Tag Archives: Sam Harris

On hating God

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The ten commandments popped up as part of my regular Bible reading this morning and Ex 20:5-6 struck me:

You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.

“Who”, I thought to myself, “could possibly be stupid enough to hate God?” Even though I now believe atheism to be illogical, I can empathise with being an atheist, since I once was one; being oblivious to God I can understand because even after I thought the idea of his existence was at least plausible, I didn’t want to have much to do with him. But who could hate God? If nothing else, a sense of self-preservation ought to keep one from such folly.

Not so, however. The so-called new atheists don’t so much disbelieve in God as loath him. Christopher Hitchens, shortly before his death, paraphrased the famous C. S. Lewis proposition: “if Jesus isn’t the Son of God, he is a hideous wicked imposter; his words were vane, empty and intended to deceive.” Lewis concluded that Jesus, therefore, was the Son of God, Hitchens that he was…..  a hideous wicked imposter. Dawkins, Dennett, Harris et al echo similar sentiments.

Blinkered fools!

The foundation for objective moral values

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A debate between Sam Harris and William Lane Craig on where moral values come from and whether atheists have grounds for believing in objective moral values.
The whole series is well worth watching. I am, of course, biased but it seems fairly clear that Sam Harris didn’t fare too well. He never came to grips with the problem of his tautological definitions of “good” and “evil”, preferring, instead, to eschew logic and employ the decoy of making emotionally indignant appeals to examples of our or God’s – the God he claims isn’t there – moral failures, along with other randomly selected red-herrings.
William Lane Craig, on the other hand, pounds his points home with remorseless logic.






According to Sam Harris, “All we need is science”

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It sounds like the cue for a song, but it is actually another atheist trying to demonstrate that morality can be derived from science. Read the whole thing here (my emphasis):

How could we ever say, as a matter of scientific fact, that one way of life is better, or more moral, than another? Whose definition of “better” or “moral” would we use? While many scientists now study the evolution of morality, the purpose of their research is to describe how human beings think and behave. No one expects science to tell us how we ought to think and behave. Controversies about human values are controversies about which science officially has no opinion.

However, questions about values are really questions about the well-being of conscious creatures. Values, therefore, translate into facts that can be scientifically understood….

The highlighted section above is itself a value statement that cannot be derived from science; it assumes that the well-being of conscious creatures is “better” than their non well-being. Everything that follows from Sam Harris is grounded on this value, a value that is not based on science: Sam Harris’s claim that his values can be deduced from science is false. Even worse, his foundation is thoroughly antithetical to scientific method, since a concious creature’s longing for well-being is the ultimate expression of subjectivity – at least a theist’s attempt at finding meaning for the word “better” is one which assumes an objective moral reality that was created by a Person who exists independently of “concious creatures”.