The End of Faith
0 ratings from readers
According to a 2004 survey conducted by the BBC, over 80% of people in most countries surveyed believe that a belief in God makes for a better human being.
Although only 54% of those surveyed in the United States attend a regular church service, 67% of those surveyed said they prayed regularly — and the figure rose even higher for those who pray during times of crisis.
Clearly, faith is alive and well in the Twenty-first Century. Many, in fact, maintain that an ethical life is not possible without religion and the faith it requires.
Sam Harris, a philosophy graduate from Stanford University, has offered a challenge to this view. In his August 2004 book The End of Faith (re-published in paperback in October 2005), Harris explores the nature of faith, belief, and — according to the book’s subtitle — “religion, terror, and the future of reason.”
Harris begins with a scenario that is becoming more probable every day: A young man boards a bus with explosives strapped inside his coat. He detonates them, killing himself, those aboard the bus, and many near it, due to the ball bearings and nails he’d placed in his pockets.
Then Harris asks a question that is fast becoming rhetorical: Is there any doubt as to this man’s religion?
If Islam is used as a sort of whipping boy in Harris’s book, it is only because that creed shows so clearly the link between belief and action. Certain people read in an ancient book that they will go to eternal paradise if they are killed in a battle for God; and because they believe it, all of Western civilization is now in danger.
Harris’s book, however, is not titled “The End of Islam.” Although he uses Islam as a tool to demonstrate the very real dangers of faith, his case is against any faith — that is, faith itself.
For the purposes of the book, faith is not “confidence” or “a positive attitude” or any of the other characterizations that many of its defenders use to dress up the concept. In fact, Harris defines faith much as Ayn Rand defined it: belief without reasons. That is, belief without — or on the basis of insufficient — evidence.
Harris is incredulous that the vast majority of the world’s inhabitants continue to believe a collection of myths and proscriptions gathered at a time when so many natural explanations of events, including disease, had yet to be discovered, and when concepts such as controlled experiments and variables were nonexistent.
Regarding the Christian Bible in particular, he questions the reliability of the available text — but contends, however, that even if there were no questions surrounding the accuracy of the Bible’s many fragments and translations, it would make no sense to accept it.
After all, we have many of the Greek and Roman myths in excellent forms, but no one really believes there was a being named Zeus who transformed himself into a bull and whisked away a young girl named Europa, or that the cause of rough waters in the Mediterranean are two monsters named Scylla and Charibdis.
Harris also sees no reason to continue to hold as holy what previous generations or societies did. He points to plenty of things from the past that are not seriously advocated today, such as trial by ordeal, the caste system, and human and animal sacrifice.
The problem with the world’s major religions is that they have enshrined the beliefs of a certain period of history and refuse to consider new information. Intellectually, they are a moment frozen in time. To have integrity, any system of beliefs must be open to new discoveries, new theories, and free inquiry. Religion doesn’t fit the bill.
So far, those familiar with Ayn Rand’s ideas, and those who agree with the fundamentals of her philosophy, will find nothing surprising here. This is territory, after all, well traversed by atheists and secular humanists. Although Harris writes of faith in a common-sense, accessible style, what he has to say so far is similar to what has been said by others.
What is new, however, is Harris’s treatment of the faithful themselves. He presents a picture of “believers” at odds with that promoted by most secular humanists, Objectivists, and other reality-grounded folk. Harris starts with a clarification of terms: All of your premises — all of the things you hold true — can rightly be termed “beliefs.” This is unsettling because the word “belief” seems to carry some emotional baggage for atheists. Our reaction is often, “I don’t want to believe, I want to know.”
Harris clarifies his notion of belief: Believing a given proposition is simply a matter of holding that it correctly represents some state of the world. This is not intellectual subjectivism, however. He goes on to say, in a passage characteristic of his style:
[W]e are no more free to believe whatever we want about God than we are free to adopt unjustified beliefs about science or history or free to mean whatever we want when using words like “poison” or “north” or “zero.” Anyone who would lay claim to such entitlements should not be surprised when the rest of us stop listening to him.
It should be noted here, however, that Harris is an individualist when it comes to the question of judgment and knowledge. Each person, he maintains, must judge for him- or herself whether any particular beliefs meets the reasonable person’s criteria of being a fact about the universe, and not a wish or fantasy.
Harris goes on to demonstrate that the grand-scale atrocities committed in the name of religion and faith throughout history were not done by a hysterical mob or a few mentally ill believers. They were done on the basis of fantastical notions about the universe — but those notions were accepted, however wrongly, as facts, and people acted according to those beliefs.
A few prominent examples include the persecution of Jews in the thirteenth century for fear of desecration of the Eucharist wafer, laws passed against blasphemy by France’s king in the fourteenth to appease a wrathful God believed to have sent the Black Plague, and the burning of witches thought to use occult forces to strike down crops and people.
In each of these cases of faith-stoked fervor, people acted upon the knowledge they thought they had gained of the world. Although their standard of evidence was flimsy indeed, people acted — and continue to act today — upon their beliefs, however fantastical.
The New Testament is replete with examples of “miracles” that are supposed to prove the power of God and his son, Jesus. The life of Jesus itself is thought by many to have been written to conform to Old Testament prophesy.
All of this belies a need to make certain beliefs appear reasonable — not to others, but to the believers themselves. As Harris says, “The ‘leap of faith’ is really a fiction. No Christians, not even those of the First Century, have ever been content to rely on it.”
Despite Harris’s masterful treatment of the nature of faith and the faithful, he eventually gets derailed when he begins to discuss the implications of his ideas.
Some of his initial insights are refreshing to read. For example, he rightly maintains that ethics is a science like any other, in that objective knowledge is possible. Ethics is neither cultural nor racial — no one speaks of a Caucasian physics or a Gallic chemistry and no one should speak of a subjective ethics.
The neurological, chemical, and biological facts that give rise to the way human beings are will certainly be understood one day to a much greater extent than which they are today. There is no reason to think that, because psychology is in its infancy as a science, all facets and processes of human consciousness and subconsciousness will forever be a mystery.
In short, Harris holds that objectivity in ethics is possible and, even if not yet in view, attainable — and it will be based on the facts of this world.
In certain ways, Harris’s arguments up to this point place him firmly on the side of Ayn Rand. In his ultimate decision on what to do about these facts, however, he couldn’t be farther off course.
Harris starts his discussion of ethics with the premise that ethics is about happiness and suffering — of others. There is no mention of ethics as a guide to choices in regards to a person’s own life, except for where that life intersects others and the potential for causing harm or happiness to others begins.
Not surprisingly, this causes him to equate the emotion of love with ethics: “[W]hatever a person’s current level of happiness is, his condition will be generally improved by his becoming yet more loving and compassionate, and hence more ethical.”
He then goes on to make the following observations on the nature of consciousness:
The basic (and, I think, uncontestable) fact is that almost every human being experiences the dualism of subject and object in some measure, and most of us feel it powerfully nearly every moment of our lives. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the feeling that we call “I” is one of the most pervasive and salient features of human life: and its effects upon the world, as six billion “selves” pursue diverse and often incompatible ends, rival those that can be ascribed to almost any other phenomenon in nature…Almost every problem we have can be ascribed to the fact that human beings are utterly beguiled by their feelings of separateness. It would seem that a spirituality that undermined such dualism, through the mere contemplation of consciousness, could not help but improve our situation.
Thus Harris flows effortlessly from an accurate observation — that human beings experience a sense of “self” — to a terrible implication: So the answer, dear friends, is to renounce the self and merge with all other human beings. In other words, he offers the same worn mantra of “Love is the answer.” To call this an anticlimax would be an understatement.
The End of Faith is a book desperately needed in the fight against bad ideas. Its treatment of the subject matter in a humane but humorous style does not overshadow Harris’s unforgiving stand against faith in all its incarnations. Despite its disappointing conclusions on ethics, it is an important reminder that, at its most fundamental, the movement to reclaim reason can not be one of political caucuses and voter resolutions. It is primarily epistemological — it is not about what we think, but how we think.
Jason Dixon is a telecom billing consultant living in Atlanta, Georgia. An aspiring amateur linguist, he’s long maintained a love of words and their power and hopes to integrate this passion into a writing career. He is also editor of the Atlasphere's columns section.
