Harris on the immorality of Christianity

Below is as sharp a critique of Christianity, its basic tenets and why Christianity does not offer and alternative, much less a more ethical view of morality that you are likely to find:

The most cogent point, and one that I have referenced frequently, is the problem of unnecessary evil and — take your pick — either the inability or unwillingness of an all-loving, all-powerful, all-knowing God to intervene. Harris says it in unequivocal terms: the God of Christianity is either impotent or evil.

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Dawkins: ‘Nobody wields a sharper bayonet than Sam Harris’

I’ve often contended that for one to argue that, not just morality, but objective morality, can exist without the assumption of a god, one only need to find cases in other species within the animal kingdom that experience empathy and display altruism. For, to find such cases would be to show that other species, while, perhaps, operating on a more simplistic, less evolved level, still display shades of what it means to be of a higher intelligence, that is, dogs and cats have feelings (the former more than the latter!) and various monkey species, like us, care, not only for their own kin, but for strangers without any outside forces operating on their consciences in anyway whatsoever. Here are two good articles on animals and morality: Animals can tell right from wrong and The moral status of animals.

In an intriguing article titled, “Morals Without God,” Frans De Waal argued against folks like the Rev. Al Sharpton, whom Waal quotes from a debate (I believe with Christopher Hitchens), in which Sharpton states:

If there is no order to the universe, and therefore some being, some force that ordered it, then who determines what is right or wrong? There is nothing immoral if there’s nothing in charge.

Of course, Sharpton wrongly assumes that something is needed to determine right or wrong and that something needs to be “in charge.” One might, for instance, be quite appalled if the something “in charge” (and all-loving something) has sat silently by while atrocity after atrocity has taken place under his omniscient eye.

Waal, in response to this and Dostoevsky’s oft-quoted, “If there’s no immortality of the soul, then there’s no virtue, and everything is lawful,” had this to say:

Perhaps it is just me, but I am wary of anyone whose belief system is the only thing standing between them and repulsive behavior. Why not assume that our humanity, including the self-control needed for livable societies, is built into us? Does anyone truly believe that our ancestors lacked social norms before they had religion? Did they never assist others in need, or complain about an unfair deal? Humans must have worried about the functioning of their communities well before the current religions arose, which is only a few thousand years ago. Not that religion is irrelevant — I will get to this — but it is an add-on rather than the wellspring of morality.

Getting more specific farther down in the essay, Waal argues for the kind of objective, scientifically-based morality that I would:

Fortunately, there has been a resurgence of the Darwinian view that morality grew out of the social instincts. Psychologists stress the intuitive way we arrive at moral judgments while activating emotional brain areas, and economists and anthropologists have shown humanity to be far more cooperative, altruistic, and fair than predicted by self-interest models. Similarly, the latest experiments in primatology reveal that our close relatives will do each other favors even if there’s nothing in it for themselves.

Even neuroscientist Sam Harris seems to have been influential in changing some of this colleagues’ minds, namely Richard Dawkins, who earlier argued that

In a universe of blind physical forces and g0enetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at the bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no other god. Nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is.

So too, ethics in humans, perhaps, just are, and Harris briefly mentioned the case for objective morality in his earlier work, “The End of Faith” before more largely expounding on it in “The Moral Landscape.” The most basic argument for objective morality is this: Would humans cease being good and generally civil to one another without a god? I would emphatically say, “No,” and this notion is absurd because there have existed numerous societies that have been built on the secular principle of the separation of church and state and religion as a private, not public, concern, with America being just one of them. Also, without some intrinsic, naturally endowed ethical elements, no society, be it the British empire, the Roman empire or America would exist very long without them. While there have existed societies with very different notions of what is right or wrong based on time, place and social norms, some basic ethical principles itself holds the line within every functioning and thriving society. In the absence of ethics, societies fail for they self-implode. Here is Harris in “The End of Faith:”

The pervasive idea that religion is somehow the source of our deepest ethical intuitions is absurd. We no more get our sense that cruelty is wrong from the pages of the Bible than we get our sense that two plus two equals four from the pages of a textbook on mathematics. Anyone who does not harbor some rudimentary sense that cruelty is wrong is unlikely to learn that it is by reading — and, indeed, most scripture offers rather equivocal testimony to this fact in any case. Our ethical intuitions must have their precursors in the natural world, for while nature is indeed red in tooth and claw, it is not merely so. Even monkeys will undergo extraordinary privations to avoid causing harm to another member of their species. Concern for others was not the invention of any prophet.

And Dawkins’ response today to Harris’ conclusions?

I was one of those who had unthinkingly bought into the hectoring myth that science can say nothing about morals. The Moral Landscape has changed all that for me. Moral philosophers, too, will find their world exhilaratingly turned upside down, as they discover a need to learn some neuroscience. As for religion, and the preposterous idea that we need God to be good, nobody wields a sharper bayonet than Sam Harris.