Ask Wednesday: What are your favorite passages from The Moral Landscape?

A few of many

By Morris Dean

The Moral Landscape is one of my favorite books, by one of my favorite authors – Sam Harris. He's been mentioned once or twice already on Moristotle & Co.

Unlike many other readers, I always read the acknowledgments, where a book's author recognizes and thanks people who contributed to the work. In The Moral Landscape, I like the way Harris compliments three particular fellow authors:

In addition to my [PhD in neuroscience] dissertation committee at UCLA, several outside scholars and scientists reviewed early drafts of this book....Daniel Dennett...read the text, in whole or in part, and offered extremely helpful notes. A few sections contain cannibalized versions of essays that were first read by a larger circle of scientists and writers, including...Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett...Christopher Hitchens....I am pleased to notice that with friends like these, it has become increasingly difficult to say something stupid....[–p. 194, emphasis mine]

A main theme of The Moral Landscape is "the clash between faith and reason," which heads a subsection in Chapter 4, whose focus is religion. I like the way this passage starkly characterizes the clash, without trying to downplay it.

Introspection offers no clue that our experience of the world around us, and of ourselves within it, depends upon voltage changes and chemical interactions taking place inside our heads. And yet a century and a half of brain science declares it to be so. What will it mean to finally understand the most prized, lamented, and intimate features of our subjectivity in terms of neural circuits and information processing?
    With respect to our current understanding of the mind, the major religions remain wedded to doctrines that are growing less plausible by the day. While the ultimate relationship between consciousness and matter has not been settled, any naïve conception of a soul can now be jettisoned on account of the mind's obvious dependency upon the brain. The idea that there might be an immortal soul capable of reasoning, feeling love, remembering life events, etc., all the while being metaphysically independent of the brain, seems untenable given that damage to the relevant neural circuits obliterates these capacities in a living person. Does the soul of a person suffering from total aphasia (loss of language ability) still speak and think fluently? This is rather like asking whether the soul of a diabetic produces abundant insulin. The specific character of the mind's dependency on the brain also suggests that there cannot be a unified self at work in each of us. There are simply too many separable components to the human mind – each susceptible to independent disruption – for there to be a single entity to stand as rider to the horse....
    Nevertheless, it is widely imagined that there is no conflict, in principle, between science and religion because many scientists are themselves "religious," and some even believe in the God of Abraham and in the truth of ancient miracles. Even religious extremists value some of the products of science – antibiotics, computers, bombs, etc. – and these seeds of inquisitiveness, we are told, can be patiently nurtured in a way that offers no insult to religious faith.
    This prayer of reconciliation goes by many names and now has many advocates. But it is based on a fallacy.The fact that some scientists do not detect any problem with religious faith merely proves that a juxtaposition of good ideas and bad ones is possible. Is there a conflict between marriage & infidelity? The two regularly coincide. The fact that intellectual honesty can be confined to a ghetto – in a single brain, in an institution, or in a culture – does not mean that there isn't a perfect contradiction between reason and faith, or between the worldview of science taken as a whole and those advanced by the world's "great," and greatly discrepant, religions.

    What can be shown by example is how poorly religious scientists manage to reconcile reason and faith when they actually attempt to do so. Few such efforts have received more public attention than the work of Francis Collins. Collins is currently [and in 2014 still is] the director of the National Institutes of Health, having been appointed to the post by President Obama. One must admit that his credentials were impeccable: he is a physical chemist, a medical geneticist, and the former head of the Human Genome Project. He is also, by his own account, living proof that there can be no conflict between science and religion. I will discuss Collins's views at some length, because he is widely considered the most impressive example of "sophisticated" faith in action. [–pp. 158-160]

One discussion from the sixteen pages that follow:

Even for a scientist of Collins's stature, who has struggled to reconcile his belief in the divinity of Jesus with modern science, it all boils down to the "empty tomb." Collins freely admits that if all his scientific arguments for the plausibility of God were proven to be in error, his faith would be undiminished, as it is founded upon the belief, shared by all serious Christians, that the Gospel account of the miracles of Jesus is true. The problem, however, is that miracle stories are as common as house dust, even in the twenty-first centure. For instance, all of Jesus's otherworldly powers have been attributed to South Indian guru Sathya Sai Baba by vast numbers of living eyewitnesses. Sai Baba even claims to have been born of a virgin. This is actually not an uncommon claim in the history of religion, or in history generally. Even worldly men like Genghis Khan and Alexander were once thought to have been born of virgins (parthenogenesis apparently offers no guarantee that a man will turn the other cheek). Thus, Collins's faith is predicated on the claim that miracle stories of the sort that today surround a person like Sathya Sai Baba – and do not even merit an hour on cable television – somehow become especially credible when set in the prescientific religious context of the first-century Roman Empire, decades after their supposed occurrence, as evidenced by the discrepant and fragmentary copies of copies of ancient Greek manuscripts. It is on this basis that the current head of the NIH recommends that we believe the following propositions...[–pp. 167-168]

I shouldn't provide so many excerpts that you might begin to think you've already read the book, but here's one more – one that identifies in its final sentence why Harris feels confident of his claims, in a culture in which religious beliefs are usually given a special pass to let slide and be left unchallenged:

There is now a large and growing literature – spanning dozens of books and hundreds of articles – attacking Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and me (the so-called New Atheists) for our alleged incivility, bias, and ignorance of how "sophisticated" believers practice their faith. It is often said that we caricature religion, taking its most extreme forms to represent the whole. We do no such thing. We simply do what a paragon of sophisticated faith like Francis Collins does: we take the specific claims of religion seriously. [–p. 174, emphasis mine]

Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011)
Sam Harris, Daniel C. Dennett [top-left to bottom-right]

Copyright © 2014 by Morris Dean