Letter to a Christian Nation

Did you ever read a book you mostly agreed with but still didn’t like? That would be my reaction to Sam Harris’ 2006 Letter to a Christian Nation.

Let’s start with the worst part, and the part I most disagreed with. Harris not only attacks Christians throughout, even moderate and liberal Christians, he launches into a three-page diatribe against Muslims in which he claims that “most Muslims are utterly deranged by their religious faith” (his italics).

His extreme anti-religious stance is as arrogant in its atheism and as intolerant of religious faith as any of the believers he attacks for their arrogance and intolerance.

Harris asserts that atheism is not a dogma: “It is time that Christians like yourselves stop pretending that a rational rejection of your faith entails the blind embrace of atheism as dogma” (his italics). He then turns around and defines atheism as “simply an admission of the obvious.” Sorry, but that sounds pretty dogmatic to me.

He claims to rely solely on reason, evidence, and logic: “The conflict between science and religion is reducible to a simple fact of human cognition and discourse: either a person has good reasons for what he believes or he does not.” (I assume women are included as persons here, but Harris’ use of the generic “he” only reinforces male dominance.) He goes on to say that “…faith is nothing more than the license religious people give each other to keep believing when reasons fail.”

The problem is that reason, evidence, and logic don’t answer all questions or account for all human experience. They don’t fully account for ethics, values, human empathy or other moral feelings, and they certainly don’t account for the origin of the universe, which, as Harris admits elsewhere, remains a mystery to this day. When reasons fail, we still have to make ethical choices and we do so on the basis of our experience, the values we hold dear despite the lack of evidence to support them fully, and our feelings of human concern. Likewise we value aesthetic experience and beauty, not on the basis of reason, logic, and evidence, but on the basis of human sensibility. Are we to suspend making any moral or aesthetic choices because reasons fail?

In the same way, do we suspend all belief because reasons fail? When reason, logic, and evidence fail to support atheism fully (for as Harris says we simply do not know about the origin of the universe), does Harris suspend his belief in atheism? Hardly.

And I would really like to see him base his love life on nothing but reason, logic, and evidence.  Maybe religion is akin to romantic love.  In addition to common sense, they both require some chemistry, some tenderness, some imagination, and a strong appreciation for the mystery of it all.  Throw in enough compatibility and commitment and you have a life-long relationship, whether it be with a significant other or with a faith community that shares your world view.

For someone who claims to be guided strictly by rationality, Harris’ own logic is inexcusably sloppy at times. He repeatedly falls into the fallacy of simplistic either-or thinking, as in the “fact” that “either a person has good reasons for what he believes or he does not,” when “good” is a relative term that may mean different things to different people and when “reasons” may encompass one’s experience, intuition, values, and feelings.

Elsewhere, Harris states “Either the Bible is an ordinary book written by mortals or it isn’t.” Is it possible for the Bible to be an extraordinary book written by mortals, like other great works of literature? Considering the Bible is a collection of works by different authors from different sources, could it be a mixture of great literature, full of beauty, wisdom, and even symbolic truth, and “ordinary” writing full of both the mundane and the nonsensical? Harris’ simplistic language and chop-logic allows for no such complexity.

Next Harris reduces morality to the alleviation of suffering: “Religion allows peole to imagine that their concerns are moral when they are not—that is, when they have nothing to do with suffering or its alleviation.” As important as the alleviation of suffering is to human morality, surely that does not exhaust the topic. What of honesty and truth-telling? Equity and fairness? Hypocrisy? Taking turns? Sharing? Do these principles rise to the level of morality only when human suffering is involved? Again, in his zealous enthusiasm to attack religion, Harris repeatedly oversimplifies and overstates.

I completely agree with Harris on the issues of abortion and stem cell research. I abhor the religious absolutism that would let a woman suffer and even die rather than abort a fetus and that would let countless fully conscious humans suffer from disease rather than seek treatment and cures through stem cell research. Yet, when Harris equates a human fetus with a skin cell as equally potential human beings, he has once again let his anti-religious zealotry get the better of balanced rationality.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in his references to intelligent design. He begins by saying that “nature offers no compelling evidence for an intelligent designer and countless examples of unintelligent design.” Note the subtle shift from “designer” to “design,” as if they were the same thing. And is “compelling evidence” a matter of fact or a matter of interpretation and opinion?

Later, Harris gives numerous examples of what he calls “unintelligent design” in nature. Yet the underlying assumption of his argument is that every imperfection is evidence of unintelligence, as if intelligence were always infallibly perfect.

Despite numerous scientifically and rationally based theories of intelligent design in the universe, Harris rejects out of hand any form of rational science that does not support his own atheistic convictions. (See for example the work of Paul Davies, David Deutsch, and Bernard Haisch, as well as the process theology of Alfred North Whitehead. And see Brian Greene and Michio Kaku if you want your mind blown by scientific theories of the universe just as seemingly fantastical as the concept of God.)

Harris may be right that the universe and everything in it are nothing more than material phenomena, at most epiphenomena dependent on physical reality, but just because the material is all we can observe, measure, and quantify does not mean that that is all that exists. In the end, we do not know. Maybe someday we will. Meanwhile, it may be the better part of wisdom to keep an open mind.

After reading this post one might ask what is left for me to agree with. Well, most of Harris’ specific attacks on religion are directed at the most unreasoning, literal-minded, hard-hearted tenets of fundamentalist and absolutist believers. I have no quarrel with his rejection of mindless, uncompassionate, and downright inhumane religious belief and action, but (1) he extends his attack to all believers, leaving little room for complexity, subtlety, and even the rationality of belief, and (2) his own zealotry blinds him to his own irrational, arrogant, and intolerant attitudes.