Posted from http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/debate-with-dennis-prager/
This is a great read where the atheist Sam Harris really demolishes the Judeo-Christian believer Dennis Prager. My comments are at the end.
Why Are Atheists So Angry? A Debate with Dennis Prager
This Debate was conducted by email for the website Jewcy.com
Author of the thundering anti-theist polemics The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, Harris may just be the Thomas Paine of an emerging movement to wrench religion out of American life. Prager is a nationally syndicated talk radio host who trumpets the virtues of the Judeo-Christian tradition… (www.jewcy.com)
From: Sam Harris
To: Dennis Prager
Subject: Yahweh Belongs on the Scrapheap of Mythology
I’d like to begin this exchange by making the observation that “atheist” is a term that should not even exist. We do not, after all, have a name for a person who does not believe in Zeus or Thor. In fact, we are all “atheists” with respect to Zeus and Thor and the thousands of other dead gods that now lie upon the scrapheap of mythology.
A politician who seriously invokes Poseidon in a campaign speech will have thereby announced the end of his political career. Why is this so? Did someone around the time of Constantine discover that the pagan gods do not actually exist, while the biblical God does? Of course not. There are thousands of gods that were once worshipped with absolute conviction by men and women like ourselves, and yet we all now agree that they are rightly dead. An “atheist” is simply someone who thinks that the God of Abraham should be buried with the rest of these imaginary friends. I am quite sure that we need only use words like “reason,” “common sense,” “evidence,” and “intellectual honesty” to do the job.
So many gods have passed into oblivion, and yet the sky-god of Abraham demands fresh sacrifices. Wars are still waged, crimes committed, and science undone out of deference to an invisible being who is believed to have created the entire cosmos, fine-tuned the constants of nature, blanketed the earth with 20,000 distinct species of grasshopper, and yet still remains so provincial a creature as to concern himself with what consenting adults do for pleasure in the privacy of their bedrooms. Incompatible beliefs about this God long ago shattered our world into separate moral communities—Christians, Muslims, Jews, etc.—and these divisions remain a continuous source of human violence.
And yet, while the religious divisions in our world are self-evident, many people still imagine that religious conflict is always caused by a lack of education, by poverty, or by politics. Yet the September 11th hijackers were college-educated, middle-class, and had no discernible experience of political oppression. They did, however, spend a remarkable amount of time at their local mosques talking about the depravity of infidels and about the pleasures that await martyrs in Paradise.
How many more architects and mechanical engineers must hit the wall at 400 miles an hour before we admit to ourselves that jihadist violence is not merely a matter of education, poverty, or politics? The truth, astonishingly enough, is that in the year 2006 a person can have sufficient intellectual and material resources to build a nuclear bomb and still believe that he will get 72 virgins in Paradise. Western secularists, liberals, and moderates have been very slow to understand this. The cause of their confusion is simple: They don’t know what it is like to really believe in God.
The United States now stands alone in the developed world as a country that conducts its national discourse under the shadow of religious literalism. Eighty-three percent of the U.S. population believes that Jesus literally rose from the dead; 53% believe that the universe is 6,000 years old. This is embarrassing. Add to this comedy of false certainties the fact that 44% of Americans are confident that Jesus will return to Earth sometime in the next 50 years and you will glimpse the terrible liability of this sort of thinking.
Nearly half of the American population is eagerly anticipating the end of the world. This dewy-eyed nihilism provides absolutely no incentive to build a sustainable civilization. Many of these people are lunatics, but they are not the lunatic fringe. Some of them can actually get Karl Rove on the phone whenever they want.
While Muslim extremists now fly planes into our buildings, saw the heads off journalists and aid-workers, and riot by the tens of thousands over cartoons, several recent polls reveal that atheists are now the most reviled minority in the United States. A majority of Americans say they would refuse to vote for an atheist even if he were a “well-qualified candidate” from their own political party. Atheism, therefore, is a perfect impediment to holding elected office in this country (while being a woman, black, Muslim, Jewish, or gay is not). Most Americans also say that of all the unsavory alternatives on offer, they would be least likely to allow their child to marry an atheist. These declarations of prejudice might be enough to make some atheists angry. But they are not what makes me angry.
As an atheist, I am angry that we live in a society in which the plain truth cannot be spoken without offending 90% of the population. The plain truth is this: There is no good reason to believe in a personal God; there is no good reason to believe that the Bible, the Koran, or any other book was dictated by an omniscient being; we do not, in any important sense, get our morality from religion; the Bible and the Koran are not, even remotely, the best sources of guidance we have for living in the 21st century; and the belief in God and in the divine provenance of scripture is getting a lot of people killed unnecessarily.
Against these plain truths religious people have erected a grotesque edifice of myths, obfuscations, half-truths, and wishful thinking. Perhaps you, Dennis, would now like to bring some of that edifice into view.
From: Dennis Prager
To: Sam Harris
Subject: The Faith of Disbelief
There is one thing you and I agree on, Sam. You write that you are “quite sure that we need only use words like ‘reason,’ ‘common sense,’ ‘evidence,’ and ‘intellectual honesty’ to do the job.”
I agree because I am certain that use of those wonderful vehicles to truth make the case for God, not for atheism.
Yet you and other atheists—as opposed to agnostics, who simply claim doubts about God—appropriate words like “reason” and “common sense” to maintain a position that is hardly the fruit of reason and common sense.
Is it really reason and common sense that lead atheists to their certitude that everything, all existence, came about by sheer chance? That there is therefore no God, no creator, no designer? Unlikely. Atheist certainty and religious certainty are both faith claims that transcend reason and common sense. But at least religious believers have the intellectual honesty to admit theirs is a faith claim.
Nevertheless, I am not as certain about God as you are about no-God. When I look at the unjust world God created, I have questions, sometimes even doubts. But not atheists like you, Sam. No, they look at love and consciousness, at the grandeur of the universe, at the birth of a child, and they hear Bach’s music and conclude that all of this and everything else just came about by itself.
It is an understatement to say that I do not find that position intellectually compelling. And when held with certitude, it borders arrogance.
On the other side, we believers look at the evidence and believe that there is a God. In that sense, the atheist has considerably less intellectual honesty than the sophisticated believer. The atheist says he knows, despite the fact that what he “knows” is unprovable. The believer believes because he knows that what he believes is ultimately unprovable.
Now, of course, I am referring to the “sophisticated believer,” not to every human on Earth who claims to believe in God. There are many people with simplistic views of God, and many millions who have vile notions of God. If I and all other believers in God are to be lumped with Muslims who believe that slaughtering innocents gets you sex in heaven, then you must be lumped with Josef Stalin and Mao Tse-Tung and all the other atheists who butchered more innocents than all the religious crackpots in history.
Do you not know about people such as Francis Collins? On June 11, 2006, the Times of London reported that “The scientist who led the team that cracked the human genome…now believes in the existence of God … Francis Collins, the director of the U.S. National Human Genome Research Institute, claims there is a rational basis for a creator and that scientific discoveries bring man ‘closer to God.’”
Is Francis Collins irrational, lacking in common sense, unaware of evidence, and intellectually dishonest? Would you like to debate Francis Collins about God based on the scientific evidence and common sense? I doubt it.
Neither you nor I, untrained in the sciences, would even understand much of the evidence these and many other scientists offer for belief in God.
So, enough of the college dorm clichés about “no evidence” for God. You have not decided to be an atheist because of “no evidence.” As a non-scientist, you are unlikely to even know the evidence that believing scientists offer.
The Times piece quoted Collins:
When you have for the first time in front of you this 3.1 billion–letter instruction book that conveys all kinds of information and all kinds of mystery about humankind, you can’t survey that going through page after page without a sense of awe. I can’t help but look at those pages and have a vague sense that this is giving me a glimpse of God’s mind.
Have you checked those 3.1 billion–letter instructions? I suspect you would understand them as poorly as I would.
In a future response I will address the other points in your opening statement. But I will respond to one now—your argument that Prager’s or Collins’s God is in the same intellectual league as belief in Zeus. Did anyone studying the human genome ever argue for Zeus? What are you talking about?
I’ll answer that question. You are talking as if you are addressing fellow atheists who cheer all these lines that belittle faith in God. They think ridicule compensates for their ignorance of intellectually sophisticated God-belief. But unfortunately for you, in this dialogue you are not addressing fellow believers in atheism or people who mock religion. You are addressing a mixed audience and debating a man who knows his arguments. I heard them in high school.
From: Sam Harris
To: Dennis Prager
Subject: The Burden of Proof Falls on the Faithful
I should clear up a couple misconceptions you have about me. While I am very happy that you have admitted your own ignorance of the relevant science, there is no need to attribute this ignorance to me.
While my day job as an infidel has slowed my progress of late, I am in the process of finishing my Ph.D. in neuroscience. This requires that I actually understand recent developments in biology. Let me assure you that I am firmly grounded in the life sciences and am well aware of the kinds of contortions that people like Francis Collins make in the service of their religious myths. Your claim that I would be afraid to debate Collins is especially amusing, given that I offered to debate him several months ago, and he is still considering it. I’ll be sure to invite you to this event if it ever gets scheduled.
You are, however, quite correct to observe that many scientists do believe in God. I indicated as much in my first post (“a person can have sufficient intellectual ... resources to build a nuclear bomb ...”). But in the developed world this is an American phenomenon. And even in this benighted country of ours, faith in God virtually disappears among the most established scientists.
A recent poll of the National Academy of Sciences (our most elite scientific organization) revealed that only 7% of its members believe in God (compared to 40% of ordinary scientists and 90% of the population at large). Still, I would be the first to admit there is a debate to be waged and won in the scientific community on this point. The fact that 40% of American scientists believe in God does not indicate that there are good reasons to believe in God; it indicates that 60% of scientists aren’t doing their jobs. The faith of people like Collins is invariably propped up by terrible arguments of the sort you have begun to put forward. Let’s look at a few of them.
First, the atheist you have conjured—so chock-full of false certainty—is an utter straw man. This defense of religion is one that Bertrand Russell demolished a century ago with his famous “teapot argument.” As I can’t improve on it, and you clearly have forgotten it amid the many challenges to piety you successfully parried “in high school,” here it is again:
Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense.
If a valid retort to Russell has ever seen the light of day, I’m not aware of it.
The faithful do resist the bogus certainties of religion—when they come from any religion but their own. Every Christian knows what it is like to find the claims of Muslims to be deeply suspect. Everyone who is not a Mormon knows at a glance that Mormonism is an obscenely stupid system of beliefs. Everyone has rejected an infinite number of spurious claims about God. The atheist simply rejects one more.
Atheism does not assert that “it is all made by chance.” No one knows why the universe came into being. Most scientists readily admit their ignorance on this point. Religious believers do not. One of the extraordinary ironies of religious discourse can be seen in the frequency with which people of faith praise themselves for their humility, while condemning scientists and other nonbelievers for their intellectual arrogance. You have done a fine job of this above. And yet, there is no worldview more reprehensible in its arrogance than that of a religious believer: The Creator of the Universe takes an active interest in me, approves of me, loves me, and will reward me after death; my current beliefs, drawn from scripture, will remain the best statement of the truth until the end of the world; everyone who disagrees with me will spend eternity in hell…
An average believer has achieved a level of arrogance that is simply unimaginable in scientific discourse—and there have been some extraordinarily arrogant scientists.
You suggest that the existence of the universe demonstrates the existence of God. Why? Because everything that exists must have a cause. It is amazing how many people find this argument compelling.
Who is to say that the only thing that could give rise to the universe is a personal God? Even if we accepted that our universe simply had to be designed by a designer, this would not suggest that this designer is the God of Abraham, or that He approves of Judaism or Christianity. If intelligently designed, our universe could be running as a simulation on an alien supercomputer. Or it could be the work of an evil God, or two such gods playing tug-of-war with a larger cosmos.
If God created the universe, what created God? To say that God is uncreated simply begs the question. Why can’t I say that the cosmos is uncreated?
I eagerly await your display of “intellectually sophisticated God-belief,” Dennis. But you’re going to have to do better than that.
From: Dennis Prager
To: Sam Harris
Subject: Straw Men, Teapots, and Moral Confusion
Dear Sam:
I may have erred in assuming that you, like myself and nearly all other mortals, could not match Dr. Francis Collins—the head of the human genome project— in his knowledge of human genetics. So if, as a graduate student in neuroscience, you have already approached Collins’s level of expertise, I salute you and exclude you from the vast majority of atheists or theists who could not debate him about the science that leads him to belief in God.
My point remains valid, as you graciously concede. Scientific knowledge hardly invalidates belief that there is a God. On the contrary, there are more believers in God in the natural sciences than in the social sciences. This suggests that it is the virtual absence of God in education, not knowledge of science, that likely accounts for the atheism of academics.
I note that you did not respond to my dismissal of your comparison of Zeus-belief with God-belief. You were wise to avoid it. That argument is intellectually silly, and unworthy of serious atheist.
You write that “the atheist you have conjured—so chock-full of false certainty—is an utter straw man.” “Straw man?” Sam, there is not one honest reader of your first letter who could assume anything but certitude on your part. Your dismissal of belief in God as intellectually identical to belief in Zeus proves my point, because both you and I are utterly certain that Zeus is not God.
And if you really aren’t certain that there is no God, level with us about your doubts as I did about mine.
The teapot argument is entirely inapplicable to me. I never wrote that atheism fails because it cannot disprove God. Are you responding to what I wrote, or just assuming that I fall into your caricature of believers?
I am, however, grateful for your bringing Bertrand Russell into the discussion. Russell is a fine example of one major reason I reject atheism. In the West, people and societies who reject the God of Judeo-Christian religions are more likely to become morally confused and foolish than believing Jews and Christians are.
Bertrand Russell, the great atheist, was, to put it gently, a very morally confused man. Among his many confused ideas was to wage pre-emptive war (including, if necessary, using nuclear bombs) on the Soviet Union after World War II, and then, after the Soviet Union gained nuclear weapons, advocated that America and the West disarm.
Secularism usually produces moral and intellectual foolishness in people and institutions. My prime evidence is the contemporary American university, which is a place of intellectual and moral confusion so deep that one must look very hard to find religious Christian or Jewish equivalents.
That is why I wrote a column years ago titled “How I found God at Columbia University.” Professors where I did my graduate work, at the Columbia University School of International Affairs, were wrong on virtually every important issue.
To give but one example of the foolishness that pervades your godless, religionless, secular world, the president of Harvard University, Lawrence Summers, was forced from office by the Harvard faculty largely because he had the audacity to say that brain differences between men and women might help account for their different predilections for the sciences and math. As the Psalms put it thousands of years ago, “Wisdom begins with awe of God.” The lack of wisdom at the secular temple, the university—where America is the world’s villain, where women and men are regarded as essentially the same, and where Marxism was taken seriously for generations—verifies the Psalmist’s view.
So thanks for raising Bertrand Russell. Though his china teapot argument is irrelevant to anything I have written or believe, his morally confused outlook on the world helped me to understand how indispensable God is to morality and wisdom, about which (especially in light of your characterization of this country as “benighted”) I’ll write more in my next letter.
Take care,
Dennis
From: Sam Harris
To: Dennis Prager
Subject: An Irrelevant Argument and Its Imaginary Facts
This debate is fast drawing to a close, Dennis, and you have neither addressed my arguments nor presented any substantive arguments of your own.
I certainly did not claim that I possessed Collins’s level of expertise. I am, however, sufficiently conversant with the relevant science to know that Collins does not hold his beliefs about God for compelling, scientific reasons. You appear rather over-awed by the man’s academic credentials. Let me assure you that even very accomplished scientists can be terrible philosophers.
Collins, as you probably know, has just published a book-length defense of religious faith entitled The Language of God. It is a masterpiece of simple-mindedness. For instance, Collins describes the moment that he, a top-tier scientist, became convinced of the divinity of Jesus Christ:
On a beautiful fall day, as I was hiking in the Cascade Mountains…the majesty and beauty of God’s creation overwhelmed my resistance. As I rounded a corner and saw a beautiful and unexpected frozen waterfall, hundreds of feet high, I knew the search was over. The next morning, I knelt in the dewy grass as the sun rose and surrendered to Jesus Christ.
A recent profile of Collins in Time adds a priceless detail: The waterfall was frozen in three streams, and this put the good doctor in mind of the Trinity! Earlier you wrote that I would not “even understand” the evidence that a genius like Francis Collins would put forward in defense of his faith. I confess you may be right about this.
I hope it is immediately obvious to you, and to every one of our readers, that there is nothing about seeing a frozen waterfall (no matter how frozen) that offers the slightest corroboration of the doctrine of Christianity. If the beauty of nature can mean that Jesus is the son of God, then it can mean anything at all.
Let’s say I saw that same waterfall, and its three streams made me think of Romulus, Remus, and the She-wolf—the mythical founders of Rome. I just knew, from that moment forward, that Italy would one day win the World Cup. This epiphany, while perfectly psychotic, would actually put me on firmer ground than Collins. (Because Italy did win the World Cup.)
The reason science (especially in America) doesn’t better inoculate its practitioners against the belief that Jesus was the son of God (or that Joseph Smith received God’s final revelation on golden plates from the angel Maroni) is because it is taboo to seriously challenge a person’s religious faith in our society. I wonder what you make of the fact that some significant number of Hindu scientists believe in a plurality of gods. Does this suggest to you that polytheism has been borne out by dispassionate scientific research?
You also appear to have drawn the wrong conclusion from the statistics. There is little question that exposure to a scientific education reduces the likelihood that a person will believe in God, and does so in a more or less linear fashion (about 10% of the general population are atheists/agnostics, 40% of doctors, 60% of research scientists, and 93% of National Academy members).
An article in Nature recently reported that no scientists doubt the existence of God more than biologists, followed closely by physicists and astronomers. I’m not aware of the data you cite on social scientists, but if it is as you report, and they are more atheistic still, it would not surprise me. After all, these people spend a lot of time thinking about things like self-deception, wishful thinking, cognitive biases, and the other enemies of intellectual honesty that keep religion in such good standing in our society.
Tell me why it is more reasonable to believe in Yahweh than in Zeus. I have little doubt that if Francis Collins grew up in a culture in which nine out of ten people venerated the gods of Mount Olympus, that frozen waterfall would have carried a decidedly pagan message (perhaps he would have thought “trident” before “trinity” and hit upon Poseidon as his favorite deity).
Your job is to either produce a rational argument for the unique legitimacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition (one that reveals why one billion Hindus are utterly in error about the nature of the cosmos), or to admit that you cannot do this. I am willing to bet the farm that you cannot.
I raised the teapot argument because you accused me (and all atheists) of being certain that God does not exist, inviting our readers to appreciate just how absurd and intellectually dishonest such certainty is. Russell’s argument reveals why an atheist need never pretend to such certainty (as I don’t). The burden is upon those who believe in Yahweh, Zeus, or celestial teapots to provide evidence in support of their doctrines. Russell’s argument does indeed apply to you. And it will apply to your children’s children if we don’t get our heads straight as a civilization.
You wrote: “In the West, people and societies who reject the God of Judeo-Christian religions are more likely to become morally confused and foolish than believing Jews and Christians are.”
As you are well aware, the United States is unique among wealthy democracies in its level of religious adherence. It is also uniquely beleaguered by high rates of homicide, abortion, teen-pregnancy, STD infection, and infant mortality. Southern and Midwestern states, characterized by the highest levels of religious literalism, are especially plagued by the above miseries, while the comparatively secular states of the Northeast conform to European norms. Clearly, strong religious commitment does little to guarantee moral behavior or societal health.
But there is a far more important point for you and our readers to understand. Even if your claim about the link between faith and morality were true, it would offer no support whatsoever for your religious beliefs. Even if atheism led straight to moral chaos, this would not suggest that the doctrine of Judaism is true. Islam might be true in that case. Or all religions might function like placebos. As descriptions of the universe, they could be utterly false but extraordinarily useful. Contrary to your opinion, however, the evidence suggests that they are both false and dangerous.
I suspect, Dennis, that you and I agree about many questions of morality. I trust we both feel that slavery was an abomination, despite the fact that no matter how you squint your eyes the Bible tells us that it is okay to keep slaves. (Who decides what is good in the Good Book? Answer: We do. Our moral intuitions are still primary. It makes absolutely no sense, therefore, to think that we get our basic sense of right and wrong out of scripture). We surely agree that political correctness has undermined the intellectual and moral integrity of much of our discourse, both within our universities and elsewhere.
But the linkage you have drawn between immorality and atheism is spurious. And, needless to say, the taboo that got Lawrence Summers fired is the same taboo that would keep an atheist professor from criticizing the lunatic religious convictions of his students. What we need, across the board, is intellectual honesty—not more dogmatism.
It seems that your attachment to religion results, at least in part, from your abhorrence of moral relativism. I fully share your concern here and spend a considerable portion of my professional energies trying to free secularism from the dangerous nonsense with which it is often entangled. I strongly suspect that you and I have similar views of the risks posed to civilization by the spread of Islam. We probably draw some of the same lessons from the failures of multiculturalism in Western Europe: All the backwardness and barbarism that goes by the name of European Islam (the forced marriages, honor killings, anti-Semitism, hostility to free speech, and so forth) has to be reamed out of those immigrant populations or the whole continent is headed over the falls.
But it is clear from our debate that you and I differ on the location of the problem. In your view, the problem must be that Europe has lost the moral backbone that only religion can provide (and Islam just happens to be the wrong religion.) In my view, our world has been shattered, quite unnecessarily, by religion itself. As I said, even if you were right, and the only people who could summon the moral courage to fight the religious lunatics of the Muslim world were the religious lunatics of the West, this would suggest nothing at all about the existence of the biblical God. It would only show that a belief in Him might be politically necessary, in a given time and place, to motivate people to fight (as our inimitable President says) “the evildoers.”
I am reasonably sure you are wrong about this. But again, this is quite irrelevant to the question before us.
From: Dennis Prager
To: Sam Harris
Subject: Unhappy Correlations
Dear Sam:
Dr. Collins did not offer three waterfalls as an argument for belief in the Trinity, not even in your isolated citation from his book or in the single sentence in Time. All he said was that three waterfalls reminded of him of the Christian Trinity and that after observing such awesome beauty he became a believing Christian.
If a man says that a beautiful flower reminds him of his beautiful wife, he is not saying that the beauty of the flower proves his wife is also beautiful. Natural wonders often inspire a person to reflect on the divine. You see natural beauty and, for that matter, everything else in the universe, and see no Creator, just coincidence. I find that reaction at least as odd as you find seeing in nature evidence for a Creator.
The Collins comments simply indicate that he and other eminent scientists see science as arguing for a Creator God. If Collins had said that the existence of three waterfalls proves that there is a Trinity, I would then share your dismissive attitude. But these comments didn’t even imply something so preposterous.
You write that, “There is little question that exposure to a scientific education reduces the likelihood that a person will believe in God,” a point I fully acknowledged in my last correspondence. But exposure to other areas of higher education, specifically the “social sciences,” further reduces the likelihood that a person will believe in God.
We therefore have two choices about how to interpret these data. One is that the more one knows, the less likely one is to believe in God. That is your interpretation. I have another interpretation—that contemporary higher education increases factual knowledge but decreases wisdom. With some exceptions, I believe that the more time one spends at a university the more foolish he or she becomes.
Only among the highly educated are there still those who believe that men and women are basically the same. Going back a generation or two, support for Josef Stalin, perhaps the greatest mass murderer in history, was almost entirely confined in the West to intellectuals. German Ph.D.s were also among Hitler’s greatest supporters. The moral record of secular intellectuals—Lenin’s “useful idiots”— is the worst of any single group in free societies in the last hundred years.
I am therefore not quite bowled over by data connecting higher secular education with atheism.
You write that, “Your job is to either produce a rational argument for the unique legitimacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition (one that reveals why one billion Hindus are utterly in error about the nature of the cosmos), or to admit that you cannot do this. I am willing to bet the farm that you cannot.”
Don’t bet your farm quite yet. I have in fact made the case for the unique legitimacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition in 25 essays I wrote in 2005. Suffice it to that Judeo-Christian values alone gave humanity the notion of the sacredness of human life; linear history and therefore the idea of moral and scientific progress; universal standards of good and evil; the abolition of slavery; the scientific method; the development of democracy; equality of the sexes; the greatest experiment in non-ethnicity-based society (America); the greatest music ever composed; and the greatest art ever drawn.
As for India, I have traveled there a number of times and lectured there; I have a deep reverence for its people and culture. But India did not give us those contributions. Nor did China and certainly not any of the societies contemporaneous with the ancient Jews who gave us the Torah from which these values emanate.
Presumably you assume that all these world-changing values and unique achievements would have evolved on their own with no Hebrew Bible, no divine revelation, and no Christians to bring the Bible to the world. You are, after all, a believer that everything awesome came from nothing.
That is how you view the world: All things came from no thing; intelligence came from nonintelligence; order came from chaos. I cannot understand why anyone finds these beliefs rationally compelling. I can only conclude that it takes either a university education—the secular immersion that begins in grade school—or an antipathy to religion.
If you want to make the case for secularism producing better people in America, how about “betting the farm” on this: I bet you whatever sum we each can afford that the vast majority of murderers and rapists in this country were not religiously active during the time they committed their violent crimes. I would make a second bet that you won’t take that bet.
Here’s another real-life correlation for you to ponder. For the most part, secular Europe couldn’t tell the moral difference between America and the Soviet Union and can’t tell the difference between Israel and its enemies. Religious America knew the Soviet Union was an “evil empire” and believes that there is a moral chasm separating Israel from its enemies. And secular Europe, like secular America, doesn’t even reproduce itself. Secularism either makes people too selfish to have more than one child and/or shatters any belief in sustaining one’s society and culture.
Finally, I salute you for acknowledging the Islamic threat and for abhorring the moral relativism that pervades the West. Unlike most atheists, you do acknowledge that the moral courage to fight today’s greatest evil is primarily to be found among religious Jews and Christians. I credit that courage to the moral clarity inherent to Jewish and Christian beliefs and to these Jews’ and Christians’ belief in God. I have yet to figure out to what you ascribe the courage among the religious and the lack of moral backbone in secular Europe and America.
You are right that this moral clarity and courage among the predominantly religious does not prove the existence of the biblical God. Nothing can prove God’s existence. But it sure is a powerful argument. If society cannot survive without x, there is a good chance x exists.
From: Sam Harris
To: Dennis Prager
Subject: Three Ways to Miss the Point
Well, we seem to have arrived at the end of our debate without a true meeting of minds. I doubt either of us expected to change the other’s views on religion. Before signing off, I would like to point out that you have relied on a variety of maneuvers that do not (even in combination) lend any support to your position:
1. You have observed that some very smart people, like Francis Collins, believe in God.
As it stands, citing such good company doesn’t amount to an argument—especially when the reasons these illustrious people have for believing in God are risible. Unfortunately, it is your treatment of Collins that is “misleading.” The excerpt I provided represents his own account of the precise moment he had his doubts about Christianity removed. You are rightly embarrassed by this, given your reliance on him as one of the great lights of “sophisticated” faith.
I will leave it to our readers to consult Collins’s book and decide for themselves whether the man arrived at his belief in the risen Christ through the science of molecular biology or by some other route. You, however, would do well to observe that there is an enormous difference between (1) acquiring a picture of the world through dispassionate, scientific study, and (2) acquiring it through emotionality and wishful thinking, then looking to see if can survive contact with science. Collins has clearly done the latter.
The fact that evangelical Christianity can still survive contact with science (because of the gaps in science) does not mean that there are scientific reasons for being an evangelical Christian. And despite your gyrations on the subject, the fact that scientists are, across the board, less religious than nonscientists suggests that science doesn’t tend to support religious belief.
2. You have, rather frequently, ignored the plain meaning of words.
I trust that attentive readers will notice where you have misconstrued me (or rendered a tortured interpretation of Collins, polling data, etc.).
3. You have continually sought to make the case that belief in God is useful.
While the usefulness of religion might be worth debating in another context, it is completely irrelevant to the question of whether God exists. (It is debatable, of course, because the Judeo-Christian tradition, to which you ascribe so much of humanity’s progress, has also spawned much of the world’s misery—and even produced Stalin, the worst of the worst).
The fact that certain religious beliefs might be useful in no way suggests their legitimacy. I can guarantee, for instance, that the following religion, invented by me in the last ten seconds, would be extraordinarily useful. It is called “Scientismo.” Here is its creed: Be kind to others; do not lie, steal, or murder; and oblige your children to master mathematics and science to the best of their abilities or 17 demons will torture you with hot tongs for eternity after death. If I could spread this faith to billions, I have little doubt that we would live in a better world than we do at present. Would this suggest that the 17 demons of Scientismo exist? Useful delusions are not the same thing as true beliefs.
With regard to your wager about the religiosity of murderers and rapists—it depends, of course, on what you mean by “religiously active.” If you are suggesting that these violent offenders rarely believe in your biblical God, I will happily take this bet. The rate of belief among murders and rapists in the U.S. must surely exceed the rate of nonbelief. I would even be willing to handicap it: We can leave aside the thousands of ordained child-rapists in the Catholic Church (or weren’t they “religiously active” by your lights?).
I should also point out that you sealed your last missive with a fallacy. You wrote:
“You are right that this moral clarity and courage among the predominantly religious does not prove the existence of the biblical God. Nothing can prove God’s existence. But it sure is a powerful argument. If society cannot survive without x, there is a good chance x exists.”
No, Dennis, this moral clarity is not a “powerful argument,” or even an argument at all; please keep your x’s straight. If humanity can’t survive without a belief in God, this would only mean that a belief in God exists. It wouldn’t, even remotely, suggest that God exists.
A further irony, of course, is that the civilizational threat that worries us both—Islamic fascism—is purely the product of religious faith, held for precisely the reasons (or pseudo-reasons) you defend. If Muslims didn’t think of themselves as “Muslims”, Jews as “Jews”, and Christians and “Christians”, we wouldn’t be in this mess. Let me assure you that “sophisticated” Muslims resort to the same rationalizations that Francis Collins does to prop up their belief in mighty Allah. Indeed, your “awesome beauty of nature” is one of the chief rationales for faith found in the Koran. How many more people will have to die because of this Iron Age response to the beauty of nature?
If nothing else, our debate clearly reveals how difficult it is to change another person’s mind on this subject. Perhaps some of our readers had their views shifted one way or the other. Whatever the result, I’m very happy we took the time to correspond.
All the best,
Sam
From: Dennis Prager
To: Sam Harris
Subject: Your Task is Far Greater than Mine
I will leave it to our readers to identify who relied on “maneuvers.”
To help them judge I will cite your words and not rely on paraphrasing your views as you have mine.
You write: “You have observed that very smart people, like Francis Collins, occasionally believe in God.”
I didn’t write that. I wrote that some eminent scientists believe in God and that some of them have come to believe in God through science. The issue was scientists and belief, not “very smart people” and belief. In fact, with no implication intended regarding you, I have almost never encountered “very smart people” who do not believe in God. The vast majority of atheists I have met had fine brain matter, but if “smart” includes wisdom, intellectual depth, profundity of thought, and moral insight, I have encountered such people almost exclusively among believers in the Judeo-Christian God. (For the record, I have also met fools who believe in this God.)
You write: “I trust that attentive readers will notice where you have misconstrued me (or rendered a tortured interpretation of Collins, polling data, etc.) and then pressed a false charge.”
I continue to defend my understanding of Collins—in fact, on my radio show I asked him about the waterfalls and he sustained my, not your, understanding. (The entire interview with him is available through my website.)
You never took my bet that the vast majority of violent criminals were not religiously active when they committed their crimes. Instead you redefined “religiously active” to mean belief in the biblical God. Everyone who uses the term knows it doesn’t refer to belief; it refers to being active within a religion, such as with regular church or synagogue attendance, Bible study, etc. You know as well as I do that such people are not proportionately represented among America’s violent criminals. So you redefined “religiously active” to avoid the wager.
You write: “While the usefulness of religion might be worth debating in another context, it is completely irrelevant to the question of whether God exists.” I agree. My argument is that unlike Judeo-Christian America, secular societies—generally meaning those of Western Europe—lose their will to survive (by not reproducing), and stand for nothing (they were largely morally worthless in the Cold War against Communism and are worthless or worse in helping to keep Israel alive against Muslims who vow to exterminate the Jewish state.) When people realize this, they may conclude that something that is necessary for society to survive—belief in the God of Israel—may in fact exist.
You write that the Judeo-Christian tradition “even produced Stalin.” I have to admit this is a first in a lifetime of debating atheists. I can only imagine that you are referring to the fact that Stalin attended a Christian seminary as a youth. So what? Stalin was a passionate atheist who murdered untold numbers of Christian clergy, destroyed virtually every church in Russia, and forced Soviet students to study “scientific atheism.” If those violent pro-atheism policies were produced by the Judeo-Christian tradition, then words have no meaning.
You write: “Useful delusions are not the same thing as true beliefs.”
That is certainly true. However, if what may be a “useful delusion” is responsible for Judeo-Christian civilization’s abolishing slavery, discovering science and the scientific method, affirming rationality, believing in progress (the Torah was unique in repudiating the cyclic view of life), elevating women’s rights, affirming universal human rights, establishing the sanctity of human life, and so much more, then I would be loathe to dismiss it as merely a “useful delusion.”
You write: “If humanity can’t survive without a belief in God, this would only mean that a belief in God exists. It wouldn’t, even remotely, suggest that God exists.” This statement is as novel as the one suggesting that Stalin was produced by Judeo-Christian values. It is hard for me to imagine that any fair-minded reader would reach the same conclusion. If we both acknowledge that without belief in God humanity would self-destruct, it is quite a stretch to say that this fact does not “even remotely suggest that God exists.” Can you name one thing that does not exist but is essential to human survival?
You conclude: “If nothing else, our debate clearly reveals how difficult it is to change another person’s mind on this subject. Perhaps some of our readers had their views shifted one way or the other. Whatever the result, I’m very happy we took the time to correspond.”
I, too, am happy we took the time to correspond. But I never entered this debate with any hope that I would change your mind on this subject. The motto of my radio show is, “I prefer clarity to agreement,” and that is why I agreed to this. I wanted readers to attain clarity about the differences between atheism and Judeo-based theism.
And with that goal in mind, I will end with my re-wording of a superb summary of the argument for belief in God that was made by Rabbi Milton Steinberg (1903–1950), a rationalist (and non-Orthodox) rabbi: “The believer in God has to account for the existence of unjust suffering; the atheist has to account for the existence of everything else.”
And that is why your task, Sam, is infinitely greater than mine.
All the best,
Dennis
About Sam Harris: Sam Harris is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation. He is a graduate in philosophy from Stanford University and has studied both Eastern and Western religious traditions, along with a variety of contemplative disciplines, for twenty years. Mr. Harris is now completing a doctorate in neuroscience. He and his work have been discussed in Newsweek, TIME , U.S. News and World Report, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Chicago Tribune, The Economist, The Guardian, The Independent, Der Spiegel, The Globe and Mail, New Scientist, Wired, SEED Magazine, and many other journals. The End of Faith won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction. Several foreign editions are in press. Mr. Harris makes regular appearances on television and radio to discuss the danger that religion now poses to modern societies. His essays have appeared in Newsweek, The Los Angeles Times, The Times of London, The Boston Globe, and elsewhere. He blogs for the Washington Post / Newsweek website: On Faith.
About Dennis Prager: Dennis Prager hosts a nationally syndicated radio talk show live Monday through Friday mornings from Los Angeles. Widely sought after by television shows for his opinions, he’s appeared on “Larry King Live,” “Hardball,” “Hannity & Colmes,” “CBS Evening News,” “The Today Show” and many others. Dennis also writes a syndicated column (Creators Syndicate) that is published in newspapers across the country and on the Internet. His writings have also appeared in major national and international publications including, Commentary, The Weekly Standard and The Wall Street Journal. He has authored four books, including The Nine Questions People Ask About Judaism, which remains a paperback bestseller over 20 years after its release. Mr. Prager was a Fellow at Columbia University’s School of International Affairs, where he did graduate work at the Middle East and Russian Institutes. He has taught Russian and Jewish history at Brooklyn College; and was appointed by President Ronald Reagan to the U.S. Delegation to the Vienna Review Conference on the Helsinki Accords. He holds an honorary doctorate of laws from Pepperdine University.
appeal to consequences of a belief has this fallacious form:
The belief in P leads to Q.
Q is desirable.
Therefore, P is true
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_consequences>
If an argument has this form it is techincally NOT an argument at all. This is what Sam is pointing out (see below):
Sam:
No, Dennis, this moral clarity is not a "powerful argument," or even an argument at all; please keep your x's straight. If humanity can't survive without a belief in God, this would only mean that a belief in God exists. It wouldn't, even remotely, suggest that God exists.
Dennis Prager's Reponse to Sam:
You write: "If humanity can't survive without a belief in God, this would only mean that a belief in God exists. It wouldn't, even remotely, suggest that God exists." This statement is as novel as the one suggesting that Stalin was produced by Judeo-Christian values. It is hard for me to imagine that any fair-minded reader would reach the same conclusion. If we both acknowledge that without belief in God humanity would self-destruct, it is quite a stretch to say that this fact does not "even remotely suggest that God exists." Can you name one thing that does not exist but is essential to human survival?
This is most troubling to me. Even after Sam points out that Dennis is conflating the reference with the referant, Dennis still confuses to. He may be aware of his mistake and be avoiding owning up to it, but it is just as likely that he is cognitively less capable of identifying thought from non-thought based reality. Some realities depend on thought such as money. Money becomes more than paper and metal because we individually as well as collectively give it meaning and value. Then there are things such as the fact that the earth is revolving around the sun and not the other way around that is independent of both individual and collective thought. I think belief about God is like money - socially constructed. But God is a truth claim about the universe like the earth revolving around the sun. You can't socially construct God into existence like you can belief in God. Did you notice how Dennis' arguments are based on the usefulness of belief in God? This is the type of argument that would be valid for arguing for the usefulness of believing in the value of money.
As a strict materialist/patternist I believe that we need to not only use rationality from within the religious mindset (e.g. "Say I grant you the truth claim of T, you still have problems X,Y,Z), but from the position that completely disregards the fictions and focuses on realities. Part of reality is the psychological/neurological basis of belief. For example in psychology it is well known that people suffering from anxiety disorders such as obsessive compulsive disorder a contributing factor is an reduced ability to distinguish thought from reality. It is also known that religiosity has a large genetic component, that its not just social indoctrination. The brains of the religious are a little broken in their ability to distiguish between reference and referant, and science needs to discover exactly how. I believe the sciences that deal with Mind, Brain, and Society will be much more threatening to religious belief than cosmology, geology and biology as they learn move about the religious mind.
Related to this is my view that that all those that fight powerful falsehoods should not attack them as being non-sense, but as being imaginary. This may seem a trivial point, but I believe it is not. If further clarification on this point is required, just ask.
