I wanted my first post from TED to cover my reflection from day one, but I have to rift on Sam Harris' talk this morning. It was unimpressive (again) and I question why some consider him such a strong intellectual.
I was amused by his jabs at "delusional religious" frameworks and thinking without referencing examples outside of religion. Harris correctly scorns religious and cultural thinking that leads a father to think about killing his daughter that was raped to escape his shame and dishonor.
What Harris and others don't do is take rational frameworks from the left and inject intellectual honesty into these discussions. Obviously, Harris is not a fan of Christianity and religion, but having tunnel vision is not a good thing.
Since Harris referenced chimps and degrees of consciousness between animals, a good starting point is the intellectual framework of Peter Singer, Princeton bioethicist and a founding father of the animal rights movement. What I respect about Singer is that he is logically sound. He takes his intellectual framework to the nth degree that is transparent and honest.
Singer doesn't make a distinction between humans and animals, and believes if you do than you are a speciest (animal racist). If there is minimal self-awareness and ability to feel pain, then an animal is on par with humans. I assume this sounds rational to many animal activists, but what does this really mean and where does lead you?
Singer leads you there. He is in favor of infanticide, especially if the child is disabled, and maintains that drug testing and clinical trials should be done on disabled people over healthy animals. I don't even want to discuss the issue of bestiality, but you can talk to him. The logic is sound within his framework but horrifying to me and I hope to most of you.
He has argued the more severely disabled a human is that they lose their personhood status. So "higher" animals would have greater rights that disabled humans. Think about this. Think about how many talented people would not have been alive in Peter Singer's world...
Jim Abbott, professional baseball player
Christy Brown, author of My Left Foot
Itzhak Perlman, world class violinist
Judy Heumann, former Assistant Secretary of Education
Stephen Hawking, physicist
And so many others. If you take animal rights to an intellectual honest endpoint, do you still favor it above human exceptionalism?
Switching gears and examining the beliefs of the last person cited, Stephen Hawking, is another example of taking a framework to an intellectually honest degree. Hawking is one of our intellectual giants and a determinist. It's a world without God and where causality rules. What does this world look like?
Discussing his beliefs, he stated his fear for the long-term survival of our species, “My only fear is this. The terror that stalks my mind is that we have arrived on the scene because of evolution. Because of naturalistic selection, and natural selection assumes natural rejection, which means we have arrived here because of our aggression. And my hope is that somehow we can keep from eating each other up for another 100 years. At that point science would have devised a scheme to take all of us into different planets of the universe and no one atrocity would destroy all of us at the same time.”
Seriously? Our survival rests on the hope that we can progress enough to blast off into space and escape the earth? This is not the world of my beliefs.
Showing posts with label sam harris. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sam harris. Show all posts
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Monday, January 22, 2007
Letter To An Atheist Nation
As 2006 came to a close, I came across articles in magazine such as Time and Wired and a few books, such as The God Delusion and Letter to a Christian Nation, which seemed to reflect atheism was in vogue. Since I haven't written anything of substance in months that wasn't related to our startup, I decided to take some time out during my recent travels to respond in my own way.
As a Christian, it’s always good to be intellectually simulated so I began reading Letter to a Christian Nation. Disappointment is an understatement. Sam Harris’ approach was pop philosophy that made me yearn for Kant and Hume. As most of us have learned since our early years of schooling, context is essential for reading any text which Mr. Harris seem to have forgotten about or is simply ignorant of. I assume it is the latter.
He quotes laws from Old Testament books, such as Deuteronomy and Leviticus, which have little direct relevance to the Christian life. One of the first things I learned as a new Christian from the Bible was that Christ was a fulfillment of the old laws and that they were not always applicable to me. If the old laws and traditions were, then I would be looking forward hosting my future son’s Bar Mitzvah and my love of bacon would be sadly hampered.
His arguments were stale and reflected a certain arrogance that appears prevalent among educated atheists. This is best reflected by Harris’ colleague, Richard Dawkins, who said, “Not a single member of either house of Congress admits to being an atheist… Either they are stupid, or they’re lying.” Are these really the only two options? I’ve encountered a fair amount of stupid people who don’t believe in God and know many brilliant people that do believe in God. Dawkins and Harris’ pretentiousness reveals the island of unfounded certainty that science places many people on. Even looking back a hundred years, there was a fundamental shift that occurred in science when Mendeleev created the periodic table of elements. Chemistry was the foundation of thinking and the human senses were at its core. With Mendeleev’s creation, the mind became the core since scientists had to begin believing in the unseen and undiscovered elements. Since then more fundamental shifts have occurred, but has the core of Christianity changed in over two thousand years?
It’s also interesting to observe how some leading advocates of atheism stem from the softer sciences that Dawkins and his former colleague Stephen Jay Gould were from. I remember my friend’s father who was a leading materials scientist (his creations are in Motorola’s chips) and a creationist met Gould while visiting Harvard. Professor Gould told him, “I heard of you. You’re not a real scientist.”
It seems these softer scientists might have a chip on their shoulders that lead them to become such advocates of science. The shallow part of my mind would rather listen to the strong constituency of physicists, such as Freeman Dyson, John Polkinghorne, and Charles Townes (Nobel Prize-winning physicist), whose research in the fabric and origins of the universe led them to a belief in God.
One pillar of Mr. Harris’ book is on the question of slavery. It states how “the only real restraint God counsels” on slavery is that we “not beat our slaves so severely that we injure their eyes or their teeth.” First, “slavery” in the Bible is not the slavery of America’s past. It is similar to indentured servitude which is a stark difference most of us learned from our high school U.S. history course. Second, Old Testament laws insured the humane treatment of servants and guaranteed their freedom unconditionally, which no other system of servitude or slavery in world history has done.
Mr. Harris writes that “there is no place in the New Testament where Jesus objects to the practice of slavery,” but in 1 Timothy 1:9-11 you find St. Paul identifying slave traders along with murderers and adulterers as ungodly and sinful. Clearly God is speaking out against the practice of “slavery.”
While he touts the morality of atheist and tries to answer whether atheists are more evil than religious people, he fails to comprehend that it’s not about degrees of imperfection but about God’s abundant grace towards humankind in Christianity. One of my atheist friends understood this clearly when he told me, “Assuming the Bible is true, I cannot accept an unfair religion. I fine it incomprehensible that a highly moral man, such as Gandhi, is going to hell for not believing in Christ while if a man like Charles Manson accepts Christ then he will be allowed into heaven.”
The Gospel offends and it takes faith to accept the stories and values in the Bible. Theories and aspects of science take faith from the low probability that the Big Bang was a random event to actual species jumping within the Theory of Evolution. The conflict is not between Christianity and science, but between the egos and sinful nature of people. If the Queen of Hearts can do six impossible things before breakfast, surely we can believe in two impossible things at once.
UPDATE: More from Townhall.com's Mary Grabar, "Letter to a Stupid Atheist"
sam+harris, richard+dawkins, atheist, atheism, god, jesus, bible, letter+to+a+christian nation, christianity, christian, religion, religious
As a Christian, it’s always good to be intellectually simulated so I began reading Letter to a Christian Nation. Disappointment is an understatement. Sam Harris’ approach was pop philosophy that made me yearn for Kant and Hume. As most of us have learned since our early years of schooling, context is essential for reading any text which Mr. Harris seem to have forgotten about or is simply ignorant of. I assume it is the latter.
He quotes laws from Old Testament books, such as Deuteronomy and Leviticus, which have little direct relevance to the Christian life. One of the first things I learned as a new Christian from the Bible was that Christ was a fulfillment of the old laws and that they were not always applicable to me. If the old laws and traditions were, then I would be looking forward hosting my future son’s Bar Mitzvah and my love of bacon would be sadly hampered.
His arguments were stale and reflected a certain arrogance that appears prevalent among educated atheists. This is best reflected by Harris’ colleague, Richard Dawkins, who said, “Not a single member of either house of Congress admits to being an atheist… Either they are stupid, or they’re lying.” Are these really the only two options? I’ve encountered a fair amount of stupid people who don’t believe in God and know many brilliant people that do believe in God. Dawkins and Harris’ pretentiousness reveals the island of unfounded certainty that science places many people on. Even looking back a hundred years, there was a fundamental shift that occurred in science when Mendeleev created the periodic table of elements. Chemistry was the foundation of thinking and the human senses were at its core. With Mendeleev’s creation, the mind became the core since scientists had to begin believing in the unseen and undiscovered elements. Since then more fundamental shifts have occurred, but has the core of Christianity changed in over two thousand years?
It’s also interesting to observe how some leading advocates of atheism stem from the softer sciences that Dawkins and his former colleague Stephen Jay Gould were from. I remember my friend’s father who was a leading materials scientist (his creations are in Motorola’s chips) and a creationist met Gould while visiting Harvard. Professor Gould told him, “I heard of you. You’re not a real scientist.”
It seems these softer scientists might have a chip on their shoulders that lead them to become such advocates of science. The shallow part of my mind would rather listen to the strong constituency of physicists, such as Freeman Dyson, John Polkinghorne, and Charles Townes (Nobel Prize-winning physicist), whose research in the fabric and origins of the universe led them to a belief in God.
One pillar of Mr. Harris’ book is on the question of slavery. It states how “the only real restraint God counsels” on slavery is that we “not beat our slaves so severely that we injure their eyes or their teeth.” First, “slavery” in the Bible is not the slavery of America’s past. It is similar to indentured servitude which is a stark difference most of us learned from our high school U.S. history course. Second, Old Testament laws insured the humane treatment of servants and guaranteed their freedom unconditionally, which no other system of servitude or slavery in world history has done.
Mr. Harris writes that “there is no place in the New Testament where Jesus objects to the practice of slavery,” but in 1 Timothy 1:9-11 you find St. Paul identifying slave traders along with murderers and adulterers as ungodly and sinful. Clearly God is speaking out against the practice of “slavery.”
While he touts the morality of atheist and tries to answer whether atheists are more evil than religious people, he fails to comprehend that it’s not about degrees of imperfection but about God’s abundant grace towards humankind in Christianity. One of my atheist friends understood this clearly when he told me, “Assuming the Bible is true, I cannot accept an unfair religion. I fine it incomprehensible that a highly moral man, such as Gandhi, is going to hell for not believing in Christ while if a man like Charles Manson accepts Christ then he will be allowed into heaven.”
The Gospel offends and it takes faith to accept the stories and values in the Bible. Theories and aspects of science take faith from the low probability that the Big Bang was a random event to actual species jumping within the Theory of Evolution. The conflict is not between Christianity and science, but between the egos and sinful nature of people. If the Queen of Hearts can do six impossible things before breakfast, surely we can believe in two impossible things at once.
UPDATE: More from Townhall.com's Mary Grabar, "Letter to a Stupid Atheist"
sam+harris, richard+dawkins, atheist, atheism, god, jesus, bible, letter+to+a+christian nation, christianity, christian, religion, religious
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