Posts Tagged Sam Harris
New Atheist Episode Thoughts: Skepoet, Harris on Faith, Politics and Religion
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Misc. Philosophical Musings, Web Detritus on October 15, 2011
A “University Lecturer living in South Korea” calling himself Skepoet responded here to our episode. He gives a nice quote from Julian Baggini and makes some salient points about our discussion.
One of his comments was that we didn’t seem to find an argument in Harris to critique. Here’s the argument as I remember it that we were focusing on:
If you suspend your critical faculties and “have faith,” then you open yourself up to believing all sorts of horrific stuff, such as, most importantly to the rest of society, commands to violence.
The general response is, yes, if faith is actually a matter of “I can’t think for myself! Think for me!” then this is a legitimate concern, and no doubt that is exactly the experience of faith in some people. However:
1. Per Kant and William James, faith about matters over which no experiential deconfirmation is even theoretically possible isn’t irrational in this way. Granted, most actual religions are not Kant-friendly in this way (so it’s kind of goofy that we spent so much time on this when that’s not the new atheists’ target for the most part).
2. As a practical matter, people just don’t get brainwashed to the point of violence. Other forces in human motivation tend to step in to curtail violence, and when violence does occur, you generally find that the perpetrator had more things wrong with him than just the religious motivation. Religion is neither necessary nor sufficient for violence… which is not to say that they’re unconnected in all circumstances or that more critical thinking wouldn’t be very helpful in preventing the spread of violence. To the extent that religion is against critical thinking, it’s a detriment to any society.
Episode 44: New Atheist Critiques of Religion
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on October 11, 2011
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:50:03 — 100.8MB)
Discussing selections from Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel C. Dennett.
Should we be religious, or is religion just a bunch of superstitious nonsense that it’s past time for us to outgrow? Does faith lead to ceding to authority and potential violence? Can a reasonable person be religious? We say lots of rude things about these authors, and at times about their targets in this listener-requested episode featuring Mark, Wes, Seth, and Dylan. Read more about the topic.
Buy/read what we did:
-Ch. 1-2 of Harris’s The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
-The last three chapters of Hitchens’s God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
End song: “Goddammit” by Mark Lint and the Simulacra, recorded partly in 2000 and partly just now.
Topic for #44: “New Atheism”
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in General Announcements on September 7, 2011
We have long promised to more systematically cover these guys who generate so much fun sniping on our blog here, and as of last Sunday, the full as-of-now-regular podcaster lineup (myself, Seth, Wes, and Dylan; we will still have some guests on, though) recorded a discussion of:
-The first two chapters of Sam Harris’s The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
-The last three chapters of Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
These fellows do not so much answer the question “is there a God?” as the question “should we be religious?”
Harris claims that faith, defined as believing something without evidence, is morally irresponsible: it leaves us open to believing all sorts of destructive things, and there are portions of all the major Western religious texts that, if taken literally and without the need for rational justification, command abominable things. Religious moderates, by extension, are on Harris’s view in the awkward position of not being able to condemn the extremists in the way that would be necessary to quash them: the extremists are, after all, just acting out fully the principles commanded by the faith that the moderates profess to embrace.
Hitchens presents a big book of anecdotes about terrible things done in the name of religion. Like Freud, he thinks the fundamental tenets of the worlds religion are superstitions that adults in the modern age have any business believing and thinks religious leaders to be for the most part a bunch of power-grabbing phonies.
What is a Philosophical Explanation?
Posted by Wes Alwan in Misc. Philosophical Musings, Web Detritus on September 1, 2011
On some comments to a recent post by Mark on Sam Harris and the ought/is distinction, I noted that Harris assumes that “happiness” (or “flourishing”) is an un-problematic concept — a well-established ruler against which one can easily measure the success or failure of behaviors. Hence when he claims that science can tell us what is right and wrong — by telling us what makes us happy — he has merely tabled the harder, philosophical problem of what happiness is (not to mention whether it ought to be our measure of right and wrong).
In yesterday’s Philosopher’s Stone, Gary Gutting mines a similar vein: the nature of happiness is a) not uncontroversial and b) a philosophical rather than scientific question. Empirical studies that try to establish the nature of happiness by simply asking people what makes them happy are problematic because the meaning of “happy” is unclear and may vary between respondents significantly:
But the most powerful challenge concerns the meaning and value of happiness. Researchers emphasize that when we ask people if they are happy the answers tell us nothing if we don’t know what our respondents mean by “happy.” One person might mean, “I’m not currently feeling any serious pain”; another, “My life is pretty horrible but I’m reconciled to it”; another, “I’m feeling a lot better than I did yesterday.” Happiness research requires a clear understanding of the possible meanings of the term. For example, most researchers distinguish between happiness as a psychological state (for example, feeling overall more pleasure than pain) and happiness as a positive evaluation of your life, even if it has involved more pain than pleasure.
Sam Harris on the Is/Ought Distinction
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Things to Watch on August 23, 2011
Sam Harris got a lot of grief on our Churchland episode. Whatever the difficulties that Churchland (and allegedly Hume) may have with the is/ought distinction, Harris provides a much easier target for this kind of criticism.
Here’s Harris specifically responding (starting around 1:40) to the is/ought distinction: “a firewall between facts and values in our discourse:”
He doesn’t explain what’s wrong with the distinction, but just says that it’s had terrible effects: encouraging superstition and making science into something inhuman and amoral.
Around 4:30, he gives something like Churchland’s response (and incidentally, she shows up at 5:15 as an audience member, and he refers to her near 8:40): we are social beings, i.e. it is a fact that most of us want to help others. At 5:50, he describes something like the pluralism Churchland advocated, using an analogy of food: there’s not just one palatable type of food, but there’s an objective distinction between food and poison. Does a social practice make for happier, flourishing individuals? No? Then it’s bad.
Defending Religion from the Left (Jackson Lears on Sam Harris)
Posted by Wes Alwan in Web Detritus on May 24, 2011
Historian Jackson Lears has an interesting attack on Sam Harris in The Nation. I’m not endorsing everything in this everything-but-the-kitchen sink assault (on both Harris’ religious and moral theories), but it’s interesting and worth a read.
– Wes
The Pernicious Influence of Scientism
Posted by Wes Alwan in Misc. Philosophical Musings on April 7, 2011
Alright, Mark has successfully baited me into a response on the issue of scientism. I should begin by saying that Mark has an interesting reading of Dennet that makes him out not to be a reductionist (as I and many others interpret him). I won’t address that here; I’m more interested in the general question of the influence of scientism on well-educated, intellectually curious people.
As I’ve said before, I think scientism — the idea that science is applicable to any domain of inquiry that is meaningful, and will inevitably provide a solution to all meaningful questions — is a much more pernicious cultural force than does Mark. In fact, I think it’s the popular religion of most smart people (even of many people who also consider themselves moderately religious). The other popular religion for educated people is cultural constructivism (or something of the sort) and accompanying relativism and postmodernism: it shares with right-wing religious fundamentalism an overly dismissive attitude towards science (see this article on how the right has co-opted this approach in its resistance to science). I’m not a fan of this extreme either; but it doesn’t have the same influence outside the university that it does within it. It’s quite hard to find an educated person who isn’t significantly influenced in one of these directions.
Science Cannot Ground Morality. But Robots Can
Posted by Wes Alwan in Web Detritus on December 14, 2010
Via Massimo Pigliucci, this gives us a nice overview of the fundamental objection to Sam Harris’ notion that moral questions can be decided by the empirical sciences.
Wes Alwan
Simon Blackburn vs Sam Harris: Can Science Tell us Right from Wrong?
Posted by Wes Alwan in Things to Watch on December 9, 2010
In a debate with Patricia Churchland, Peter Singer, Sam Harris, and Lawrence Krauss, Simon Blackburn explains why Harris simply has it wrong on whether science can provide substantive guidance on morality:
There is no doubt, he notes, that “science can inform our values” (and I would add that this goes trivially for many other types of knowledge). But “as to whether you need nothing but science”, “I don’t agree with Sam about that and neither do the other three speakers we’ve heard so far.”
Sam Harris on the Daily Show
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Misc. Philosophical Musings, Things to Watch on October 8, 2010
Wes has posted about this previously, but I wanted to give this more thought after seeing Sam Harris (introduced at the top of the show not as a philosopher but as a “professional atheist”) on the Daily Show a couple of days back. You can see the interview here.
As is typical for a short interview like this, not enough gets conveyed about Harris’s point for the viewer to really evaluate it, and I have not read his book, but I wanted to say a little about the project of using science to bolster morality.
Yes, if we take human morality to be self-evidently about human well-being (i.e. health, lack of suffering, “fulfillment:” these are where the “ought” comes out of “is”), as Mill, Spinoza, Hobbes, Nietzsche, Aristotle and others have done, then it seems like we could use science to analyze what actually constitutes well-being and what doesn’t. Though we can’t measure misery, sociologists have plenty of experience coming up with other measures, such as the suicide rate, economic indicators, the results of surveys, etc.
So, the project is reasonable on the face of it, but faces some evident problems, some of which I think are surmountable, some of which are not.
Read the rest of this entry »
Armstrong on Dawkins and Harris
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Misc. Philosophical Musings on August 17, 2010
This is a follow up to my last post, which you should look at the comments on for some good comments by Wes. I’ve now read the part in Armstrong where she addresses Dawkins directly (from p. 304 of “The Case for God”):
For Dawkins, religious faith rests on the idea that “there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence, who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it.” Having set up this definition of God as Supernatural Designer, Dawkins only has to point out that there is in fact no design in nature in order to demolish it. But he is mistaken to assume that this is “the way people have generally understood the term” God.
In discussing Sam Harris, she says:
Like Dawkins and Hitchens, he defines faith as “belief without evidence,” an attitude that he regards as morally reprehensible. It is not surprising, perhaps, that he should confuse “faith” with “belief” (meaning the intellectual acceptance of a proposition) because the two have become unfortunately fused in modern consciousness.
Julian Baggini’s Philosophy Monthly – the PEL review
Posted by Seth Paskin in Other (i.e. Lesser) Podcasts on July 30, 2010
So Mark stole my thunder with his post about AC Grayling, as I was preparing my thoughts about Julian Baggini’s regular podcast, Baggini’s Philosophy Monthly. Nonetheless, even though Mark hates and wants to upstage me, I will proceed with my ramblings.
Julian Baggini
I found and started listening to Baggini’s podcast towards the end of last year and was able to reel off a series of cached episodes to get a feel for what he was about. Unlike Philosophy Bites, which consists of coordinated studio interviews, Baggini’s PM typically has more of a ‘Charles Kuralt‘ vibe (look up that reference – old skool!), as he travels around to festivals, conferences, and other assorted gatherings of the philosophically inclined, doing field interviews of philosophers, artists, and others surrounded by the din of beer halls, barking dogs, frolicking children, and the like. Not always, but a lot.
The episodes are a very short: 1/2 hour, usually consisting of 2-3 segments, which Baggini sets up well with edited-in commentary. Read the rest of this entry »
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The Partially Examined Life is a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living but then thought better of it. Each episode, we pick a text and chat about it with some balance between insight and flippancy. You don't have to know any philosophy, or even to have read the text we're talking about to (mostly) follow and (hopefully) enjoy the discussion. Discuss episodes and provide feedback here or via our Facebook group. You can also e-mail comments to mark@marklint.com or wesalwan@gmail.com.
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