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Article Excerpt
There are certain book titles that should be permanently banned, including those that start with 'the end of' (as well as any of its variations, such as 'the twilight of,' like the contrary and off-the-mark volume The Twilight of Atheism by Alister McGrath) and those that start with 'the culture of.' Both of these titles have been done to death, and frankly they show a lack of imagination that should alert the potential buyer and reader of such texts. Sam Harris breaks this rule with his new book; unfortunately, this is not the only manner in which he displays a lack of imagination and a dependence on exhausted and bankrupt themes.
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As a rationalist and a non-theist--an overt Atheist, in fact--I was happy to see Harris' book arrive and receive the remarkable attention that it has received. Not many treatises on the subject of the negativity of religion get much publicity in America, especially in these days of religion ascendant. The comments and reviews by secularists had been overwhelmingly positive. As I began to read it, I had high hopes, which were initially supported, then disappointed, and ultimately dashed. I think Harris missed a major opportunity with this book, and I have not yet decided what its popularity means as a commentary on the Atheist community. Perhaps little more than starvation.
Harris' work is actually three books in one--no mean feat for a text of 227 small-trim pages. The first mini-book considers the general problem of faith as an impediment to good decision making. The second focuses on the violence that religion does, with special emphasis on Islam. The third and final turns to a disquisition on morality and spirituality. In short, the first mini-book is useful, even quotable; the second is tired and cliched; and the third is just dead wrong.
Book 1: What's Wrong with Faith?
The first roughly eighty pages of The End of Faith are promising. In it Harris makes a strong case for the destructiveness, not just politically but intellectually, of religious faith. He accurately asserts that it is not religious extremism alone that is the problem, nor any specific religious ideology, but rather the very phenomenon of faith itself. In some nice turns of phrase, he says such things as "Faith is what credulity becomes when it finally achieves escape velocity from the constraints of terrestrial discourse--constraints like reasonableness, internal coherence, civility, and candor" (65) and "Believing strongly, without evidence, they have kicked themselves loose of the world. It is therefore in the very nature of faith to serve as an impediment to further inquiry" (45).
Anyone who knows anything about the intellectual history of Christianity knows that these statements ring true. The early church fathers were rather explicit in their views. Tertullian (c. CE 160-c. 230) wrote: "When we come to believe, we have no desire to believe anything else, for we begin by believing that there is nothing else which we have to believe ... I warn people not to seek for anything beyond what they came to believe, for that was all they needed to seek for." He continued by claiming that, "In the last resort, however, it is better for you to remain ignorant, for fear that you come to know what you should not know.... Let curiosity give place to faith, and glory to salvation. Let them at least be no hindrance, or let them keep quiet. To know nothing against the Rule [of faith] is to know everything." Augustine (c. CE 354-430) after him opined: "There is another form of temptation, even more fraught with danger. This is the disease of curiosity ... It is this which draws us to try and discover the secrets of nature, those secrets which are beyond our understanding, which can avail us nothing, and which man should not wish to learn."
Harris makes a good case, for those who have not already heard it, that faith is dishonest and mentally debilitating, depriving us of the very curiosity and critical attitude that we need in order to make empirical progress and to sort out the true from the false. Even worse, he points out the political or social dangers in faith, including the...
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