Columnist Janie Cheaney has a short take on Sam Harris’ new book, Letter To a Christian Nation. She’s says it’s a short book from a “hard-boiled atheist of the kind C.S. Lewis lamented back in the ’40s.” He wants to eliminate faith from our minds. Interestingly enough, he complains in a recent column about radical Islam and the fact that those speaking with the “greatest moral clarity about the current wars in the Middle East are members of the Christian right.”
Sam, what basis does an atheist have for recommending moral judgements to others? Isn’t it just an appeal to individual reason that your way is the way for us all to get along better? That’s what Richard Dawkins seems to argue in his book, The Selfish Gene, but he states our biology works against this idea of everyone’s better good:
The genes are the master programmers, and they are programming for their lives. They are judged according to the success of their programs in copying with all the hazards that life throws at their survival machines, and the judge is the ruthless judge of the court of survival.
Whenever a system of communication evolves, there is always the danger that some will exploit the system for their own ends. Brought up as we have been on the ‘good of the species’ view of evolution, we naturally think first of liars and deceivers as belonging to different species: predators, prey, parasites, and so on. However, we must expect lies and deceit, and selfish exploitation of communication to arise whenever the interests of the genes of different individuals diverge. This will include individuals of the same species. As we shall see, we must even expect that children will deceive their parents, that husbands will cheat on wives, and that brother will lie to brother.
So he urges us to find morality outside of biology. Why?
R. Dawkins annoys me no end. I remember a time over twenty years ago when I was required to read one of his first books and ended up throwing it across the room. His idea of the world ruled by genes isn’t science; it’s speculative metaphysics. In no way can it be proven true or untrue. He doesn’t seem to understand (if we assume he’s being honest) that this idea would render our lives absurd and meaningless. If this horrid idea were true there could be no truth, meaning, reality, ethics, etc. Why then does he keep publishing these rants of his? If what he says is true there is at the very least no free will; so what’s the point of decrying or trying to change human behavior? The man’s animus against christianity has rendered him an idiot.
I understand. He has been a mocker for a long time. Before seeing the excerpts from this book, I had heard that he admited to an audience that Darwinism cannot give us a livable morality. He says that in this book too, but apparently he does not see the foolishness or irrationale of trying to found morality apart from real life. It seems to me evolution, if it were the way of the world, will have it’s way no matter what happens. Let the Americas die a thousand deaths. Let Asia become a wasteland. If mankind survives somewhere–heck! what does it matter that anything lives on–the universe will continue to evolve and life will begin again or not.