When Sam Harris Is Right

"Faith, if it is ever right about anything, is right by accident."
--Sam Harris


When I think of Sam Harris, the New Atheist neuroscientist, I often think of his relentless use of the naturalistic fallacy, the laughable incoherency of scientism, the confusion of people who call themselves atheists but really are agnostics, and the straw man fallacies he throws at the moral argument.  Now, I like the guy.  I find him far more serious and consistent about his positions than jokers like Richard Dawkins.  It seems he truly cares about doing the right thing and about truth.  He just happens to commit many fallacies as he seeks his goals, something that has been the source of much laughter or much criticism on my part.

But for all of his errors, he is inescapably right about one thing.  "Faith", he says, "if it is ever right about anything, is right by accident."

If someone were to email me, posing as a friend and requesting money, friends and family members would encourage me to be skeptical, especially if there were noticeable typos, spelling errors, and information in the email conflicting with things I already know about the friend in question.  If someone were to claim to me that he or she just escaped an alien mothership, again, friends and family would likely encourage skepticism.  Tell those family members that I just saw a two foot cockroach in my room that became invisible when I called for them, and they will likely not even merely be skeptics but deny what I insist I saw.

Claim that God convicted you of some need to abstain or engage in a particular act or that you need to change something about the way you think, though, and many of the same people who would be skeptics in the situations I just mentioned above would defend the alleged truth of those convictions.  This is unacceptable logically.

I am no skeptic about the existence of a first cause.  I can prove that one exists by pure necessity with just logic and math.  Now, if someone told me that God had informed them in a vision that I need to do a particular action, I would be skeptical.  This, however, is not because I do not believe in God.  If God is defined as an "uncaused cause that exists outside of the material/natural world responsible for causing it", then anyone who does not believe in God is irrational.  Having a bias against the supernatural is stupid, irrational, illogical, fallacious, and inconsistent.  Since the entity I described clearly would exist outside of the natural, physical world, I definitely believe in something defined as "supernatural".  However, I have nothing but skepticism towards the claims of many individuals that claim to have received specific visions or messages from God that take the form of the scenario I just described [1].

I included the preceding paragraph to demonstrate that my attacks on fitheism (belief in God based on "faith" and not reason or proof or at least some form of evidence) are not because of some anti-supernatural or anti-theistic ideas.  My blog title is The Christian Rationalist, for hell's sake!  I am a theistic rationalist because theistic rationalism is true and verifiable, not because I have faith, simply want rationalism or theism to be true, had an emotional experience that subjectively convinced me of God's existence, or because I presupposed the position of theistic rationalism.  Sam Harris, while he mistakenly rejects all forms of theism (even deism or agnostic theism), understands that faith, at least as defined by the average churchgoer, offers no epistemic value and thus no certainty and therefore, if something believed by someone on faith turn out to be true, the person who has faith and is ultimately right is right not because of logical proof but because of pure happenstance.

If only the church realized this, it could have made it more difficult for people who have departed from Christianity to excuse their departure with the claim of intellectual uncertainty.


[1].  Here I mean individuals like those who constitute the average 21st century American church congregation.  The Bible is at least somewhat different than generic visions claimed by individuals because it is a written document that has many statements which that can be verified or falsified.  Does the universe have a beginning?  If so, at least Genesis 1:1 is correct.  Did Jesus of Nazareth exist in historical Israel?  If so, at least his presence in the gospel narratives is correct.  Would it be metaphysically impossible for humans to atone for their sins themselves if such a thing as sin exists?  If so, then at least the core of Christian soteriology is correct.

Things like this can actually be verified (especially topics which pure logic can settle, like the question about the beginning of the material world), but much of what people claim God tells them cannot be verified or falsified by me.  Since I am I and not another person, I can never know if they even had a vision to begin with.  Even if they had one, deciphering the cause and truth of the matter is not simple.