Science vs Religion

The Moral Landscape: How Science can Determine Moral Values by Sam Harris – review

It isn't Sam Harris's atheism that bothers Giles Fraser, but his breathtaking hubris

Giles Fraser The Guardian, Saturday 9 April 2011

We are caught in a battle between those who believe too much and those who believe too little – so Terry Eagleton was saying at St Paul's cathedral the other day. In the one corner are the fundamentalists for whom certainty can be pulled off the page of ancient scripture, and in the other are the "whatever" generation for whom the continual introduction of the word "like" is the perfect expression of anxiety about certainty per se. (Conversation with my daughter: she says "It is, like, raining." "No," I reply, "there's no like about it. It is raining.")


The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris

Sam Harris struck literary gold having a go at those with too much certainty in The End of Faith. Now he turns his attention to those with too little. His target is moral relativism. For too long religion has sheltered behind the popular idea that you can have your truth and I will have mine. Harris wants a more muscular form of God-denying liberalism, attained by tearing down the familiar idea that science does facts (where truth is possible) and religion does meaning and values (where relativistic respect is essential). With this fact/value distinction – inspired by no less a figure than David Hume – religion and science have announced the terms of their peace treaty, each claiming for themselves a non-competing jurisdiction. But Harris will have none of it. Science has sold itself cheap. The peace treaty must be torn up. Science can indeed tell us about morality. Indeed, science can determine morality.

First, the atheism. On that useful quadrant – interesting and right, interesting and wrong, uninteresting and right, uninteresting and wrong – Harris is mostly in the uninteresting and right category. Uninteresting because he is concerned only with the narrowest definition of religious belief, and right because the moral and intellectual crimes he pins on this form of belief – its ignorance and prejudice – are so obvious to the western secular imagination that they do not require argument, and certainly not a PhD in neuroscience. Given his definition of religion, his attack on it is the philosophical equivalent of taking sweets from a baby. These things are wrong: "female genital excision, blood feuds, infanticide, the torture of animals, scarification, foot binding, cannibalism, ceremonial rape, human sacrifice". The list goes on. With regard to the god Harris describes, I am a much more convinced atheist than he – even though I am a priest. For Harris asks constantly for evidence, with the implication that if he discovered some, he would change his mind. My own line would be that even if the god he described was proved to exist, I would see it as my moral duty to be an atheist. An all-powerful eternal despot is still a despot. Blake called this wicked villain "Nobodaddy".

Nonetheless, the attack on relativism leads Harris into much more interesting territory, but interesting and wrong. His astonishing lack of humility leads him to claim too much for what science can achieve in the realm of morality. The key concept is that of "wellbeing". It is, he suggests, both a fact word and a value word, like "health". So, for example, to suggest that a thing contributes to wellbeing is to make of it a positive evaluation as well as to claim something that can be measured scientifically. On this Harris has invoked the wrath of countless philosophers. But I'm with Harris here. As Mary Midgley argued years ago in her brilliant Beast and Man (a book with a comparable intention to Harris's, though more modestly expressed), an apparently neutral description – "natural" or "human" for example – relates to the empirical world and contains a moral charge. But to extend this point to the idea that wellbeing can shoulder all the work of morality is breathtakingly hubristic.

What is presented as Harris's big new idea is really just reheated utilitarianism with wellbeing in place of pleasure. Where this idea breaks down is where utilitarianism breaks down. Let me start with Harris's defence of torture. If the sum of general wellbeing (whatever that means) is increased by the torture of a terrorist suspect, then torture is not even a necessary evil – it becomes a moral duty. Worse still: discussing Robert Nozick's ingenious idea of a "utility monster", Harris asks "if it would be ethical for our species to be sacrificed for the unimaginably vast happiness of some superbeings". His answer is astonishing: "Provided we take time to really imagine the details (which is not easy), I think the answer is clearly 'yes'." For me this is back with the evil Nobodaddy. I will not worship superbeings nor sacrifice to them. Once again I am more atheist than he.

There are so many problems with utilitarianism, it's a pity Harris does so little to address them. How can one quantify the sum total of wellbeing produced by a single action when the potential consequences of any particular action are infinite? So keen is he to turn morality into science that Harris presses on regardless. His demand is that all morality be calibrated on a single scale. Yet if one observes what it is that people call good (and isn't observation a scientific golden rule?), instead of assuming what good ought to look like, one surely recognises very different sorts of moral value. Can the moral value of freedom and equality really be measured in the same way? Can a conflict between love and duty be resolved by some scientific calculation? No. As Isaiah Berlin rightly pointed out, moral values are often incommensurable. Not all things are good in the same way and for the same reasons. Thus they cannot be measured against each other, however attractive that seems to the scientific mind.

For all this, it is not so much that I disagree with Harris. Rather, I am scared of him. And not his atheism, which is standard scientific materialism with the volume turned up. But scared of his complete lack of ambiguity, his absolute clarity of vision, his refusal of humour or self-criticism, his unrelenting seriousness. Harris sees the great moral battle of our day as one between belief and unbelief. I see it as between those who insist that the world be captured by a single philosophy and those who don't. Which is why I fear Harris in just the same way I fear evangelical Christians, to whom he looks so similar. Like them, he is in no doubt about his faith. Like them, he has his devoted followers. Like them, he wants to convert the world. Well, I'm sorry. I am not a believer.

Giles Fraser is canon chancellor of St Paul's cathedral.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2011

When you line them up together religion wins , hands down.

Doc Watson wrote:When you line them up together religion wins , hands down.

Wins what?

You must pick one or the other , but neither are what they claim.

New Yorker cartoon.

One of the most typical characteristics of especially ancient philosophy is the complex, hard to fully graps and thought-provocative relation between theorethical and practical philosophy - the understanding that our conception of the world finally has a role to play in the way we lead our lves.
Religion has long propagated a similar vision: the God that has created the world has created us with a certain purpose and thus we must behave and act according to certain principles.

The problem religion is facing today is that both it ontological and epistemological claims have become either very hard to believe or even plainly nonesensical. Kant made short work of the epistemological aspect in the late 1700s, the ontological claim died a slow death in between Galilei and the early 20th century.

And thus man sits around with the question how to found his life after the fundament of all fundaments has been proven obsolete.

I've never known a minister directly herding a flock of believers to ever say anything about epistemology or ontology. They just say read the bible and have faith.

I've never known (known personally, that is) any scientist that claimed the natural sciences can say anything about the supernatural (how could natural sciences delve into the supernatural?). I don't see how science and religion can be regarded as in confrontation; they never occupy the same turf as far as i can see.

And if what I was taught in religion class had been strictly applied, Thomas Aquinas would have been declared a heretic for trying to prove Gods exists, because the Church teaches that God's existence is an article of Faith.

To which Aquinas would answer you that the existence of God is one of the praeambula fidei - grounding notion which according to his understanding had to be made 'demonstrabilia' instead of mere 'credibilia' by philosophy - and not articula fidei - significant yet contigent truths of faith which because of their nature are pricipally unaccessable to reason alone and does required a revelation (e.g. the ressurection of the flesh, Original Sin, creation in time, ...

Aquinas also rejected a priori proves for the existence of God such as the ontological argument by Anselmus of Canterbury.
Aquinas' prooves for the existence of God, the so-calld quinque viae, are demonstration of how reason through its own autonomy can come to trace the reality of a divine being in reality.

nemo wrote:Aquinas' prooves for the existence of God, the so-calld quinque viae, are demonstration of how reason through its own autonomy can come to trace the reality of a divine being in reality.

Would you say he succeeded in doing that?

That depends on how you understand that question of course.

He doesn't succeed in convincing me - his arguments all point to notions that Kant would consider synthetic a priori's in a metaphysical context. The sort of notions, in other words, which find themselves outside the field of scientific inquiry and only might serve it in a regulative sense. That's something else than a God obviously.

But my answer is of course already influenced by my knowledge and understanding of evolutions in scientific and intellectual inquiry that span the +/- 600 years that seperate us from Aquinas.
I would consider it rather unfair to hold such things against anyone - it's a bit like saying that Newton's stuff is rubbish because he failed to take general relativity and quantum physics into account.

Aquinas intellectual demonstrations of the existence of God are a child of their time and a very decent effort to fullfill the goal he was trying to achieve: a Christian actualisation of the Aristotelian corpus.

If it's fair to say (as you say Kant would have said) that Aquinas' arguments really all point to notions that are synthetic a priori's in a metaphysical context, then I think one would certainly be justified in holding that against him.

And Newton would never have been guilty of any such a thing (and I would add that "gross oversimplifications" need not be "rubbish").

I have been thinking about how to formulate an accurate and sensefull answer to this thread for quite a while now ...

The problem is I'll either become lengthy and technical - and thus, boring and maybe hard to follow (at least in part due to the fact that I'd have to formulate a number of complex ideas in a language that is not my mother's tongue) -, or short and blunt.

Let me say this in favour of Aquinas: in your religion class you may have been told that God is real and that his existence has to be entirely accepted upon the sole authority of the revelation. This may also not have been the case, but it certainly was a dominant stace in Aquinas' days which maintains to be heard till this very day.
Aquinas did a huge effort in the process of the emancipation of autonomous reason - of rational inquiry into reality a part from the revelation.

Aquinas was a theologian and as such, his goal obviously was not to create animosity between autonomous rational inquiry and the revelation: he rather saw them as 2 paths to a singular truth, 2 techniques of inquiry if you wish. Both also had their specific function: revelation, for example and among other things, served to show the Truth to everyone whereas philosophy was obviously only accessible to the select elite of intellectuals. Philosophy, on the other hand, also served to demonstrate the reality of certain elements of the revelation.
The quinque viae are to be understood in this context.

Now, in relation to Kant one might say that the specific formulation of the demonstrations that make up the quique viae allows one to understand them as regulative ideas - in case of which they are acceptable, even neccessary according to Kant (he's a bit dubious on this matter: sometimes he suggest they are the product of moments of overenthusiasm of reason, other times he maintains such ideas are fundamentally inherent to reason).
Put simply: Kant sees a possitive function for metaphysics in that it pentrates into the fundamental issues which inspire us our rational inquiry of reality - it are these questions which fuel reason to operate, so to speak. The only mistake we musn't make, according to Kant, is to be tempted to take our ideas of certain metaphysical matter - e.g. 'Does God exist', 'Is time finite or infinite', 'Is the soul substantial', ... - for actual realities - which he calls the constutive use of metaphysical a priori's. At great lenght he demonstrates how none of such notions withstand intense scrutiny by a logician.

It is obvious that Thomas himself likely meant his quique viae as demonstrations of the actual existence of an Ideal Being - which is a term Kant uses to designate God - and in doing so he clearly trespasses the line set out by Kant. Anybody who whises to put faith in them in spite of this fact faces the Gargantuan task of having to rewrite the Kritik der reinen Vernunft, I don't even think Hegel could save 'm.

But a figure who initiated the proces of emancipation of rational reason after it had been incorporated entirely within the bound of a theistic religion for nearly a millennium deserves some credit I think - especially when the specific formulation of his problematic demonstrations allow for a less-problematic reading by a modern reader.

Andy wrote:Let me say this in favour of Aquinas: in your religion class you may have been told that God is real and that his existence has to be entirely accepted upon the sole authority of the revelation. This may also not have been the case, but it certainly was a dominant stace in Aquinas' days which maintains to be heard till this very day.

Aquinas did a huge effort in the process of the emancipation of autonomous reason - of rational inquiry into reality a part from the revelation.

Aquinas was a theologian and as such, his goal obviously was not to create animosity between autonomous rational inquiry and the revelation: he rather saw them as 2 paths to a singular truth, 2 techniques of inquiry if you wish. Both also had their specific function: revelation, for example and among other things, served to show the Truth to everyone whereas philosophy was obviously only accessible to the select elite of intellectuals. Philosophy, on the other hand, also served to demonstrate the reality of certain elements of the revelation.
The quinque viae are to be understood in this context.

I certainly bear no ill will towards Aquinas; I am no more keen on blind faith than he was. I was only pointing out that his philosophical inquiry was at odds with the teachings of his own church, and what he was trying to do was likely even dangerous.

I appreciate his dilemma: "...his goal obviously was not to create animosity between autonomous rational inquiry and the revelation..." But I don't think there was ever any possibility that he could actually bring the natural and the supernatural together within a single discipline. In the end, the church did the wise thing, and simply declared them to be separate--and therefore not in conflict.

As for Kant, I think I have to work through some linguistic issues in order to judge. It's interesting to discuss Kant with someone who's read him in German, while I've read him in English, and in a 120-year-old translation at that, with archaic 19th century English usage and probably some neologisms made up by the translator. [I recognize some ideas that Kant evidently took from mathematics and the natural sciences--he (or the translator) just used different language. The term "a priori cognition" does not appear in mathematics texts, just as the term "postulate" (as a noun) does not appear in Kant].

But it's clear that Kant recognizes that without free will there can be no morality and no God. And he says that we cannot "cognize" free will (that is, it is not a phenomenon that we will ever experience or witness), but we can "think" it as something purely theoretical. To me, it seems a long journey from something we can "think," but never "cognize," to a conclusion that God exists, and so far I have not been able to go the distance with him.

pinhedz wrote:I certainly bear no ill will towards Aquinas; I am no more keen on blind faith than he was. I was only pointing out that his philosophical inquiry was at odds with the teachings of his own church, and what he was trying to do was likely even dangerous.

I appreciate his dilemma: "...his goal obviously was not to create animosity between autonomous rational inquiry and the revelation..." But I don't think there was ever any possibility that he could actually bring the natural and the supernatural together within a single discipline. In the end, the church did the wise thing, and simply declared them to be separate--and therefore not in conflict.

I think it is important to keep to historical context in which Aquinas was working in our minds: the philosophical doctrines of the Church had been rooted in (neo-) platonism almost from the time of the Churchfathers - up until some time during the 12th century Aristotles work was almost entirely forgotten save only for his efforts in the field of logic.
The specific way in which neo-platonism seeks to find true knowledge in this world is very different from how aristotelian science advances. To put it simply - and thus, obviously, without neccessary nuance -: Plato taught that the Real World was to be found outside of the Cave (I assume most of the people reading here are familiar with his parable of the cave, if not just check out the entry for Plato in the '3 Minute Philosophy' cartoon series at YouTube, it's meant as satire but portrays the idea sufficiently accurately). So for any philosopher seeking true knowledge the challenge lies in 'getting outside of the cave' - to be understood metaphorically, of course -, to somehow obtain insight into the world outside the cave through contemplation.
The elements one has awareness of inside the cave can be of some help, but are ultimately of little assistance in this process.

Translated to the Christian doctrine you get a situation in which close study of the Revelation is the only possible exit out of the cave and as such a church relatively unconcerned with the elements of reality - the strict seperation of the natural and the supernatural you refer to.

The introduction of the Arestotelian corpus, at least part due to Arabic occupation of European territories, did pose a serious challenge to the European thinker confronted with it. Unlike Plato, Aristotle had written extensively about physics, biology and other disciplines that are directly occupied with the physical world. As a result, Aristotelianism proved to offer much more detailed and accurate description of the world as we perceive it through our sense.
Furthermore, there was a collection of writing called 'The Metaphysics' - a term more than likely never used by Aristotle himself - which contained a complex study of how to obtain insight in the divine order through the study of the physical world.
(Note: this is a gross oversimplification of 'The metaphysics', I chose to focus only on this aspect of this study because of its relevance to the rest of the matter we're discussing.)

It was Thomas' brilliance to understand the sciences of Aristotle as an alternative path through which knowledge of God as a destination of all mankind can be revealed. Or to put it quite simply: if we wish to obtain knowledge of Gods Divine Plan we can procede by studying His Revelation (The Bible) or His Creation (The World).
When choosing the last path we procede 'a posterioribus in priora' - only through close and detailed study of what is given in specific particular objects in this world do we gradually obtain an understanding of the more general abstract principles which govern them.

The real danger in Thomas' teaching lay in the fact that he extended the Church scope outside of the religious context: suddenly the physical world became a matter of interest as well, as it was appreciated as a path to God.
This is the process that eventually lead to the sort of strict doctrines you see portrayed in a book like 'The name of the rose'.

Nominalism was the reaction against this strict intertwining of The World and The Word - a position most famously held by William of Ockham, the source of inspiration for the lead character in 'The name of the rose'.
Their thesis, put simply, has an almost Kantian touch to it: to them metaphysical entities such as the soul and God lay outside of the understanding of man and can therefor not be known through study of the world.
There were no doubt various reasons for nominalism to see the light of day, but once which is often cited is the ravage caused by the Plague throughout Europe. In a world in which God's word and his creation are essentially thought as 1, the plague can obviously not be the work of a loving God. How could we obtain insight in the divine order through studying the world around us, if that world is filled with a horrible reality that one obviously doesn't wish to ascribe to his Divine Saviour?
The nominalists seperation of both order allows for the formulation of what has become a classic answer to the question of suffering by religiously inspired people: The Lord works in mysterious ways - i.e. Gods intentions with his creation are unknowable to mere mortals.

pinhedz wrote:
As for Kant, I think I have to work through some linguistic issues in order to judge. It's interesting to discuss Kant with someone who's read him in German, while I've read him in English, and in a 120-year-old translation at that, with archaic 19th century English usage and probably some neologisms made up by the translator. [I recognize some ideas that Kant evidently took from mathematics and the natural sciences--he (or the translator) just used different language. The term "a priori cognition" does not appear in mathematics texts, just as the term "postulate" (as a noun) does not appear in Kant].

But it's clear that Kant recognizes that without free will there can be no morality and no God. And he says that we cannot "cognize" free will (that is, it is not a phenomenon that we will ever experience or witness), but we can "think" it as something purely theoretical. To me, it seems a long journey from something we can "think," but never "cognize," to a conclusion that God exists, and so far I have not been able to go the distance with him.

Kant has the reputation to be a terrible stylist.
I think this reputation is only partly justified.

For sure Kant often expresses himself through extremely long phrases - even for me! - which have over-complex grammatical structures. Prior to analyse the content of what he is saying one regularly has to analyse simply what he is saying, überhaupt. So if you translate him and which to deliver a readable text, you're facing a serious challenge.
But personally I only partly agree with this reputation, for the simple reason that I find most philosophers to be rather poor to downright terrible stylists and that Kant doesn't really stand out in a bad way amongst them. Try Husserl or, even worse, Heidegger. Personally I find Descartes to be so self-indulgent that he's barely readable. Deleuze is a chaotic who is so allergic to strutural argumentation that sometimes he reads like Dylan's Tarantula, Carnap is so incredibly boring, Aristotle mostly known through notes that weren't even meant to be read by a large public but rather served working instruments for himself etc. Plato, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche are notewothy exceptions.
I'd say that one of the things I like best about Kant is his clearly neurotic approach: he's extremely structured which is very helpfull to obtain so broad overview from his writings prior to examening aspects in more detail. He's also extremely rigous and will devote considerably lengthy sections to elements which at first hand might appear to be self-evident.

As an atheist I'm obiously also not going the distance with him which leads him to postulating the immortality of the soul and the existence of God - I actually even find such notion problematic in relation to Kants own theoretical philosophy, which delivers a far more robust theory.
I do understand why he postulates these notions - or rather proclaims that reason itself does so.

In his most famous writing about morality, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (GMS) (Eng.: Foundation of the metaphysics of morals, I believe), Kant examens the very nature of morality - what it is in itself, a part from specific situations. His examination lead his from the central position of the good will over the dimension of duty that is implied within it to the formulation of the categorical imperative as the cental explicitation of his theory of ethics.
In the opening chapters of 'Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloße Vernunft' (Eng. Religion within the bounds of pure reason , I believe), Kant examens the condition humaine in relation to his work on morality in the GMS. His conclusion is rather dim: man is a being capable of doing good but by nature inclined to give into his passions and urges and thus ultimately, by nature bad. True moral actions are motivated solely by the understanding of the duty that speaks from the moral law. Any inspiration from other motives leads to the action being disqualified as truly moral.

In the Kritik der praktischen Vernunft Kant than asks how reasonable being are able of acting in accordance with moral laws - put shortly: how are pratical synthetic a priori's possible? In the GMS he had famously caimed that morality would shine as a juwel even if it didn't cause single moment of goodness in this world - that is to say: effecs or intented effects of actions can never serve as a valid criterium to determine moral actions. Ever. In the Religion he formulates his most fundamental - but surely not only - objection against any form of motivation aside from respect for the moral law.
This obviously leads one to ask: why would one choose to act in accordance with the categorical imperative? It would mean renouncing to all human passions and continue to do so even in spite of an awareness of the uselessness of one's moral behaviour.
And this is why he caims pratical reason postulates the immortality of the soul and the existence of God - a life lead in strict accordance with the categorical imperative must finally find its justification in an aferlife gouverned by the divine order.

Some also claim that Kant's servant was a very pious and devout man who was sincerely let down by the conclusion of his employer in his opus magnum: the fundamental impossibility to know God. To make amends, some claim, Kant wrote the praktische Vernunft.