Screaming at the Choir

I just finished reading Sam Harris's Letter to a Christian Nation. And if this is a review, it gets the NR treatment from me.

It was a mixed exercise at best. The book is a response to the slew of criticism from the religious right that Harris received for his other NYT best seller, The End of Faith, and I suppose I have committed a literary foul of sorts by reading his before the book that engendered the original criticism. But it isn't hard to extrapolate backward to what his first book said - I'll still read it, of course - but I'm getting the impression that he's delivering an old message with a caustic tongue that quite unsurprisingly is making a lot of people mad.

I say "an old message" because Harris largely uses philosophical arguments that are so notorious that they have names. He cites a number of classic arguments against theism (e.g., the problem of evil, the superfluousness of god, contradictions within "perfect" texts) but angles them sharply at Christians, citing an overwhelming number of problematic passages from the Bible. He cites, among other things, the recurring theme of violence and God's wrath that permeates the Old and, hate to say it, New Testaments. He points to the obvious fallibility of an allegedly infallible text: e.g., Leviticus 25:44-46, which illustrates the propriety of slavery, or the moral instructions of Deuteronomy 13:6-15, which instruct you to kill your family members if they follow a religion other than your own. He points to the questionable profundity (and general cross-cultural ubiquity and therefore non unique character of numbers 6-9) of the ten commandments. He speaks of the divorce of aspects of Christian morality from any regard to human suffering or emotion (see recent statements by Evangelical leader Reginald Finger that he (Finger) would oppose an AIDS vaccine that would save millions of lives because he thinks it would encourage premarital sex). I am finding myself tracing the book and looking at all of Harris's arguments, all of which I've heard before in other forms, many more eloquently and evenly presented. I will spare you a full page by page run through of a book that you too could read in an hour; suffice it to say that the arguments are very solid, classic complaints, but Harris doesn't *really* bring anything new to the table in this regard.

What he does bring to the table is a negative consequence of the beliefs - arguments over religion and the existence of god can lend themselves to the sort of late night college dorm room ramblings that amount to little material consequence. Harris argues that the choice to believe or not believe is not immaterial, not just one of personal preference and that to believe is a delusion that is not just wrong but dangerous and an impediment to global civilization. The consequences of radical or fanatic belief have rather overt 9/11-scale consequences, but Harris pushes it further - he claims that it is exactly the atmosphere engendered by the more moderate religious devotees and the religious tolerance exhibited by atheist and agnostic moderates and liberals that allow for the radical factions to exist, prosper and ultimately destroy. Harris thinks that religious faith is pure lunacy and that our future is dependent upon rational minds coming to this conclusion, requiring a fact-based dialog in the public sector which would alienate and theoretically eliminate the fringes that cause the danger. He is downright fervent in this assertion and does not understand why we allow an outmoded form of thought continue in our culture - he is quite clearly baffled by the very existence of organized religious faith in the scientific age. You can practically hear him screaming between the lines, "Isn't this obvious? What the hell is wrong with you people?" He even goes so far as to say that the word "atheist" should not exist, comparing it to the fact that no one is forced to identify themselves as a"non-astrologer." He likens his efforts to abolish religious belief, even moderate belief, to the abolishment of slavery 140 years ago. Harris is a missionary of a different sort, and not surprisingly, he uses the same fiery attitude and self-assuredness that his opponents behind the pulpits have used for centuries. He is right, and he all but states that if you cannot see this, you are an idiot.

Which is where the central flaw of LtaCN comes in - it's suppose to be a response to his Christian critics and is addressed to a Christian nation, but his vitriolic tone would be so off-putting to a believer that i find him equally foolish to believe that this is the manner in which to convince people. His stance, as Roger Penrose puts forth on the back cover, is uncompromising, and I believe more strongly resembles a political fundraiser than a debate. As such, i envision it as a cheering session for the already-atheists and more senseless noise to the devout. And the a-a's are likely to stand and shout and speak in tongues and yell "Praise Harris," but no one without those special robes is going to take heed. Which is a shame, because I think Harris is very much on to something here - I, too, share his opinion that dogmatic belief in this day and age is absurd at best and horrifically dangerous at worst. I am more humble about it, I hope, and believe that he could have accomplished a lot more with an even-keeled book that did not damn his titular target audience. His response, which is almost certainly an accurate one in the current airwave cacophony, is that you have to shout to be heard; you have to throw the curve to get the average to fall where you might like. The effect for your more considerate readers is the book seeming disingenuous - if Harris is really as smart as he is professing, he would clearly be aware of the stylistic absurdity in his own work, so he is either not quite that smart or he is intentionally overshooting and manipulative. And manipulative is exactly what he is trying to be, but in this case, I don't think his MO is going to work.

I decided to give the other side a try immediately after reading LtaCN and read Francis Collins's The Language of God. Cousin-in-law Frank reviewed it on his site, and despite a mixed review, I was intrigued enough to give it a try, especially by this line:

I figured he would illuminate some amazing information about the structure of DNA that would truly amaze and wonder (and he did…sort of). I wasn’t expecting a philosophy text.

Nor, Frank, did you get one. Collins sets an embarrassingly bad tone for rigorous philosophy very early in the book. For one, he culls from C.S. Lewis with reckless abandon, throws Lewis's arguments into single paragraph quotations and then proceeds as though they were law. He repeatedly presents one-sided arguments including only his supports and doesn't just ignore opposing views but takes pot shots at them: the anti-intellectual aw-shucks attitude towards modern philosophy is transparent. He even goes so far as to say that something confusing is "like existential philosophy, and who understands that?" He attempts to throw postmodern theory on subjective truth under the proverbial bus with a single line - he claims that it is a Catch-22 (BIG FAT SIC) because it claims that there are no objective truths, but, Collins claims, if there are no objective truths, then how can postmodernism be true? Um... perhaps because you just evaluated a system with no objective truth with a standard of objective truth? You know, the standard that is non-existent within the system? This is the same method that tries to introduce a contradiction into nihilism by saying that nihilists "believe that there are no true beliefs." But the nihilists have a true belief... hyuk hyuk - I apologize for the informal tone here, but I just have the gut reaction that these arguments are painfully juvenile in that they don't recognize that they are evaluating systems with the very standards and concepts that the systems purport do not exist.

I actually don't have a complaint with those arguments; I personally don't buy them, but I recognize that serious people make them quite eloquently and they are worthy of consideration. My main objection is that Collins routinely dismisses entire schools of thought with one liners! It's actually the same fault that Harris has - he is equally saying "you know, it's completely obvious that you're wrong, and you're a moron for not being able to see it - I can destroy your whole worldview in one quip." It's completely invalid, and not to take a pot shot myself, but I get the impression that the same person who identifies existentialism as "impossible to understand" is not exactly qualified to assess postmodern philosophy.

Which, to get to the point, is the central flaw in this book, that a scientist is claiming to give a (presumably scientific) proof of god via his work with the genome and DNA (his actual area of expertise). The entire concept of the book and its title hinge on his authority as a scientist, but he turns in an amateurish philosophical proof where he and ends up spouting C.S. Lewisisms and doing a bad job of it. I wholeheartedly agree with Frank that when Collins "sticks to his day job" and discusses DNA and junk sequences and the like, he does a reasonable job. But his philosophy is atrocious. His entire argument hinges on the argument from morality, an argument that essentially claims that the existence of an absolute standard morality proves the existence of a supreme being. Collins gives this classic argument one of the worst treatments of ANY argument I have ever read. He starts by saying that there exists an absolute moral standard because "deep down, we all know what's right and wrong." He then goes on to say that because there are certain laws that are found repeatedly in different cultures that it must have a source. He answers the obvious, "Um, but people break the laws in all of these cultures all of the time, which seems to indicate that we don't really all deep down "know" the absolute morality" challenge by saying that human beings are fallible and can't live up to the absolute moral code.

Which is a sort of beg the question 101 logical argument, that we know there is an absolute moral code because it's everywhere and even when it's not it's because we are weak and can't possibly live up to the absolute moral code which by the way exists.

Collins violates all kinds of rules of argument by claiming that maybe even if you don't believe there is an absolute code b/c people don't all follow it, saints, specifically people like mother theresa, do follow it and are evidence that a universal moral code must exist. For those of you keeping score, he just used individual (and rather exceptional at that) cases to prove a universal.

I must admit that I set (THREW) the book down several times as I encountered these braindead arguments. And I have to emphasize that it's not like I was picking apart long arguments on technicalities; these two to three paragraph assertions were his version of proofs. Egads man! But I muscled through the book and got to watch - he did make some progressively more solid arguments later, most of them revolving around, again, his actual work and not his philo-moonlighting, but even those "solid" arguments invoked the "plainly existing" absolute moral authority again and again and again. Unspeakable levels of sloppiness went into this book - and I won't even get started on the fact that there's a whole absurdity in there about how he saw three waterfalls an KNEW the trinity and Christianity were right, nor will I mention that even the editing was sloppy - the first chapter was peppered with phrases like this:

"This book is only a small antidote to that circumstance, but will perhaps provide an opportunity for reflection, and a desire to dig deeper."

And, the, unnecessary, use, of, commas, award, goes, to...

I was obviously not impressed by Collins's book - another NR and Harris presented somewhat more sound arguments with an intolerable level of bile that rendered the whole exercise pointless. Disappointing foray into a couple of religious books, but fear not, I will, like Lee, press on .