. It has the great disadvantage that it requires treating as illusions morality, art, free will, and much else that most people call "reality." That, of course, does not make it false. It does, however, make it literally incredible to anyone who hasn't made the leap of faith materialism requires. [bold added]

Don Watkins correctly identified the essence of such arguments when he said:

On the Kantian premise, it doesn't matter why men disagree. Since truth is determined by man's consciousness, the very fact that men disagree means there is no truth. So long as some men deny the Holocaust, whether or not it happened "cannot be considered settled." So long as some men believe that cannibalism is moral, the question "cannot be considered settled." And what about the belief that nothing can be considered settled unless all men agree? Well, hell, that's just self-evident.

Actually, Campos sounds like Lee Harris, but with a twist. Whereas Lee Harris argues that there is not truth, Campos simply holds that reason cannot grasp truth. There is no need for debate, in Campos's mind, because everything is a matter of faith. While Campos pays lip service to the notion of reality, his "faith-based world" is for all practical purposes no different than Lee Harris's socially-constructed world: Either way, you just go with whatever's on your mind regardless of facts and logic. (And this shakes out in morality: "Do your own thing." vs. an arbitrary moral code whose lack of justification can't answer the obvious question, "Why not do your own thing?")

So for George Lucas -- I mean Paul Campos -- not only is disagreement among men "just self-evident" as Watkins put it, so is everything else. Pedophilic torture is "just wrong". And men "just have" free will. And Shakespeare is "just better" as a writer than George Lucas. And secularism "just treats as illusory" a whole bunch of territory that Paul Campos "just knows". The fact that he took the time to write a lengthy essay on the point indicates to me that, at least on some level (indicating measures of dishonesty, insecurity, or both), Paul Campos does not "just know" that faith is the only way to answer moral questions. Why else would he argue the point at such great length? (And if, contrary to what I think, he does respect reason, why did he argue so poorly?)

Campos then ends, not on the note of riteous indignation that pedophilia/materialism/secularism "deserve", but with the petulant disdain of an adolescent applying peer pressure.

Indeed, I consider holding beliefs such as that sadistic pedophilia is evil because it violates the basic moral order of the universe to be part of a fairly minimal definition of sanity. But then I lack the materialist's faith.

Translation: "My faith is better than your faith. Neener neener neener!" How profound. And how relevant.

Belief divorced from evidence and proof is hardly a definition -- even minimal -- of sanity. It undercuts one's mind and with it, morality and, if done consistently, it even undercuts sanity.

-- CAV

PS: This reminds me of something I said when reviewing the Sam Harris book:

[O]ne of my greatest concerns about the book is that it would "champion some new version of revealed truth as a means of knowledge. [The book] would then end up aiding religion while appearing to champion reason."

I would say that that fear has been realized in the sense that Sam Harris seems to be doing a great job of discrediting reason through the straw man of the scientism-cum-Buddhism he pretends is reason.