Greg's Reviews > The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason

What follows is not a review. It's more like some notes and thoughts I had while reading the book... a review will soon be written....


This is from DFW's 2005 Kenyon Commencement Speech:

"Here's another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: "Look, it's not like I don't have actual reasons for not believing in God. It's not like I haven't ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn't see a thing, and it was fifty below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out 'Oh, God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me.'" And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. "Well then you must believe now," he says, "After all, here you are, alive." The atheist just rolls his eyes. "No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp."

I have no doubt that Sam Harris is much smarter than I am. I have little doubt that any criticisms I make will be duly dealt with by persons probably smarter than myself too, or at least better informed than I am on these topics. I'm curious to read some of the religious critiques of this book, are any of them able to refute what he is saying without resorting to religious babble? I'm not really quite sure where you argue with him on the questions of religion, something about the way he posits a definition of belief I think is the weak link in the argument, but I can't put my finger on what it is. That's only based an unease I felt with his reasoning though. Is he harsh on Islam? No, I don't think so. Everyone who is Islam is not a bad person, as a group that can run out into the street waving AK-47's around cheering and celebrating the deaths of a few thousand innocent people, or who find it proper to behead people, or douse women in gasoline and light them on fire, or excitedly show pictures you took with your camera of dead-people on the ground around the WTC that are now housed on your laptop, and not understand how come everyone else around you doesn't think it's a great thing (ok, this guy might just be a sociopath who happened to be Muslim, but still Greg conspiracy number 3 of 9/11, why did he bring not one but two cameras to school with him that day, when he had never brought cameras to school any other day? Greg conspiracies #1 and 2 may be dealt with later). The way that liberals have defended their right to the diversity of their religion has stunk to me for quite awhile. If they are allowed to actively do anti-social things, then we should allow any religious group in our country to do them too, both books proscribe similar things. I don't think a bunch of women being forced outside of towns freezing their asses off and being shunned all because they are menstruating would be looked upon as a cultural difference worth appreciating some Leviticus inspired church decided to do this out in Wyoming.

Lots of words to say I agree.

What I had difficulty with was Harris' attempt at explaining a possible ethics. Maybe it was the appeal to a proto-utilitarianism and basing a possible universal moral code on the premise of love and happiness. I'm simplifying here. I actually agree with him, but I don't see it all holding water. Now, because of love we feel for others we want them to have the most happiness and suffer less. This love would radiate outward in our immediate social circle's (this is me talking now not Harris), our family (that we don't hate), significant others, friends, children we'd feel more of a bond with and be more invested in their happiness and suffering. Here is sort of my problem: If me and my very large family, my wife and our 12 children, whom I love very very much, but it pains me to see them go hungry all the time, not have shoes for their 24 little feet, and I can't just seem to provide for them all. I want them to be happy. I don't want them to suffer anymore. Now living next door is an old miser. He never talks to me, I don't like him, nor do I hate him. I know he has 10 million dollars stashed under the floorboards in his house. I know he has no friends, no family and that no one will miss him if he died. I also know that no one knows about the money, I just happen to know someway. Do I kill him? One the happiness and suffering scale the answer could be yes, but we'd still say he has a right to his happiness of life. What if I told you that a letter got accidently delivered to my house yesterday from his doctor, and the doctor told him that he has terminal cancer of the most painful kind, and he only has 6 months to live. Do I kill him now? What if I'm going to do it with a drug that he will never realize he has taken, he will feel nothing from, and he will just pass away in his sleep, with no terror, no violence, no awareness even of his death? Can I kill him now? The answer somewhere in this becomes yes, yes I can kill him. Especially if one doesn't believe in an afterlife, there becomes a point in this far-fetched hypothetical situation; happiness and suffering are at this point vague and unquantifiable, and are a slippery slope. What if I had these 12 kids, they are all on the brink of starvation, and the next door neighbor is a rich miser, no relations blah blah blah, who I know hates life because he walks around his yard all day muttering "I hate my life". Murder here is morally justified, but it shouldn't be--it's that reason why it shouldn't be justified that I think is missing in the framework of a system that Harris is building.

Harris isn't really offering up a final word on ethics though, he's just pointing towards ways that a future morality could be built that didn't rely on fairy tales, myths, or some of the problematic pragmatic approaches someone like Rorty might endorse. (On pragmatics, wow, was he a little harsh on Rorty and company. I've never been much of a fan of pragmatism, nor spent much time thinking about it, or reading it, but he really did a number on it. I do think that he missed an interesting point that he could have taken up and been in agreement with Habermas, and which I think is a central problem in any talk about religion and irrationality. Habermas has had many different sides to him in his long career as Adorno's successor who lost his balls, so to speak. Habermas' central idea is roughly that if open discourse could happen then it would easily resolve problems; but it's that communication is not possible, that problems continue without being able to find a solution. This brings me back to the DFW quote at the start, the problem between having a discourse on religion and the irrational aspects, and trying to bring someone who believes some really weird shit into congruence with the actual physical world we live in is that neither person are speaking the same language. This isn't relativism, it's not that both are right, or that you have your truth and I have mine in any kind of epistemological sense, it's that both sides could be wrong, but neither of them is speaking a language that the other one understands. Look at the creationist debate. The reason why scientists can't convince a biblical literalist about the validity of their findings is that the words a scientist uses are not even understood by the creationist. Yes they can give definitions of the words that both would agree on, but there is something in their language, in their way of using the language and expressing themselves both to themselves and to the outside world that is not the same as being used by the other person. The scientist can show figure after figure, show pictures, fossils showing every stage for transition from single-cell molecule to human and it would do nothing to the creationist, they would still hear every word as intelligent design, as biblical this or that. And this would be vice versa too. I'd suggest that one possible way to break down this barrier of communication is through something of a deconstruction (a text with no inherent truth can be broken apart any number of ways that are all legitimate, a text with a concealed truth can be broken open to expose that truth, in the first instance there is a case of relativism, but it's of no importance, their is no truth in the text to begin with, it's only making the inconsistencies more apparent by showing the absurdity of the new readings. The second is the more abused version of deconstruction, because it often falls into a relativistic whirlpool of competing 'truths', but in many cases I think it's the job of the reader to read these 'deconstructions' as added layers to the original, where this is going I'm not quite sure, I'll probably add something in the comment section at some point), and I think it's something that late Derrida was pointing to along with his focus on cosmopolitanism (which in reality is probably the only way to truly overcome the schisms of irrational belief, it's in all likelihood one of the major contributing factors of Ancient Greece putting their pantheon of Gods aside, but this is mentioned by Harris, although I don't think he uses the word cosmopolitan).

Now I should probably go finish the book. I still have a chapter left to read.