The Contemptuous Caricature of Faith | Rev. Brian Van Hove,
S.J. | A Review-Commentary on "The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the
Future of Reason" by Sam Harris | Ignatius Insight
The Contemptuous Caricature of Faith | Rev. Brian Van Hove,
S.J. | A Review-Commentary on The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the
Future of Reason by Sam Harris | Ignatius Insight
http://www.ignatiusinsight.com/features2011/bvanhove_samharris_feb2011.asp
Editor's note: This
review of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
(New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004) originally appeared in a slightly
different form in The Fellowship of Catholic Scholars Quarterly, vol. 28, no. 3 (Fall 2005): 30-32. While Harris's
book is now a few years old, the ideas and argumentation in it are even more
widespread and commonplace today. Fr. Van Hove's incisive review highlights
several of the serious problems with Harris' "facts" and approach, providing a
pithy apologetic for Catholicism against the so-called "new atheism".
Mr. Sam Harris (www.samharris.org)
wrote a new book about something old. In the long history of philosophy we have
encountered his thesis before. His is a naive enthusiasm for the power of
reason and rational verification, which really means that he has rediscovered
the 18th century and its Age of Reason. Perhaps as an undergraduate
he never read William Barrett's Irrational Man.
Does the author appreciate light to the exclusion of
heat?—after all, love is famously irrational. But for Sam Harris, love is
a pleasurable state of mind (189). He picks the "happiness and suffering" of
sentient beings to ground his rationalist ethics, which he calls "realist
ethics", but "happiness and suffering" are described materialistically (171).
"Reason is nothing less than the guardian of love" (190).
Harris advocates something akin to a Neo-Enlightenment. His
skepticism about any truth outside the mind and reason, narrowly conceived, is
used to dismantle the architecture of our historic Western worldview (Jewish,
Christian, and Muslim), yet he offers nothing in replacement except Buddhist
meditation (288 n. 16) and old-fashioned rationalism updated by neuroscience.
"How can we encourage other human beings to extend their moral sympathies
beyond a narrow locus? How can we learn to be mere human beings, shorn of any
more compelling national, ethnic, or religious identity? We can be reasonable"
(190). The End of Faith is his first
book, and it is short—227 pages of text and 62 pages of notes.
The End of Faith is a
caricature of organized Western religion and faith. He says "Our enemy is
nothing other than faith itself" (131). And again "Indeed, we know enough at
this moment to say that the God of Abraham is not only unworthy of the
immensity of creation; he is unworthy even of man" (226). The tone of the book
is contemptuous in the extreme. Harris's work rejects the contribution of Western-inspired
(= Semitic) world religions to civilization and to our times. For the author,
religion is a liability, political and social. His philosophical materialism
has drawn him to work on a doctorate in neuroscience. He thinks anything that
was good in religion can be found elsewhere. He thinks mystical states and
religious impulses are located in the brain, not in a transcendent "totaliter
aliter." Hence his admiration for Buddhism and other Asian non-dualist systems
of consciousness training (215-216; 283 n. 12). Now he is studying belief,
disbelief, and uncertainty by way of fMRI (functional magnetic resonance
imaging).
Harris claims that intuition is a respectable first step for
the inquirer en route to realism grounded in scientific truth, and so he
rejects the position of relativists and pragmatists and pluralists who can
never get to certitude. There is here a relationship with 19th
century mechanism, determinism, and the "inevitable laws of history". He
accepts a materialist conception of certitude in the philosophy of science,
while explaining that he has spent many years practicing Eastern meditation
(283 n. 12).
Harris has a practical agenda. He thinks that, unless we
coherently apply reason to all human endeavor, including ethics, we will be
destroyed. Surely this is noble. Harris is looking out for you and me. He
believes that the threat from Islam is of the greatest urgency, and that there
is likelihood it will go nuclear. Readers can assume Harris's
opposition to orthodox Jews, Muslims, or Christians. But what comes as a
surprise is his withering attack upon the moderates and the liberals among
them—indeed, quite a surprise. This book is implicitly more against the
Kungs and the Bultmanns (although he seems to write approvingly of Paul
Tillich) than it is against the Grand Ayatollah or the pope who are, for him,
obviously indefensible. Although he would not like to welcome back the
Christians of the 14th century, he thinks their revisionist heirs
are the ones who keep propping up the unjustified myths and unprovable
assertions of outdated biblical religion. He says "We will see that the
greatest problem confronting civilization is not merely religious extremism:
rather, it is the larger set of cultural and intellectual accommodations we
have made to faith itself. Religious moderates are, in large part, responsible
for the religious conflict in our world, because their beliefs provide the
context in which scriptural literalism and religious violence can never be
adequately opposed" (45).
The End of Faith is
studded with the usual examples to illustrate his thesis. The discussion of the
Paris Plague of June 1348 A.D. would interest Catholics (70-71), and even more
so his portrayal of the Mass (72-73). He likes to refer to the Holy Eucharist
as "a cracker". The Mass is one of the best examples he can find of a
preposterous belief. He quotes, without source or exact reference, "The Roman
Profession of Faith of the Roman Catholic Church" to show what he means (241 n.
30).
However, when it comes to the Inquisition and the Holocaust,
he admits that he has treated these thorny subjects cursorily, and he refers
readers to some literature on these subjects (107)—without giving them
any authors who might disagree with him. None of the best historians of the
inquisitions are cited (Kamen, Peters, Shannon, Netanyahu), even though they
are well published and they may have some pretty sympathetic things to say
about the church. For the Holocaust, he relies on Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, for
one, but never mentions Rabbi David G. Dalin or Father Neuhaus. Harris is
blissfully innocent of the serious criticism Goldhagen received from Richard
John Neuhaus in First Things. Harris refers to Pacelli as "Pious XII" and on the same page (106) he reveals a
complete misunderstanding—another caricature—of papal
infallibility.
Probably Harris considers post-conciliar Catholicism rather
tame, yet he opposes it by saying "... even the most docile forms of Christianity
currently present insuperable obstacles to AIDS prevention and family planning
in the developing world, to medical research, and to the development of a
rational drug policy—and these contributions to human misery alone
constitute some of the most appalling failures of reasonableness in any age."
(150; esp. 167-169).
The End of Faith is
as much about the culture wars as anything else. His attacks upon an alleged
irrationality of Mr. Justice Scalia and American anti-marijuana and anti-sodomy
laws (156-164) seem unprofessional for an academic and more suited to an angry
ACLU activist. Thus, Harris reveals himself as a popularizer who is especially
annoyed at restraints on stem cell research (165-167).
Harris's philosophical hero is likely Bertrand Russell, who
comes in for praise in places (esp. 173). Russell was a peace activist, and a
man who accepted spirituality in some sense, but scrupulously subjected it to
reason and science. Noam Chomsky gets a beating because he does not see that
the real problem in the world is religion. Wittgenstein is dismissed (288-289
n. 19). Harris states plainly that faith is the mother of hatred (30). He can say something good about Rousseau and
Schelling (283 n. 11). Generally, though, he is against Greek wisdom or Western
philosophy because of its dualism, though he credits Pyrrho with some
innovation, probably because he learned something when he traveled to the border
of India (282 n. 9).
Basically, Harris thinks that science will solve nearly
everything in this life, including matters of morality. He trusts the human
mind unfailingly, thus implicitly rejecting Kant and his legacy (172). Ethics
is located in the physical brain, not in the will or the intellect as
classically conceived, by Kantians or by Thomists.
He joins a long line of those who have idolized modernity.
People used to think this way before the sinking of the Titanic gave them
pause, not to mention the pause given more recently after the demise of the
Challenger and the Columbia. The Myth of Progress thrives in this book. Just
escape from our obscurantist past and its odious survival in the present via
faith, and the future will surely be bright.
Mr. Harris and my retired cardiologist may have something in
common. The End of Faith could have been
written only by a very young man. Harris is cocky and not very modest in his
claims. He spreads the net of his discourse too widely. He is a trenchant mega-scoffer
and a hot-shot currently on the lecture circuit. My retired cardiologist also
began his career as an atheist, moved on to spend many years as an agnostic,
and recently (like the venerable Anthony Flew) announced he was a Deist as the
arguments from intelligent design theory were so compelling. Perhaps at the end
of his academic journey Sam Harris's final thought might echo St.
Augustine—"Too late have I loved Thee."
The historical Voltaire received the last sacraments on his
deathbed. It was reported that Jean-Paul Sartre was moving in the direction of
theism at the time of his death. Harris sympathizes with those who would enjoy
the sacred, especially as death approaches (232 n. 20), but for him
spirituality must be deeply rational (43) and divested of unreasonable
faith-tenets. Spirituality is in the brain, and it is a state of consciousness,
not a relationship with the Other—the
Thou of Martin Buber. For Harris,
that would be mere religion and he says "No personal God need be worshipped for
us to live in awe at the beauty and immensity of creation" (227).
For now, Sam Harris is tightly locked in a universe knowable
only to the most rigorous 18th and 19th century
methodological empiricism united to the newest technology. Unlike Jacques and
Raissa Maritain a century ago, who discovered Henri Bergson to help them out of
this particular philosophical dead-end, the young Mr. Harris has found no
similar rescuer. He would minimize the saints whom Bergson revered, while
offering no real antidote to despair, a common problem in post-Christian
Western scholarship and its nihilist heirs.
We await his second book to learn if he has evolved in any
worthwhile direction. The End of Faith
breaks no new ground, nor does it rework old ground seriously. Neuroscience is
fine, but it is not the tool to answer ultimate questions. We may already be
frightened by reckless Islamism, but we did not require Mr. Harris's analysis
of Islamism to do this for us (203). His proposal for a world government is so
tiresome. His particular solution to the deeper problems of the human situation
has already been explored (he denies this by saying religion prevents us from
exploring anything since religion
rejects all new evidence—176) in the first Enlightenment. Perhaps due to
his youthfulness, Harris's philosophy is flashy and facile—or lacking in
erudition, as when he wrongly ascribes a famed Scholastic adage to Christopher
Hitchens (176). He confidently looks to the future of reason when he is
recommending its worn past.
Related Ignatius Insight Articles and Book Excerpts:
• The Better We Reason, the Nearer We Come to Truth | The Introduction to
Reason to Believe: Why Faith Makes Sense | Richard Purtill
• Dawkins' Delusions | An interview with Fr. Thomas Crean, O.P. | Carl E. Olson
• Professor Dawkins and the Origins of Religion | Fr. Thomas Crean, O.P. |
From God Is No Delusion: A Refutation of Richard Dawkins
• Are Truth, Faith, and Tolerance Compatible? | Joseph Ratzinger
• On "Believing" Atheists | Fr. James V. Schall, S.J.
• Atheism and the Purely "Human" Ethic | Fr. James V. Schall, S.J.
• Is Religion Evil? Secularism's Pride and Irrational Prejudice | Carl E. Olson
• A Short Introduction to Atheism | Carl E. Olson
• C.S. Lewis’s Case for Christianity | An Interview with Richard Purtill
• Paganism and the Conversion of C.S. Lewis | Clotilde Morhan
• Designed Beauty and Evolutionary Theory | Fr. Thomas Dubay, S.M.
• The Universe is Meaning-full | An interview
with Dr. Benjamin Wiker
• The Mythological Conflict Between Christianity and Science | An interview with Dr. Stephen Barr
• The Source of Certitude | Fr. Thomas
Dubay, S.M.
• Deadly Architects | An Interview with
Donald De Marco & Benjamin Wiker
Father Brian Van Hove, S.J., is the Chaplain to the Religious Sisters of Mercy of Alma, Michigan.
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