A Review of Sam Harris' The End of Faith Part III
May 11, 2007, Wausau, Wi— I ended part II of my review of Sam Harris’ The End Of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. , by pointing out that the view of religion which Harris was refuting was entirely artificial and that it did not represent any actual religion, much less Christianity. It was also on display in his fundamental belief that religion is at the root of most wars, a false claim we exposed in Part I.
In fact, it would seem according to Harris, that while virtually any evil attributed any religious group can be taken as an example of the core problem with religion in general, nothing good done by any religious group can be legitimately used to counter this. In fact he says “Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance and has no bona fides, in religious terms, to put it on par with fundamentalism.” (p 21). Fundamentalism, for Harris being the use of violent against those who disagree. In short, this boils down to if it is bad, it is the result of religion, if it is good, it is the result of something else. In Harris’ world view this something else is often the use of reason, which he sees as the alternative to religion.
It is hard to take such simplistic Black and White thinking seriously; especially when it is being cloaked in the guise of reason and runs so contrary to the evidence. The problem with Harris’ approach can be seen in the following passage when he writes, “The only reason anyone is ‘moderate’ in matters of faith these days is that he has assimilated some of the fruits of the last two thousand years of human thought (democratic politics, scientific advancement on every front, concern for human rights and end to cultural and geographic isolation, etc). “ (p 19)
What makes this claim so strange from Harris’ point of view is that this period when religious moderates were doing this assimilation is the Christian era. Now we must be careful not to fall into the opposite error of Harris and assume that everything good during this period resulted from Christianity and everything bad resulted from something else. The record is much more mixed. But as I argue in my book Christianity and Secularism, any objective look at the historical evidence will show that Christianity has on the whole been a very positive force.
For example, the claim of earlier historians that Christianity caused the downfall of Rome, is now rejected by most. In fact the secular historian Will Durant argues that Christianity played an important role in preserving the culture from the onslaught of barbarism. The church maintained order as civilization crumbled around it. He goes on point out that as Rome fell leaving the Church to fill the vacuum, for the first time in European history, “the teachers of mankind preached an ethic of kindliness, obedience, humility, patience, mercy, purity, chastity, and tenderness.” (cited in Christianity and Secularism, pp 100-101)
Again as I document in my book, the earlier view that the Church took civilization into the Dark Ages, and it was only when people began to break free of the Church’s hold that we had the Renaissance is a distorted view of history that is no longer accepted by historians. Even in areas where the church clearly did great evil such as the inquisition, things are not quite so clear cut as Harris would have us believe. According to Harris, the Inquisition resulted because “the medieval church was quick” to follow the “Good Book.” (p 81) Yet reality is not quite so simple. In the eleventh century, Pope Leo IX held that maximum penalty for heresy was excommunication. Then came the early parts of the renaissance and a revival of Roman Law that started in the city of Bologna in the 12th century. It was from the Roman legal concept of an inquisiti, that the Church developed Inquisition.
Much of the same can be said for the items in Harris list of thing moderates supposedly assimilated. Many have noted that science grew out of the Christian world view with most early scientists being Christians. As for the concern for Human Right, the whole concept of human rights was born out of the idea that we are created in the image of God with certain abilities given by God, and that what God has given, no man, not even the King is in a position arbitrarily take away. This religious foundation can be seen in the Declaration of Independence when it says “All men are created equal, endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.” It is no coincidence that the recent attempts to remove God as a foundation for rights have thrown the whole concept into turmoil, as no other suitable foundation has yet been found.
Given Harris’ view that sees only bad in religion, and tries to attribute any good to some other sources, it is no wonder he reaches the conclusions that he does. But such an irrational approach cannot be the foundation for a claim that is trying to contrast religion and reason.
Part I Part II Part IV Part V Part VI
A Review of Sam Harris' The End of Faith Part II
May 4, 2007, Wausau, Wi— I pointed out in Part I of my review of Sam Harris’ The End Of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, that rarely have I encountered a book which starts out with so many errors in so few pages. Further reading has not changed my opinion. In fact the detailed analysis and review I had intended will have to be abandoned as there are simply too many errors (often several per page) and it would take far too long to catalogue them all.
One of the problems is that Harris’ style leads him to make frequent bold and clearly false statements with very little justification. For example in one paragraph Harris claims that “The idea that any one of our religions represents the infallible word of the One True God requires an encyclopedic ignorance of history, mythology, and art even to be entertained.” (p16) To support this Harris simple points to evidence of “cross-pollination” among religious beliefs. There are numerous problems with this claim, but the simple fact is that there are many people who do not have encyclopedic ignorance in these areas, but to the contrary are quite well informed, and yet who not only entertain, but believe that the One True God has given us his infallible word in the Bible.
Harris then closes this paragraph by making the claim that “There is no more evidence to justify a belief in the literal existence of Yahweh, and Satan, than there was to keep Zeus perched upon his mountain throne or Poseidon churning the seas.” (p 16) Again, the facts are contrary to Harris’ claim. Skeptics have for hundreds of years attempted to undermine Christianity, and as I detail in my books, contrary to Harris claims, the evidence for Christianity has grown stronger, and it has in fact been the claims of the early skeptics that have been show to be lacking, and have often been refuted by more recently discovered evidence. For example, given the strength of the evidence, few would now argue that Jesus never existed. Where is all the similar evidence for Poseidon, or Zeus? Such false, but bold claims may be music to the ears of Harris’ fellow skeptics who love to see religion bashed and ridiculed, but it hardly make for the sound reasoning that Harris claims is the alternative to religion.
So rather than a detailed refutation of Harris’ errors, perhaps of more interest would be to apply one of Harris questions to him. Harris asks “How is it that, in this one area of our lives, we have convinced ourselves that our beliefs about the world can float entirely free from reason and evidence?” (p 17) To apply this question to Harris, just how is it that he, while claiming to uphold reason can become so irrational and detached from the evidence when it comes to religion?
We can begin to see this process at work in his classification of religion. Harris first states that people of faith fall onto a continuum, from those who accept diversity to those who would “burn the world to a cinder” to destroy heresy. But Harris immediately proceeds to ignore this and present religious belief as just two groups, moderates (those who accept diversity) and extremists (those who would presumably burn the world to a cinder). Though a highly artificial division, this by itself, this would not necessarily be a problem, except that Harris then goes on to describe moderates in ways that do not fit his previous classification, and herein lays a major error.
Harris claims that 35 percent of Americans believe that the Bible is the literal and inerrant word of God. The problem is that clearly 35 percent of the American people do not fall into his category of extremists. In fact very few if any Christians would. Harris tries to justify this, by claiming most Christians and Jews do not read their Bible enough. While it is undoubtedly true, that still does not explain the millions who do read and study their Bible do not fall into Harris category of extremists. In Short Harris’s categories simply are not an accurate description of reality.
This is the first of several key problems with Harris’ attack on religion. Harris treats religion as if it were, fundamentally, a single entity, centered around a belief in God. In my book “Christianity and Secularism” I go into detail about want is a religion and the errors with views such as Harris. There are simply too many different religions with too many different views to treat them all as a single whole. And yet this is what Harris does as he links extremist suicide bombers to tolerant faithful believers as if they were at the core one. So while Harris’ arguments may seem devastating to skeptics, they are not refuting anything any one person actually beliefs in.
A refutation of some abstract construction called religion is not a refutation of what Christians actually believe. A refutation of some abstract construction call “God’s word” is not a refutation of the actual word of God found in the Old and New Testaments. In short Harris’ arguments are aimed at something that “can float entirely free from reason and evidence” and not at Christianity.
Part I Part III Part IV Part V Part VI
A Review of Sam Harris' The End of Faith Part 1
April 20, 2007, Wausau, Wi— I recently began reading Sam Harris’ The End Of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. It is billed on the back cover as a “sustained nuclear assault” on religious belief by one reviewer, while another reviewer claims “Even Mr Harris’s critics will have to concede the force of an analysis which roams far and wide.” While I have only started the book and may yet to have encountered this analysis, rarely have I encountered a book which starts out with so many errors in so few pages.
For example, after opening his first chapter with the story of a suicide bomber, Harris begins by claiming that “A glance at history, or at the pages of any newspaper, reveals that ideas which divide one group of human beings from another, only to unite them in slaughter, generally have their roots in religion.” (p 12) Perhaps Harris is stressing the word “Glance” because any real consideration of the historical evidence show that throughout history people have kill their fellow human being for any number of reasons, greed, power, land, glory, food, self-defense, and others in addition to religion. Even many of conflict attributed to religion have many other and often more important roots.
For example the conflict between the English and Irish in Northern Ireland is often portrayed as a conflict between catholic and protestants. Yet this ignores that the conflict preceded the Reformation which gave rise to this religious split. In fact the conflict, rather than being caused by religion difference, is more likely a cause of the religious difference in that the Irish remained Catholic when England became protestants so as to be different from the English.
So to claim that most killing has its roots in religion is simply false. Then there are all the efforts of religion to stop or at least limit wars and conflicts, such as the effort of the church during the middle ages to resolve the conflicts that arose between rulers and limit the killings, particularly of civilians. Such efforts makes matters even worse for Harris’s claim. So while religion sadly has nowhere near a spotless record in this area, but instead has much to answer for, it hardly comes close to playing the central role Harris claims.
From this false claim, Harris immediately goes to what is at best a misleading claim, when he writes, “Our situation is this: most of the people in this world believe that the Creator of the universe has written a book.” While there is some dispute about the actual statistic, it is probably true that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (the only major religions about which such a claim would be considered true) together make up a slight majority of the world population. However, given the variety of religious beliefs in the world, and the related history of the three monotheistic faiths, it really is a distortion to classify this as the norm for all religions, nor is it correct to classify a slight majority as if it were a general rule.
Harris then further compounds his error when he builds on this to further claim that all religions are in “‘perverse agreement’” that God does not endorse respect for unbelievers.” What one wonders, would Harris say about 1 Peter 3:15 which says Christians are to give “The reason for the hope that you have, but do this with gentleness and respect.”
Strangely Harris then proceeds attack the “intolerance” of religious believers against those with differing views on religion, which presents the interesting paradox in that Harris also shows little tolerance against those with views on religion that differ from his.
In fact to him “an immediate problem” is not that religions are attack too much, but that they are not attacked enough, making the claim that “criticizing a person’s faith is currently taboo in every corner of our culture.” One can only assume that Harris does not get to too many corners of our culture, as Christianity, in particular conservative Christians and Catholics are routinely criticized and disparate in most of the mainstream culture. In fact a very good case could be made that conservative Christians and Catholics are among the very few groups that are “open season” in our culture when it comes to criticism.
As these errors form the foundation for the argument that Harris is going to make, they do not make for a very promising start. But then this type of straw man argument is very typical of those who criticize Christianity. It hardly makes for the “sustained nuclear assault” the cover of the book promised. We will see if Harris does any better as he attempts to develop this argument.
Part II Part III Part IV Part V Part VI
A Review of Bart Ehrmans Misquoting Jesus
April 13, 2007, Wausau, Wi— Bart Ehrman’s recent book, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, has recently been cited by those casting doubt on the text of the New Testament. Yet, despite the title Ehrman’s book is really just a popular overview of New Testament textual criticism. In fact when you get down to it, there is very little in the core of the book, that I, someone who believe in Inerrancy, could not have written, and in terms of the evidence presented, there is no major conflict with my book, Evidence for the Bible which claims that “the text we have today is essentially the same as that penned by the original authors.”
The heart of the issue is that there are over 5000 Greek manuscripts and over 20, 0000 manuscripts of translation of the New Testament. Since all these manuscripts were manually copied they don’t all completely agree. The key question is, what are we to make of these differences? For Ehrman, these differences are a problem. For me, while it may initially sound like a problem, when the actual differences are analyzed, I don’t see much of a problem at all.
After all, the main goal of Textual Criticism is to evaluate all these manuscripts to determine which of the various versions of a passage is what the original author wrote, and which were changes or errors made by later copyist. While there are lots of differences between the numerous manuscripts, most of the time it is not difficult at all to determine which version is the original version and which were the result of later copyist, particularly when there are some pretty standard types of errors that can occur when copying, such as skipping a word or line, etc. As a result most of the difference can be dealt with fairly easily.
In fact, Ehrman and I both agree that, in Ehrman’s words, “most of them are completely insignificant, immaterial, and of no real importance for anything other than showing that scribes could not spell or keep focused any better than the rest of us.” (pg 208) However, Ehrman goes on to say that, “It would be wrong… to say – as people sometimes do – that the changes in our text have no real bearing on what the texts mean or on the theological conclusions that one draws from them.”
As for this last statement, it all depends on what is meant by “text.” If one means the verse or passage where the difference occurs, then of course this is true, as I discuss in my book. If, on the other hand, this is taken as referring to the Bible as a whole, as Ehrman implies, that is something quite different.
You can perhaps better understand the reason for our different conclusions on the minority of places where the changes are significant, if you look at Ehrman’ list of his top ten additions to the Bible. Two of the ten verses Ehrman’s claims were added are also missing from the main text of modern Bibles like the NIV, while 4 others are bracketed off and preceded by statements that these passages are not found in “The earliest and most reliable manuscripts and other ancient witnesses.” Another of the ten is mentioned in a footnote as a possible addition. The remaining three alleged additions are known variants about which there is some disagreement among scholars, and there is good evidence to support that these three were original, but even if Ehrman, is correct and these verses were added, the teaching in the verses are duplicated in other portions of the New Testament. Thus while their absence would obviously affect the teaching of the passage, it would not affect the overall teachings of the Bible.
So of Ehrman’s top ten, Most are already reflected in modern Bibles and none even if Ehrman is correct, affect the overall teaching. In fact, the first of Ehrman’s top 10 (1 John 5:7) is discussed in my book as an example of a significant change.
So as a summary of the history and methods of Textual Criticism, Ehrman’s book is a good popular survey. As an argument for how the Bible is unreliable, it fails miserably.
The major difference between Ehrman and myself would be over significant to the average reader of passages about which there is some doubt. As I pointed out in Evidence for the Bible, “no major teaching of the church depends on a single verse, much less a verse in which there is a variant reading.” Nor is any of this information hidden, but is accessible to any who are interested.
In short, as I argue in my book, Evidence for the Bible the text we have today is essentially the same as that penned by the authors.
A Double Standard?
Chelan County Judge Rules Legal Challenge of Governor’s Election Can Move Forward. (Article here)
Despite the evidence of voter fraud in Washington State, I do not support dragging it out the situation in any further.
As I have written before, the Democrats have shown quite a contrast with Republicans in this area. (Democrats Challenge Election of Bush ) As such I would hate to see the Republicans adopt the Democratic strategy. Still there is a difference. In the cases I cited, the Republicans accepted the initial vote, even despite strong evidence of significant voter fraud so as to avoid a long dragged out process. In Washington the Democrats faced with close loss didn’t. They sought to drag it out as long as it takes to win. In Washington State the Republicans won the initial vote, they won the earlier recounts. It took a less reliable hand count, with special counting rules in heavily Democratic districts that were not applied to other districts to allow the Democrat to get a majority.
This is one of the problems, Republicans generally tend to play by the rules. Democrats put their ideology and wining ahead of the rules. Thus if the law gets in the way of what they want, the law is unfair or wrong, and they can usually find a Liberal Judge to set the law aside for them, as they did with Torricelli in New Jersey, and tried to do in Florida four years ago.
In this case it is not a double standard to say that politicians should accept the initial vote with perhaps one recount, and should not enter in to long unending recounts and challenges, on the one hand, yet support continuing a contest once the other side has already started it. This is because there is a higher principle, i.e., that both sides play by the same rules.
Still, while not a double standard, there is a problem and it is the reason that I do not support continuing the process in Washington, for if Republicans begin to play by the same rules as the democrats then we really would have problems. Every close election would be dragged into court for months, with very serious consequences for democracy. This by the way was one of the reasons, both parties enacted laws limiting recounts, placing time limits, etc, which Democrats have recently sought to overturn or get around in the courts, in the name of “Every vote must be counted” or just plain winning.
But in any event Washington State is a good example of the problems with such long and contested procedures, and demonstrates the wisdom of politicians like Nixon, Thune and Ashcroft. Once started, these contested elections just go back and forth with the democratic process being the real looser. It would be far more productive to focus on the problems with voting that allowed fraud in the first place and to seek reforms to the process that will prevent them in the future.
Some reading on the problems of the Roman Republic and what caused its downfall into dictatorship is instructive here. . It was a long process taking about 100 years from the Gracchi brothers to Julius Caesar. But one of the problems was the win at all cost, and to hell with the rules approach displayed by many Democrats today. A good place to start would be the recent book by Tom Holland “Rubicon” though its focus is mostly on the last 50 years of the Republic
