Two authors continue an age-old debate
'It is time we admitted, from kings and presidents on down, that there is no evidence that any of our [biblical] books was authored by the Creator of the universe. The Bible, it seems certain, was the work of sand-strewn men and women who thought the earth was flat and for whom a wheelbarrow would have been a breathtaking example of emerging technology."
Angry? Read on: "Jesus Christ -- who, as it turns out, was born of a virgin, cheated death, and rose bodily into the heavens -- can now be eaten in the form of a cracker. A few Latin words spoken over your favorite Burgundy, and you can drink his blood as well."
Finally: "It is time we acknowledged that no real foundation exists within the canons of Christianity, Islam, Judaism or any of our other faiths for religious tolerance and religious diversity."
Published several months ago, "The End of Faith" (W.W. Norton), by Stanford philosophy graduate Sam Harris, aggressively presents the give-no-ground atheist side in the age-old religious belief-versus-unbelief debate. His book has garnered plaudits from some reviewers who call him courageous for taking on America's religious culture.
Harris condemns not just fanatics, but that species so common to Boston, moderates who support pluralism. "By failing to live by the letter of [scriptural] texts, while tolerating the irrationality of those who do, religious moderates betray faith and reason equally," he writes.
Coincidentally, at around the same time that Harris's tome came out, a local author published what is effectively a rebuttal. "Can a Smart Person Believe in God?" (Nelson Books) names many who have, and author Michael Guillen, a physicist and former ABC News science reporter who lives outside Boston, offers myriad reasons why.
Harris makes two broad arguments. One is that religious belief is uniquely dangerous. It was one thing to kill nonbelievers with the low-tech weapons available to the Inquisition; it's another altogether, he says, when modern religious fanatics such as Osama bin Laden might get their hands on weapons of mass destruction. This is arguably his weakest charge. Confronted with the millions who died under regimes such as Stalin's and Mao's, he airily redefines communism as "little more than a political religion."
His second point, captured in those introductory quotes above, is intellectual. In no facet of life save religion, he says, do we accept such mind-boggling propositions on such scant empirical evidence. Moreover, Harris looks out on a world of imperfections that he says mock the idea of a supreme being. "If God created the world and all things in it, He created smallpox, plague and filariasis," he writes.
Guillen, who attends a non-denominational Christian church, said he's put off as much by Harris's tone, which he finds smugly biased against believers, as his substance. (Guillen got ink and broadcast time in 2003 when, as a journalist, he offered to round up a scientific posse to investigate the Raelian religious cult's claim that it had cloned a human baby. He pulled out of the project after saying the cult stiff-armed requests for information.)
He doesn't share the view that the universe, as Harris writes, "seems bent upon destroying us."
Indeed, Guillen notes that many of science's founding minds believed in God. He sees Harris's cited imperfections as exceptions to an exquisitely designed universe, writing in his book that "if the various atomic and nuclear forces affecting electrons, protons, and neurons had been just a smidgeon weaker or stronger, the atoms we see today wouldn't exist -- they'd either fly apart or collapse." Guillen quotes the late cosmologist and agnostic Sir Fred Hoyle: "The probability of life originating at random is so utterly minuscule as to make it absurd."
To believers, Guillen says, the imperfections show that God is not the only resident of the supernatural neighborhood; there's also evil, called Satan by some.
Harris writes that the classic theological explanation for evil -- God allows it because the alternative would be to strip humans of free will and make them robots -- has been gutted by modern understanding of the brain. Neural activity, affected by environment and genetics, governs our so-called choices, he argues. He concedes people have spiritual yearnings that science can't sate.
"There is clearly a sacred dimension to our existence, and coming to terms with it could well be the highest purpose of human life," he writes. "But we will find that it requires no faith in untestable propositions. . . . Our common humanity is reason enough to protect our fellow human beings from coming to harm."
This intellectual ping-pong will go on forever, of course, because there's no way to referee it to conclusion. The closest these players come to agreement is Guillen's admission that "of course I have doubts" barnacled to his faith, and Harris's acknowledgment of that "sacred dimension" transcending rationality.
Harris is continuing his work in the debate by pursuing a doctoral degree in neuroscience. Guillen will pursue his by speaking at a dinner before next week's National Prayer Breakfast in Washington.
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