The End Of Faith: Religion, Terror, And The Future Of Reason (2005) - Plot & Excerpts
What follows is not a review. It's more like some notes and thoughts I had while reading the book... a review will soon be written....This is from DFW's 2005 Kenyon Commencement Speech:"Here's another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: "Look, it's not like I don't have actual reasons for not believing in God. It's not like I haven't ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn't see a thing, and it was fifty below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out 'Oh, God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me.'" And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. "Well then you must believe now," he says, "After all, here you are, alive." The atheist just rolls his eyes. "No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp."I have no doubt that Sam Harris is much smarter than I am. I have little doubt that any criticisms I make will be duly dealt with by persons probably smarter than myself too, or at least better informed than I am on these topics. I'm curious to read some of the religious critiques of this book, are any of them able to refute what he is saying without resorting to religious babble? I'm not really quite sure where you argue with him on the questions of religion, something about the way he posits a definition of belief I think is the weak link in the argument, but I can't put my finger on what it is. That's only based an unease I felt with his reasoning though. Is he harsh on Islam? No, I don't think so. Everyone who is Islam is not a bad person, as a group that can run out into the street waving AK-47's around cheering and celebrating the deaths of a few thousand innocent people, or who find it proper to behead people, or douse women in gasoline and light them on fire, or excitedly show pictures you took with your camera of dead-people on the ground around the WTC that are now housed on your laptop, and not understand how come everyone else around you doesn't think it's a great thing (ok, this guy might just be a sociopath who happened to be Muslim, but still Greg conspiracy number 3 of 9/11, why did he bring not one but two cameras to school with him that day, when he had never brought cameras to school any other day? Greg conspiracies #1 and 2 may be dealt with later). The way that liberals have defended their right to the diversity of their religion has stunk to me for quite awhile. If they are allowed to actively do anti-social things, then we should allow any religious group in our country to do them too, both books proscribe similar things. I don't think a bunch of women being forced outside of towns freezing their asses off and being shunned all because they are menstruating would be looked upon as a cultural difference worth appreciating some Leviticus inspired church decided to do this out in Wyoming. Lots of words to say I agree. What I had difficulty with was Harris' attempt at explaining a possible ethics. Maybe it was the appeal to a proto-utilitarianism and basing a possible universal moral code on the premise of love and happiness. I'm simplifying here. I actually agree with him, but I don't see it all holding water. Now, because of love we feel for others we want them to have the most happiness and suffer less. This love would radiate outward in our immediate social circle's (this is me talking now not Harris), our family (that we don't hate), significant others, friends, children we'd feel more of a bond with and be more invested in their happiness and suffering. Here is sort of my problem: If me and my very large family, my wife and our 12 children, whom I love very very much, but it pains me to see them go hungry all the time, not have shoes for their 24 little feet, and I can't just seem to provide for them all. I want them to be happy. I don't want them to suffer anymore. Now living next door is an old miser. He never talks to me, I don't like him, nor do I hate him. I know he has 10 million dollars stashed under the floorboards in his house. I know he has no friends, no family and that no one will miss him if he died. I also know that no one knows about the money, I just happen to know someway. Do I kill him? One the happiness and suffering scale the answer could be yes, but we'd still say he has a right to his happiness of life. What if I told you that a letter got accidently delivered to my house yesterday from his doctor, and the doctor told him that he has terminal cancer of the most painful kind, and he only has 6 months to live. Do I kill him now? What if I'm going to do it with a drug that he will never realize he has taken, he will feel nothing from, and he will just pass away in his sleep, with no terror, no violence, no awareness even of his death? Can I kill him now? The answer somewhere in this becomes yes, yes I can kill him. Especially if one doesn't believe in an afterlife, there becomes a point in this far-fetched hypothetical situation; happiness and suffering are at this point vague and unquantifiable, and are a slippery slope. What if I had these 12 kids, they are all on the brink of starvation, and the next door neighbor is a rich miser, no relations blah blah blah, who I know hates life because he walks around his yard all day muttering "I hate my life". Murder here is morally justified, but it shouldn't be--it's that reason why it shouldn't be justified that I think is missing in the framework of a system that Harris is building. Harris isn't really offering up a final word on ethics though, he's just pointing towards ways that a future morality could be built that didn't rely on fairy tales, myths, or some of the problematic pragmatic approaches someone like Rorty might endorse. (On pragmatics, wow, was he a little harsh on Rorty and company. I've never been much of a fan of pragmatism, nor spent much time thinking about it, or reading it, but he really did a number on it. I do think that he missed an interesting point that he could have taken up and been in agreement with Habermas, and which I think is a central problem in any talk about religion and irrationality. Habermas has had many different sides to him in his long career as Adorno's successor who lost his balls, so to speak. Habermas' central idea is roughly that if open discourse could happen then it would easily resolve problems; but it's that communication is not possible, that problems continue without being able to find a solution. This brings me back to the DFW quote at the start, the problem between having a discourse on religion and the irrational aspects, and trying to bring someone who believes some really weird shit into congruence with the actual physical world we live in is that neither person are speaking the same language. This isn't relativism, it's not that both are right, or that you have your truth and I have mine in any kind of epistemological sense, it's that both sides could be wrong, but neither of them is speaking a language that the other one understands. Look at the creationist debate. The reason why scientists can't convince a biblical literalist about the validity of their findings is that the words a scientist uses are not even understood by the creationist. Yes they can give definitions of the words that both would agree on, but there is something in their language, in their way of using the language and expressing themselves both to themselves and to the outside world that is not the same as being used by the other person. The scientist can show figure after figure, show pictures, fossils showing every stage for transition from single-cell molecule to human and it would do nothing to the creationist, they would still hear every word as intelligent design, as biblical this or that. And this would be vice versa too. I'd suggest that one possible way to break down this barrier of communication is through something of a deconstruction (a text with no inherent truth can be broken apart any number of ways that are all legitimate, a text with a concealed truth can be broken open to expose that truth, in the first instance there is a case of relativism, but it's of no importance, their is no truth in the text to begin with, it's only making the inconsistencies more apparent by showing the absurdity of the new readings. The second is the more abused version of deconstruction, because it often falls into a relativistic whirlpool of competing 'truths', but in many cases I think it's the job of the reader to read these 'deconstructions' as added layers to the original, where this is going I'm not quite sure, I'll probably add something in the comment section at some point), and I think it's something that late Derrida was pointing to along with his focus on cosmopolitanism (which in reality is probably the only way to truly overcome the schisms of irrational belief, it's in all likelihood one of the major contributing factors of Ancient Greece putting their pantheon of Gods aside, but this is mentioned by Harris, although I don't think he uses the word cosmopolitan).Now I should probably go finish the book. I still have a chapter left to read.
In The End of Faith, Harris does what any number of enlightenment rationalists before him have done: attempt to undermine the authority of religion by showing how scientific rationality discredits the notion of a supernatural being. Harris seizes on the inherent contradictions that arise when a document composed of ancient texts and shaped by historical, political and institutional forces is said to be the inerrant word of a transcendent being. A number of lines of attack open up as a result:-God is kind of a jerk, at least in the Old Testament. He is capricious, cruel, vindictive, even murderous. Where does a God like this get any kind of moral authority and who would want to worship him anyway? -Believers claim the bible to be the word of God, and hence a form of absolute truth, yet almost all are incredibly selective about what they choose to emphasize. The bible is an extremely contradictory book open to multiple interpretations, and in almost any situation the things determining the emphasis are historical and cultural, rather than textual. So believers are, on the one hand, claiming supernatural authority for their moral and ethical principles, when in fact what they are really doing is using the bible to rationalize and justify beliefs that they hold for other reasons. The bible is so ambiguous and self contradictory that it can’t be said to serve as a reliable guide to how to live, because justification can be found in it for almost any course of action one might want to take. A literal reading of the bible is impossible, because such a reading would be completely incoherent. Surely an infallible being could have done a better job of telling us his intentions.-The various explanations of human existence in the bible are plainly contradicted by modern science. So it’s clear that the bible, in and of itself, is little more than a historical curiosity. The only reason it bulks so large in contemporary life and contemporary debate is because of the institutions that have grown up around it, and the political and cultural utility of reference to it. Maybe it’s the ex-history grad student in me, but I do think there’s something problematic about the kind of critique waged by Harris/Dawkins/Hitchens et al. As Terry Eagleton argued in The London Review of Books, they make no attempt to uncover and examine “the structure of feeling” of religious belief. An historian writing a history of a church or denomination or community in which religion played a large part would have to write a thick description of the way in which religious belief functions in the community of believers etc. The same thing would apply if he were writing a biography of an historical figure. He’d certainly need to stand outside that figure or community, and could not take every (or any) religion-inspired claim or belief at face value. But he would have to describe, neutrally and empathetically, the functional role religion played in a given society or community, or the psychological role it played in the lives of believers. Now I’m not against New Atheist polemics. I found Harris’ book quite cathartic, and heard myself saying “Right On!” as much as “now hold on…” but I couldn’t shake the nagging suspicion that there was something wrong with his approach. Despite all the historical references in the book it seemed far too driven by current social and political anxieties to stand as a fair account of religion (as if such a vast subject could be dispensed with in 300 pages anyway). But of course the book is not a work of history, it’s a polemic, an attempt to refute a specific opinion or doctrine. Being a polemic, it’s not bound by the rules and norms of academic historical inquiry. And in fact, Harris’ goal is not to reconstruct the past, but to convince readers that religious belief and religious faith should not be living options for people in the twenty-first century. The ahistorical quality of his argument is almost necessary, given his aim. In fact his presentist, ahistorical approach to religion is probably closer to how people actually live religious faith (or aspire to live it) than the textual, historical approach of biblical scholars. Most believers don’t approach the bible the way scholars do. They see it as a living thing, a guide to how to live in the here and now. Most believers don’t believe every word in the bible. Most use it selectively, emphasizing passages that coincide with the more modern moral outlook that they’ve acquired through socialization (of which the historical/cultural weight of Christianity or Islam or whatever is a part). And for the vast majority of believers in the liberal democratic West, I’m guessing, religious faith poses not the slightest obstacle to life in the modern world. Most are functional secularists. Harris doesn’t ignore this fact—he seizes on it and gives it a darker emphasis. Moderate religiosity, he argues, is dangerous because it aids and abets the more fundamentalist and radical tendencies in the world today. And this is especially dangerous given the rise of right-wing fundamentalist Christianity in the US, and radical Islam in the Muslim world. If it were just a question of religious moderates living with (or ignoring) certain fundamental contradictions, there would be no cause for alarm. The problem, according to Harris, is that religious moderates aid and abet religious extremists by insulating them from criticism. They enforce the idea that it’s impolite to question the fundamental assumptions behind religious faith. They help keep these issues out of public discourse. And this might not be such a big deal if fundamentalists in the US respected the separation of church and state, or if Islamic radicals in the Muslim world weren’t so busy blowing up their perceived opponents. But when conservative Christians in the US threaten the teaching of evolution in the schools, and when Islamic radicalism threatens the political stability of the middle east (as does, I should add, the US response to Islamic radicalism), and the physical existence of people everywhere, this becomes cause for alarm.Here's an attempt sketch a less condescending model of the psychology of religious moderation: a) The idea of God is the idea that there are forces beyond the self that rule and determine human existence. While these forces may, in principle, be knowable, for most human beings alive on the planet at any given moment they are effectively inscrutable. We can never know the truth of our existence in any ultimate or absolute sense. Nor, for that matter, do the truths of science offer us much insight into how we should treat our fellow human beings. b) Church and religion is a place where the ethical implications of this insight are worked through, codified, and put into practice—it’s where we learn how to act toward our fellow man c) The Bible is obviously an historical text, written and assembled by fallible human beings but it is useful for the following pragmatic reasons 1) the weight of tradition behind it gives it an authority that other, more straightforward, contemporary, intellectually rigorous and logically consistent books don’t possess—its useful in building and sustaining a community of the faithful, which is crucial to establishing a church and practicing a religion 2) It’s distance from the contemporary world is one of it’s virtues—its anachronistic nature means that its inherently critical of contemporary norms and values (often in reactionary ways) 3) While the book is riddled with incredible claims about the world, anachronistic values, and injunctions to outright despicable behavior, there are plenty of worthwhile passages in it as well. d) Church is also a place where the mysteries of human existence, and human subjectivity are explored, through prayer, meditation and other forms of spiritual discipline. These are techniques for cultivating inwardness and building a soul. e) Religion also offers solace from the harsher aspects of human existence—the anxiety and insecurity we experience while alive, and the finality of death. f) Finally, it is possible to belong to a church, practice a religion, be a “believer”, and still live in the modern world. This may involve living with a number of logical contradictions, but people do that all the time.So the upshot, I guess, is that New Atheist polemics like Harris' are good as far as they go, but they only go so far. They help you understand certain things about religious belief—mainly the logical and moral problems that arise when one tries to take an ancient text that’s origins are largely political and historical and treat it as a source of transcendent and inerrant wisdom. But they don't provide a fair description of contemporary religious belief, or provide an adequate description of how contemporary believers, especially religious moderates, live their faith.
What do You think about The End Of Faith: Religion, Terror, And The Future Of Reason (2005)?
I rate this a five in spite of some legitimate reservations, too well expressed by too many people to bear repeating here. The things I liked: 1. Brilliant writing style. Incisive, funny, powerful. (His followup to this book, a 94 page tract called "Letter to a Christian Nation" displays this skill to even better advantage.)2. Sam's recommended actions for the reader. Religion generally gets a free pass to make unsubstantiated truth claims. Stop allowing that. Start questioning, and pushing back publicly.3. Who SAYS "Faith" is a virtue? Again, an unsubstantiated assertion that deserves some pushback. 4. Analogies: I love that Harris comes up with some new thinking in the atheist arena. Too many authors are trotting out Bertrand Russell gems, and as good as they may be, they're 90-some-odd years old. The best, IMHO, is when Sam asks the reader to distinguish between comforting religious truth claims and his (hypothetical) claim that he believes there is a diamond buried in his back yard, the size of a refrigerator, and that it gives him great comfort to know that at some point in his life he can choose to be very rich. In the current climate, one would get him branded insane, and the other would get him branded a man of strong faith. Bollocks to both, I say. 5. Moderation supports extremism. It's not appealing, and those in the middle are looking for compromise and wiggle room, but it really DOES come down to some black and white, true/false determinations. Choosing to be moderate, as Sam says, betrays both one's faith and reason.This may be the hardest pill for Sam to get readers to swallow, because it requires the most sacrifice of one's own foundations (if one is moderately religious, that is.) This proposition simultaneously asks the moderate believer to abandon thoughts that they have held to be sacrosanct from their youth, and then as a consequence, "disaffiliate" themselves from a tribe with which they have strong identification. (tribe/religion... whatever.)A compelling read that I thoroughly enjoyed, and which I love to imagine moderates reading and squirming through all the uncomfortable passages. Which is precisely Sam's overall goal... to remove the "comfortability" of lolling around in one's unjustifiable faith propositions, at the expense of the rest of humanity.
—Folboteur
So near the mark, but just off of center. This book makes many laudable points, not the least of which is the critique that allowing faith/religion into the political sphere on equal footing with science and reason will doom us all. My primary complaint with this work, and the reason I knocked off a couple stars, is due to Mr. Harris's illogical and inconsistent privileging of America and fundamentalist Christianity over the more "violent" Islam.For example, he argues that we can rest assured that the intent of Bush in bombing Iraq was not, as in the case of Palestinian suicide bombings, an attempt to cause widespread civilian death. Mr. Harris was apparently asleep at the wheel when the initial incursion was labeled "Shock & Awe"... I'm sorry, but bombing suburban neighborhoods to cow an enemy is neither strategic (if you buy the liberation myth) nor morally just. The faith of radical clerics in America is treated as somehow less violent because it is Christian, yet he never supports this; I recommend Mr. Harris check out the new documentary, Jesus Camp. Much more logical to assume that with the most powerful military on the globe, Christian America doesn't need to do suicide bombings?Next, we're assured that these non-Western nations, with their approaches toward death and suicide, could not possess nuclear weapons without annihilating innocent civilians with them. Apparently the possession of these weapons by Pakistan and India means little.... fundamentalist religiosity is extremely violent and politically popular in the governments of both nations, yet they've somehow abstained from blowing themselves, each other, or us up. There seems to be a lot of truth to Arundhati Roy's claim, which he quotes, that there is a racist element underlying some critiques. Mr. Harris appears to fully buy into this trap, while making pot shots at both Roy and Chomsky for presuming that factors aside from religion may also be important.Finally, he makes a claim that Israeli treatment of Palestinians and their neighbors is of the highest ethical caliber. This is almost grotesque following the horrific loss of civilian lives in the recent conflict with Lebanon... as with American Christians, Mr. Harris frequently seems confused over whether or not Jewish fundamentalism is also as bad as the Muslim flavors.This book makes a number of excellent points regarding the errors of living based on "faith," the violence resulting from those views, and the ability of science and reason to explain and support the best of human virtue. The argument that this is more concerning in the Islamic world, or that we need to look outside our own backyard (or White House, or Senate, or House of Representatives, or Supreme Court) to find religious zealots willing to militarily force their faith-based views upon others, regardless of civilian casualties, is where the book falls apart. I'm eager to see if this is remedied in his follow-up book.
—Matthew
updated 4/12. It has always been clear to me that faith-based belief systems eliminate the possibility of conversation and the alternative to conversation is violence. For example, if you want to discuss a policy issue that relates to a faith-based belief, the dialogue ceases when one says "I don't believe that." There can be no response.Sam Harris, but much more articulately. He argues that current world conflicts relate to incompatible religious doctrines; that even thought the Israeli-Palestinian debate is framed in terms of land, the theological claims on the real estate are incompatible. Moderates remain blind to the impact of religious dogma on behavior. Harris argues in his book that we need to take religious dogmatists at their word; if they say that blowing themselves up in the service of their belief will gain them a place in heaven, we should believe them.Is there an alternative to religious faith? Either God exists or he doesn't. What's the alternative to believing in Santa Claus. No one wants to be the last kid in class to believe in Santa. There doesn't have to be an alternative to faith. We can relinquish our religious beliefs. There are no consequences. Only 10% of Swedes are believers unlike 80% of Americans. Change the word God to Zeus. How many people would insist that we hang on to Zeus. When the tsunami killed thousands, wouldn't it have made more sense to suggest we pray to Poseidon, just to cover all the bases?Harris argues that whatever is true ultimately transcends cultures. We don't talk about Christian physics or Moslem algebra. An experiment in physics done in Baghdad will be just as legitimate in Los Angeles. The challenge for us is to find ways for us to find terms that don't require belief in anything that has insufficient evidence. "A fundamental willingness to be open to evidence is essential for the conversation.""Blasphemy is a victimless crime."
—Eric_W
