A Fallacy in Sam Harris Argument

Nobody wrote to me "Enough with talking about atheism!", so I'll go on.

An atheist wouldn't believe what is obvious to me, namely that Christ has changed me deeply. He would think that I was changed by a delusion. But how could a delusion bring me so much wisdom? 

At best, he would think that I was changed by Jesus’ “philosophy”, but he would be wrong.                                                                                                                             

I’ve tried to describe my conversion in the first pages of this book. Initially, the gospels did not impress me at all, at least on a conscious level. My personality was too tainted for me to be receptive to Jesus’ message. I had to read the Sermon on the Mount many, many times before starting to absorb its meaning. The question is, why did I keep reading it? Because what emerged from the gospels was not a philosophy, but rather a person, and his presence turned my life upside down. Had I heard his voice, I would say that he talked me into reading the gospels a second time, then a third. Of course I didn’t hear it, but I felt it in my soul. 
Atheist can dismiss my spiritual experience as much as they want, yet this is the best way to describe it. 

My son thinks that, if I were intellectually honest, I would question my perception of Jesus Presence and I would find a more rational explanation for my shift in consciousness. Maybe, he says, I had simply reached the bottom and I had no choice but to take a different path. But I know that, had I questioned my feelings, I would have never, never changed.

This makes me think of another fallacy in Sam Harris’ thesis. In The Moral Landscape he argues that free will is an illusion and that, and I quote, we are no more responsible for the things we think (and therefore do) than we are for the fact that we were born into this world. I believe that this assumption clashes with his crusade against religion. If our thoughts emerge from the void, as he maintains, there must be a psychological substrate that generates them. In most cases, religion helps us grounding our inner life in goodness. Of course there are exceptions, as he tirelessly points out referring to suicide bombers, but I’m convinced that religion is a source of love a lot more than it is of hate.

Harris thinks that we can be talked into good behavior by scientific discoveries concerning our well being. But if free will is an illusion, it follows that we are unable to make moral choices that go against our impulses, even if the latter are self-destructive. We need something that touches us at the core of our being, and that is the belief in a higher power. It seems to me that Harris’ argument, paradoxically, leads to this conclusion.

Are You Tired Of Reading About Atheism?

                                                                            

 In I don’t believe in Atheists  Chris Hedges writes:                                                       

“The cult of science is used, like the cult of religion, to provide meaning and hope, to feed the illusion of moral superiority. … A belief in the limitless possibilities of science, and the belief that science will save us from ourselves has replaced, for many, faith in God.”

Atheists claim that religious people are guided by irrationality, therefore they are intrinsically dangerous. But emotions can lead to intuitions of enormous importance, and the intuition of the transcendent, which is the domain of the religious sense, is one of them. 

In existing primal religions there is continuity between mind and matter, imagination and reality, or even objects and individuals. Boundaries are an illusion. A supersensory world can be discerned by those who achieve spiritual awareness, and the shaman has this power. The spirits of the ancestors offer protection and help to the living, like how saints are believed to do in Catholicism. We can’t dismiss the common outcome of human imagination in different societies too easily, for it may well give insight into something real.

Modern atheists maintain that our moral sense stemmed from evolution, but this theory doesn’t explain our benevolence towards our fellow human beings. The struggle to survive, in fact, is more severe among members of the same species, because they fight for the same type of resources. 

In the ancient world it was custom to fight the members of a different tribe. We certainly are the children of evolution but, I believe, of something else too, or even better, of Someone else. Many of His creatures vanished  or mutated, then we are inherently worth much more than any other inhabitant of this planet.

Of course, modern intellectuals enjoy to place themselves on the same level of, let’s say, a chicken. My son made me watch a video of a deceased American comedian, may he rest in peace, who was actually wondering why we call the destruction of a human fetus an “abortion” and the one of a chicken’s egg an “omelet”. Considering the amount of omelets and the likes I’ve ingested during my lifetime, I don’t find the comparison particularly funny. But how silly of me! Chickens don’t have consciousness after all. How do I know? Well, I’ve never had a conversation with a chicken, so I’m just guessing.

The moment I find out that chickens don’t want me to eat their eggs, I won’t make omelets anymore, I swear. 

A Famous Atheist Who changed His Mind

Let's see what some Christian philosophers had to say about faith. I.M. Crombie wrote that theists, in order to express their belief, are bounded to use paradoxical statements. Some trust their cognitive faculties when they affirm the existence of God. For them, He is real and abstract at the same time, like memory. For others, He is something to speculate about. 
As we can read in There Is a God, Anthony Flew, the founder of the new atheists “movement,” speculated long enough to change his mind about God. According to him, the fact that nature obeys laws points directly to God, as it does the fact that we are conscious, purpose driven beings. We are the product of billions of years of cumulative selection, or evolution, but this can’t in any way explain consciousness. We have the capacity of thinking in concepts and we are conscious of our ability to transcend matter, yet our brain is not very different from the one of an animal. We perceive ourselves as “selves,” but we can’t analyze the self because it’s not a mentalstate that can be observed or explained in scientific terms.

The philosopher R.A. Varghese writes that science does not discover the self but the self discovers science, therefore  no account of the history of the universe is coherent if it cannot explain the existence of the self. He thinks that the supraphisical can only originate in a supraphisical source, and consciousness, thought and the self are supraphisical. Matter cannot produce thought, not even in billion years, and if this is what atheists believe, then theirs is an act of faith even more hazardous than believing in God. 

The professional atheists maintain that the human species needed religion to cope with a mysterious, frightening world. They think that modern science has ended our fears, explaining away all the things that we didn’t understand about nature, therefore religion is destined to die. True, we don’t believe anymore that lightning is the manifestation of angry gods, but our incomprehension has only shifted. Modern science has opened the door for us to unbelievable complexity and to the mystery of the universe. Our position is not that different from the one of men in Jesus‘ time. They looked at the sky, saw the stars and wondered. Today we know stars and planets but we wonder just the same about the universe, how it works, how it came into existence and why. Science still can’t answer our deepest questions.                                                                                                                                     

A Family Discussion About Faith

                                                   

Unfortunately, the intellectual superiority that Jesus displays in his exchanges with the Pharisee does not reflect the dynamics that take place today in the debates between atheists and people of faith. They argue about the existence of a Creator, so we shouldn’t be surprised. The theologian Paul Tillich said:

“Anyone who gets into a debate about the existence of God has stacked the cards in favor of the atheist.”

 “Existence” is a word we can comprehend, for it refers to reality, whereas we can’t figure out God. The two words are forced in the same sentence all the time, but they don’t belong together.

My husband, as I see it, is a believer at heart and an atheist intellectually, so he can function as a bridge between our son and I.

“Have you ever heard of the Aeropagite?” he asked to our contemptuous son. He was a mysterious ancient mystic who, in his attempt to define God, made use of what has been known by the philosophical tradition as the ‘ via negativa’. According to him, no attributes as we know them could be true of God, including the attribute of existence. Therefore, in a very mystical sense, God does not even exists. By this he probably meant that human mind cannot grasp anything concerning God, who is above and beyond our cognitive sphere.”

“He certainly is,” I said, “but what people of faith hold on to is the religious experience, which of course cannot be grasped by someone who has never had such an experience. An atheist will talk about faith like a blind man might talk of colors.”

“You are so arrogant!” our son exclaimed. “Religious people always pretend to know something that we nonbelievers don’t know. However, twenty-first century atheists are not as much against religion as they are against belief without evidence, because such beliefs caused the most tragic moments in history. For example, Hitler killed millions of people on the basis of an unjustified belief, namely that the Jews were an inferior race.”

“Evil was at the root of this false belief,” I answered. “No one can deny that in the history of Christianity there have been evil people also, but remember that the Church is a human creation. You can’t condemn Christ for the wrong that was done in his name.”

“I’m not blaming religion only,” our son replied, “but belief itself. I’m interested in truth and therefore in evidence.”

“Then what is your opinion about Communism in Soviet Russia and China?” his father retorted. “This
ideology was as dangerous as a belief and produced massive violence against innocent people. We can only
conclude that violent impulses are deeply rooted in human beings, just like their need to believe in something,
it doesn’t matter if it is a religion or an ideology. Both can be used to do either evil or good. If dogmas,
along with rational doctrines, can be used to arm people, then there is no claim that it should be responsible
for the evil of this world. Evil always finds a way to manifest itself.

Message To My Son

Jesus is the one teacher who tells us very little about what to do to achieve the kingdom. He abolished rules and didn’t leave behind a step by step road to enlightenment, but he said one thing that can bring us all the way to God: Believe in me. The difference between eastern religions and Christianity was evident to C.S. Lewis:

“We have not got to try to climb into spiritual life by our own efforts…If we only lay ourselves open to the one Man in whom it was fully present…He will do it for us".                                                                                                    

From the moment I met Jesus, all I had to do was “ride the wave”. But waves lift you up and then let you down. It’s not so easy to ride them, especially when there is no coast in sight. The religious sense must be nourished, keeping in mind that we are not feeding an illusion but something that was given to us by grace. I must look after my faith like I looked after my son when he was a child. I wanted to relate to him, so I also become like a child and we had a wonderful time together.

When you were a child, you used to get mad at me if I assumed that you couldn’t understand certain things because you were too young. You thought that children were smart, sometimes smarter than the adults, but now you have changed your mind.

“Jesus said that only those who are like children will enter the kingdom of heaven,” you said. “In fact, in order to believe one has to shut down his logical thought. Actually, one has to stop thinking!”

Maybe, if you try, you’ll be able to recall the way you were just a few years ago and realize that there is no reason to despise that little boy. In his naivete, he was aware of the deepest aspects of reality.

I’m looking at you picture. You were eleven years old, learning your first English words. Look at those eyes! Your gaze was as sharp as a razor. It’s not like that anymore; you are a grown up now. Maybe you have lost something in the process. Try to remember, try really hard.