I was visiting my extended family in California in the mid-2000’s when my uncle, someone whom I greatly admired and continue to admire, introduced the family to a new book he had found: The End of Faith by Sam Harris. He gave me a copy and I read the entire thing over the remaining few days of the vacation, and was entirely enamored with it.
Harris’s book is a polemical attack on the whole of religion, and has become a staple of modern atheist thought. For my part, I was already suspicious of religion, but now I had reasons aplenty to dismiss it entirely, to unreservedly hate its adherents for their beliefs and their actions, and to want them dead (Harris explicitly claims in the text that it may indeed be desirable and necessary to kill people for holding certain religious beliefs). Soon after, I was in Iraq with the U.S. Army with every opportunity to fulfill that wish myself.
Throughout my time in the Army, I practiced religion as a secular Zen Buddhist, spending much of my downtime meditating, occasionally teaching some of my fellow soldiers the practice, trying to live by the precepts but also as a warrior (with ample precedent from Japanese history) fighting in the face of what I saw as evil. I did, on several occasions, kill people, and justified each one, the 11th of September in mind, on the basis of Harris’s argument against pacifism as found in the aforementioned text. To the extent that I was involved in collateral damage, I justified it on the basis of Harris’s arguments of its tolerability.
Now well over a decade later, I still can’t reconcile any of this with the stupid wastefulness of the war. With the money that we’ve spent on these wars ($2.4 trillion as of this writing), and given what NASA has been able to do with less than 10% of that over the same time period, I cannot help but think that we might have done something on the scale of terraforming Venus. Such a vast sum of money, and we cannot, with all of that, solve the problems that cause wars in the first place rather than continue to fight them? Harris is right that the texts of Islam are often especially warlike relative even to the Bible, but most of the people we captured were fighting us not because of their ideology but because of their poverty: they were starving, and the local Al Qaeda branch (and the Mahdi Army, and the myriad other factions we were fighting) paid well.
Coming back to it now, I read Harris’s text with disappointment but even greater disappointment in myself. Harris’s rhetoric is terrible, and though at the time I thought myself a competent critical thinker, I was nevertheless entirely blind to what I can now only call incompetence by way of still feeling too generous towards him to call him a sophist.
This remaining generosity likely stems from the fact that I still agree with many of his underlying points. There are indeed significant problems with religion and especially resulting from its manifestation as existential belief, entirely absent evidence, in God as a distinct, metaphysical entity (or in other related supernatural beings or events, such as angels or the virgin birth of Jesus). The elevation of religious ideas beyond the realm of criticism is another problem that Harris highlights that I also agree with, as well as the abuses of religious authorities and the intrusion of religious dogma into the political sphere. But while I sometimes agree with Harris’s conclusions, I rarely agree with his arguments.
I’ve been rereading The End of Faith alongside my first read through of The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, Fear and Trembling by Søren Kierkegaard, and The Dynamics of Faith by Paul Tillich, and a few other books that deal with the questions of, and problems associated with, religious faith. Harris’s work appears especially egregious in this company. Dawkins begins his own text by acknowledging just some of the broad range of things that the words “religion” and “God” can mean, and narrows his focus to the aforementioned existential question of metaphysical God. (He disagrees that those words should be used in ways other than those to which he is referring, but this is a merely-verbal disagreement that doesn’t much concern me). He then attacks this existential question directly, effectively, honestly, and eloquently. Kierkegaard’s classic is an honest, searching, personal work that explores to the furthest depths what faith really means, rather than propping it up as a strawman and casually dismissing it. Without agreeing with everything that Kierkegaard said — and even if I disagreed with the work on the whole — I can still say that his work is insightful, revealing, and deeply meaningful. But for a book titled The End of Faith, the inclusion of the most historically significant philosophical work on the topic of faith is conspicuously absent. It’s not that Fear and Trembling would have changed Harris view; I think it actually might have given good support to it, but it would have required a much more nuanced treatment of what faith and religion actually entail, and Harris’s elaborate strawman of religion would have fallen apart in the process. Similarly, Tillich seems an almost obvious ally for Harris: he acknowledges the problems of faith as mere belief, as well as conflicts between, for example, what is believed of Jesus and what is true of the historical Jesus, and explicates what faith must mean, and must have always meant, in that context. Harris at least mentions Tillich’s work but only by way of casual dismissal; he doesn’t deny Tillich’s thesis outright, but rather seems to consider it irrelevant. Indeed, Harris’s arguments only work if “faith” is exactly and only what Harris says it is, for everyone, so a more nuanced approach to Tillich would have deconstructed, or at least weakened, Harris’s strawman.
In the preface to the paperback edition of The God Delusion, Dawkins brings up the point that one need not study theology to be able to answer whether a distinct metaphysical God exists any more than one need study the theory and history of clothing to know that the emperor is not wearing any, but again, Dawkins and Harris are dealing with different concerns, Dawkins with a very specific and pointed question and Harris with the whole of religion, and one does indeed need at least a survey of such a complex subject in order to dismiss the entire thing. (In the context of Dawkins’s example, Harris’s is more like the questions of whether anyone should be wearing clothing and what clothing they should be wearing, and some theory and history on the subject would certainly be helpful there). I can find no indication in Harris’s work that he’s performed such research. In several places he displays overt ignorance on the subject, often to the severe detriment of the points he’s trying to make. To take an example: “Our situation is this,” he writes, “Most of the people in this world believe that the Creator of the universe has written a book.” This is one of the principle propositions on which Harris’s arguments are based, and it’s wrong. Muslims believe that the Qur’an was authored by God, and there are 1.8 billion of them, which is significant, but it’s not “most of the people in this world.” Some Christians and Jews believe, at most, that portions of their books were divinely authored, and that may seem a small difference but it has significant import for many of Harris’s key arguments. Beyond that, I know of no sacred texts believed by their adherents to have been wholly divinely authored.
He continues, “While all faiths have been touched, here and there, by the spirit of ecumenicalism, the central tenet of every religious tradition is that all others are mere repositories of error or, at best, dangerously incomplete. Intolerance is thus intrinsic to every creed.” And this from someone who spent a significant amount of time in India and Nepal. Did he speak to anyone about religion while he was there? There are dozens of religious traditions extant in that region; we don’t even bother to distinguish between most of them in the West, possibly because they don’t much distinguish between themselves (despite having sometimes widely differing beliefs, greater even than the differences between, say, Judaism and Christianity), even going so far as to participate in each others’ religious ceremonies. All I ever heard from the Hindus, Buddhist, and Jains of the region, when I asked them about other religions (including the Abrahamic religions), was “All the same,” often delivered with a patronizing smile, as if they were being asked to explain something obvious to an idiot. I don’t agree that all religions are the same, but I also can’t agree that the religious traditions that emerged from South Asia are intrinsically intolerant based on what I know of those traditions and based on what I’ve seen of their practice in that region.
So if religion isn’t what Harris says it is, and the sacred texts aren’t what Harris says they are, can we accept his argument about the problems that these things cause? Harris lays out a great many of these problems, and some of them hardly seem to be connected to religion at all. The chapter “West of Eden” describes the American War on Drugs in great detail, and we can indeed take from his data that this so-called war has been rife with brutal injustice. But what does this have to do with religion? “Only anxiety about the biblical crime of idolatry would appear to make sense of this retributive impulse. Because we are a people of faith, taught to concern ourselves with the sinfulness of our neighbors, we have grown tolerant of irrational uses of state power.” We prosecute the war on drugs because of idolatry? I wonder how Harris reacted to revelations from John Ehrlichman that President Nixon had prosecuted drug laws specifically for racial and political reasons. I personally found the revelations hardly surprising. If confronted with that, I think that Harris would likely tie both racism and political authoritarianism to religion as well; his view on religion is something like the inverse of the “no true Scotsman” fallacy, where everything bad in the world can be ascribed to religion, if by nothing else, then by fiat: “Consider the millions of people who were killed by Stalin and Mao: although these tyrants paid lip service to rationality, communism was little more than a political religion.” There is a good argument to be made that religion has been used to pacify people and anesthetize them to tyranny and abuses of power, but Harris never makes it.
Things really go off the rails when Harris delves into ethical philosophy in an attempt to rectify the (indeed mistaken) belief that one needs religion for ethics. What Harris is arguing for throughout this book is based, in large part, on the notion of foundationalism, which holds that there is an ultimate foundation upon which we can base our certain, objective knowledge of the world. Harris doesn’t argue for this directly — it’s effectively impossible to do so, foundationalism being essentially dead in the wake of Gödel, Wittgenstein, and Quine, but being that he needs to establish foundationalism on some front for his book to make any sense at all, he proceeds by attacking viewpoints that oppose foundationalism. The strawmanning here is elaborate, almost impressive. Harris begins by taking on moral relativism, a view held by almost no one (Joseph Margolis, perhaps the one serious proponent of any sort of relativism, designed his philosophy specifically to remain in accordance with realism, and is not mentioned by Harris), by way of critiquing pragmatism, which is not innately relativistic and which Harris also drastically misrepresents beyond that. He then ascribes those views to Richard Rorty, who was a indeed a pragmatist but who had radically retooled the philosophy from its roots in the philosophies of Peirce, James, and Dewey and thus cannot be said to represent pragmatism in general, and who said: “‘Relativism’ is the view that every belief on a certain topic, or perhaps about any topic, is as good as every other. No one holds this view. Except for the occasional cooperative freshman, one cannot find anybody who says that two incompatible opinions on an important topic are equally good. The philosophers who get called ‘relativists’ are those who say that the grounds for choosing between such opinions are less algorithmic than had been thought” (from Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism). The text proper leaves off with this, but Harris continues this line of attack in the notes, taking on the neo-pragmatic notion that what we call “knowledge” cannot escape language.
The pragmatist seems to be tacitly saying that he has surveyed the breadth and depth of all possible acts of cognition (not just his own, and not just those that are human) and found both that all knowledge is discursive and that all spheres of discourse can be potentially fused. Pragmatism, therefore, amounts to the assertion that any epistemic context wider than our own can be ruled out in principle. While I find these claims incredible, the more important point is that a pragmatist can believe otherwise only as a realist.
The neo-pragmatic claim, Harris is saying, ultimately requires realism, because it is making a realist epistemic claim, a claim about what we can actually, objectively know about the world. Putting aside for the moment the fact that pragmatism and neo-pragmatism explicitly do not conflict with realism, what Harris misses is that, as soon as we call something “knowledge,” it has become discursive, because “knowledge” is itself a language-object. Therefore (so goes the neo-pragmatic argument), these contexts can indeed be ruled out in principle, without having to survey cognition at all.
Harris has buried another of his most problematic arguments in the notes, and this is the worst of them. In note #15 to chapter 7, “Experiments in Consciousness,” Harris seems to be suggesting that textual works have a single, objective meaning, and that any deviation from this meaning resulting from any process of interpretation of the work is necessarily fallacious. By way of demonstration, Harris selects a book at random from his shelf, a cookbook, which he proceeds to satirically interpret as if it was sacred text with hidden mystical import. This is absurd and infantile. The selection from the text that he “interprets,” ostensibly a recipe for fish and shrimp cakes, is very obviously not meant to be interpreted as anything other than what it claims to be: an actual recipe for fish and shrimp cakes.
This is not at all to say that the notion of interpretation hasn’t been used historically to make indefensible claims. Take, for example, the Epistle of Barnabas, an apocryphal work dating from the late first or early second centuries (and which was included in some early Greek editions of the New Testament) which takes the Jewish law as being entirely metaphorical.
Furthermore He saith concerning the ears, how that it is our heart which He circumcised. The Lord saith in the prophet; With the hearing of the ears they listened to Me. And again He saith; They that are afar off shall hear with their ears, and shall perceive what I have done. And; Be ye circumcised in your hearts, saith the Lord. And again He saith; Hear, O Israel, for thus saith the Lord thy God. Who is he that desireth to live forever, let him hear with his ears the voice of My servant. And again He saith; Hear, O heaven, and give ear, O earth, for the Lord hath spoken these things for a testimony. And again He saith; Hear the words of the Lord, ye rulers of this people. And again He saith; Hear, O my children, the voice of one crying in the wilderness. Therefore He circumcised our ears, that hearing the word we might believe.
Barnabas 9:1-2, translation Lightfoot
So the command to circumcise male infants, Barnabas is saying, is not actually a command to circumcise male infants, but rather a command that we “circumcise our ears” to hear the message of Jesus’ crucifixion alone. I’m sure Harris and I would both be in agreement that such an interpretation is absurd, but this does not at all prove that all interpretation of all literary work — especially with regards to a work so complex as the Bible — is absurd. In a lecture series on science fiction and philosophy (Sci-Phi: Science Fiction as Philosophy), the philosopher David Kyle Johnson posed the question of whether Schindler’s List could be interpreted as a pro-Nazi movie, by way of demonstrating that some interpretations are clearly better or more correct than others. I think this hypothetical interpretation of Spielberg’s movie and Harris’s mystical interpretations of a cookbook are at about the same level of credibility, the only difference being that Johnson only meant to highlight an example of how a possible interpretation of a work can be clearly and objectively wrong, whereas Harris’s satire is entirely sincere.
Harris attempts to head this sort of criticism off at the pass by saying:
If you pick up a copy of Finnegans Wake, for instance, and imagine that you have found therein allusions to various cosmogonic myths and alchemical schemes, chances are that you have, because Joyce put them there. But to dredge scripture in this manner and discover the occasional pearl is little more than a literary game.
This is to say that the thousands of contributors to the Bible meant every single thing as an exacting, objective statement, that even the poets who contributed to the Psalms were deviating from the genre and style of the era and intended every word they wrote to be taken on its face. This is to say that interpreting the Bible as being any less literal than a cookbook is a mistaken approach, that we would be wrong to think that its authors meant anything by it that they wouldn’t have intended to be included in a modern science textbook.
This is just the beginning of where Harris goes wrong in The End of Faith. In many places in my copy of the book, I ran out of room in the margins to write down everything wrong with what he says. And so much of it stems from a simple unwillingness to understand religion as something complex and nuanced. By way of comparison, The God Delusion by Dawkins and Breaking the Spell by Daniel Dennett, two other major popular philosophical books targeted against religion, spend a many pages at their respective outsets navigating the difficult matter of talking about so complex a subject of religion at all, and come to very specific definitions that they fully admit do not reflect the broadest possible understanding of the subject matter. For anyone interested in philosophically tackling the challenging matter of religion in the modern world, I recommend both of those works without reservation. I do not recommend The End of Faith to anyone who does not wish to extend such exploration into sophisticated but ultimately fallacious arguments.