Sam Harris: Critical Responses

Description

Sam Harris sparked off the unexpected phenomenon of the New Atheism with his best-seller The End of Faith (2004), and has since authored five more best-sellers on different topics, as well as becoming a leading presence on social media. His blog Making Sense has an enormous popular following.

Harris is celebrated as an opponent of theistic religion, a warning voice against the menace of Islamism, an atheist advocate of spiritual meditation (in the Tibetan Buddhist manner), a proponent of the controversial view that science can solve all ethical problems, and a disbeliever in the existence of free will.

Harris is frequently a target of hostility. Critics accuse him of a soulless mechanistic worldview, a bigoted Islamophobism, and a scientistic denial of deeper humanity. Typical of many bitter attacks on Harris is that of Union Theological Seminary professor Robert Wright, who wrote in 2018 that “the famous proponent of New Atheism is on a crusade against tribalism but seems oblivious to his own version of it.” Harris has been identified as a member of “the Intellectual Dark Web,” though he has recently disavowed any further adherence to that group. Harris’s much-anticipated confrontation with Jordan Peterson on the subject of religion disappointingly fell flat when Harris and Peterson were unable to get on to the serious discussion because they could not agree on the definition of the word “truth.”

Sam Harris: Critical Responses is a collection of essays criticizing different aspects of Harris’s thinking from a range of diverse perspectives—left and right, Christian and atheist, philosophical, psychological, and political. Though the criticisms are often severe, the approach is always reasonable and respectful. As one noted author commented on Sandra Woien’s previous collection, Jordan Peterson: Critical Responses, “Both fans and foes will appreciate this volume.”

Forward by Stephen R. C. Hicks. 

Stephen is a professor of Philosophy at Rockford University. He is the author of Explaining Postmodernism (2004) and Nietzsche and the Nazis (2010).

Acknowledgments xi

Foreword: Why Sam Harris Matters 

STEPHEN R.C. HICKS xiii

The Sam Harris Phenomenon xvii

I What Human Life Is For 1

1. Another Red Pill

SANDRA WOIEN 3

2.My Life Gives the Moral Landscape Its Relief MARC CHAMPAGNE 17

II Liberal Values 39

3.Spotting Dangerous Ideas DAVID RAMSAY STEELE 41

4.Intellectual Integrity or Social Justice? LUCAS RIJANA 57

5.Is Redistribution the Endgame? ANTONY SAMMEROFF 69

III Science and Ethics 91

6. The Mantle of Neuroscience RAY SCOTT PERCIVAL 93

7.A Miserable Argument MARK WARREN 115

8.Dark Spots in Sam Harris’s Moral Landscape DAVID GORDON 127

9.A Moral Compass that Works ERIK BOORNAZIAN AND JAMES W. DILLER 139

IV The Specter of Artificial Intelligence 151

10.Sam Harris and the Myth of Machine Intelligence JOBST LANDGREBE AND BARRY SMITH 153

11.Are We Too Dumb for Superintelligence? LISA BELLANTONI 163

12.Solutions to the Existential Threat of AI LEONARD KAHN 177

Part V I Feel Free 191

13.Neural Determinism and Neural Roulette JOHN LEMOS 193

14.Let’s Talk about Free Will! MEGAN DRURY 207

Part VI Beyond the Physical Cosmos 221

15.Another Thing in This Universe that Cannot Be an Illusion MAANELI DERAKHSHANI 223

16.Intimations of the Numinous REG NAULTY 235

Part VII No End to Faith 247

17.A Rational Proposal BETHEL MCGREW 249

18.Is Sam Harris Right about the Miracles of Jesus? MICHAEL BARROS AND BETHEL MCGREW 261

19.Scientism as Religion and Religion as Wisdom RON DART 275

About the Authors 287

Index 295

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie politique
• Éthique et morale
• Philosophie de la psychologie
• Essays
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Waking Up
• Criticism
• Sam Harris
• Social
• Ethique et morale

Informations

• Publié par: Carus Books
• Date de parution: 19 juillet 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781637700259
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

In This Series
Jordan Peterson: Critical Responses (2022)
Sam Harris: Critical Responses (2023)
In Preparation
Mattias Desmet: Critical Responses
Steven Pinker: Critical Responses
Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying: Critical Responses
Richard Dawkins: Critical Responses
Sam Harris Critical Responses
EDITED BY S ANDRA W OIEN
OPEN UNIVERSE
Chicago
Volume 2 in the series, Critical Responses ® , edited by Sandra Woien
To find out more about Open Universe and Carus Books, visit our website at www.carusbooks.com .
Copyright © 2023 by Carus Books
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher, Carus Books, 315 Fifth Street, Peru, Illinois 61354.
Printed and bound in the United States of America. Printed on acid-free paper.
Sam Harris: Critical Responses
ISBN: 978-1-63770-024-2
This book is also available as an e-book (978-1-63770-025-9).
Library of Congress Control Number 2021941781
To Joe
Contents Acknowledgments Foreword : Why Sam Harris Matters S TEPHEN R.C. H ICKS The Sam Harris Phenomenon I What Human Life Is For 1. Another Red Pill S ANDRA W OIEN 2. My Life Gives the Moral Landscape Its Relief M ARC C HAMPAGNE II Liberal Values 3. Spotting Dangerous Ideas D AVID R AMSAY S TEELE 4. Intellectual Integrity or Social Justice? L UCAS R IJANA 5. Is Redistribution the Endgame? A NTONY S AMMEROFF III Science and Ethics 6. The Mantle of Neuroscience R AY S COTT P ERCIVAL 7. A Miserable Argument M ARK W ARREN 8. Dark Spots in Sam Harris’s Moral Landscape D AVID G ORDON 9. A Moral Compass that Works E RIK B OORNAZIAN A ND J AMES W. D ILLER IV The Specter of Artificial Intelligence 10. Sam Harris and the Myth of Machine Intelligence J OBST L ANDGREBE A ND B ARRY S MITH 11. Are We Too Dumb for Superintelligence? L ISA B ELLANTONI 12. Solutions to the Existential Threat of AI L EONARD K AHN Part V I Feel Free 13. Neural Determinism and Neural Roulette J OHN L EMOS 14. Let’s Talk about Free Will! M EGAN D RURY Part VI Beyond the Physical Cosmos 15. Another Thing in This Universe that Cannot Be an Illusion M AANELI D ERAKHSHANI 16. Intimations of the Numinous R EG N AULTY Part VII No End to Faith 17. A Rational Proposal B ETHEL M CGREW 18. Is Sam Harris Right about the Miracles of Jesus? M ICHAEL B ARROS A ND B ETHEL M CGREW 19. Scientism as Religion and Religion as Wisdom R ON D ART About the Authors Index
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to David Ramsay Steele for making this book possible and for his reliable and astute guidance.
Fred Feldman warrants my warmest appreciation. He has taught me much about well-being throughout the years, and now in retirement, he still generously shared his insights and provided helpful criticism of my chapter. I am also grateful to Shawn Klein and Saoirse Mooney for taking the time to share their comments.
I am especially grateful to Professor Dan Wallace. Before this volume, I had no contact with him, but in a pinch, I reached out. It was a wise decision, for he was generous in sharing his wealth of expertise.
All the contributors also deserve appreciation. This book wouldn’t be possible without you, so thank you for contributing and for being a pleasure to work with throughout this process.
Why Sam Harris Matters
S TEPHEN R.C. H ICKS
Sam Harris has carved out, justifiably, a place in the first rank of our public intellectuals.
He is most well-known for his loose association with Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and Richard Dawkins to mount a powerful critique against contemporary manifestations of religion. The New Atheists took on repackaged and, in some cases, evolved forms of religious belief and argued they were false, immoral, and out of place in modern scientific and progressive reality.
Yet Harris’s real significance is broader than that important-but-narrow front in the culture wars. His work covers core issues in morality, free will, the nature of consciousness, religious history, psychedelics, artificial intelligence, and the implications of all of those for social theory and politics. He is a comprehensive thinker.
But comprehensive thinkers were largely out of fashion during the twentieth century, for deeply philosophical reasons. The idea of making an intellectual system—or of crossing major disciplinary boundaries—or, for specialist thinkers, of forthrightly applying one’s narrow technical knowledge and methods to broader issues—that idea was largely dismissed as outmoded or pretentious.
Such was the state of affairs that by the middle of the twentieth century C.P. Snow’s famous Two Cultures thesis took the world by storm. Intellectual culture, Snow argued, was dysfunctionally split into two opposing camps—roughly the scientists and the art-and-literature types. Scientists studied the natural world, prized rigor, and were optimistically progressive. By contrast, the art-and-literature types explored messy people, espoused non-rational and even irrational practices, and were cynically pessimistic.
The turf was divided into two opposing domains, each with its own methods and conclusions—and disdainful of the other. You scientists, the artsy types would say accusingly, are merely white-coated drones who feel safe in your labs but have apparently never read a poem or had wild sex. Try living for a change. And the advocates for science would retort, You artists are mostly unwashed bohemians on drugs half the time, throwing paint at a canvas and trying to screw anything that moves. Try growing up.
More seriously, though, the diagnosis did point to a problem for intellectual life. Each sub-culture had evolved away from the other to the point that, say, a scientist could think himself (or, increasingly, herself) highly educated even though he or she had no knowledge of Goethe and Dostoevsky, the French Revolution, and Post-Impressionism. Or a humanist could be considered PhD-worthy without having the least insight into calculus, genetics, or thermodynamics.
It wasn’t just that reality is complex and intellectuals need to have specialties. It was that each side of the divide thought the gulf was in principle unbridgeable—and that the other side was irrelevant to grasping the truly significant issues.
Fast-forward to the end of the twentieth century, when a young Sam Harris was traveling the world and then returning to university to finish his formal education.
Much of the arts and humanities had descended further in vacuous postmodernism and associated nihilisms, though the sciences had continued their impressive progress. Yet there was widespread recognition of a vacuum to be filled. The two-cultures dynamic had stalled, the two camps were not talking to each other—and the impasse was unimpressive to a new generation of thinkers with more comprehensive ambition and a willingness to make a fresh start.
This new generation was forming a Third Culture, to use science journalist John Brockman’s label for it. The emerging view was that humanistic questions need scientific insight to be understood and resolved more fully, and that science is itself a deeply humanist enterprise, by and for passionate and fully engaged human beings.
This was not an entirely new phenomenon. It was a twenty-first century reinvigoration of the Renaissance and Enlightenment conception of the arts and the sciences as integrated. Think of the universal ambition and the integrated scope of Leonardo da Vinci’s projects. Think of Michelangelo’s humanistic-ideal art works made possible in significant part only by his detailed empirical anatomical studies. Or think of Francis Bacon’s “Knowledge is power”—the power to unveil all of nature’s secrets and to apply them to the full range of human aspirations.
But who is best positioned to build the bridge, cross it, and fill the vacuum of the Two Cultures? As it is the scientists who actually have the most real-world focus and the proven track record of solving problems and improving the human condition, we should expect it will be scientifically trained thinkers who, disproportionately, make up the Third Culture. Hence the trend inaugurated late in the twentieth century by science-rooted intellectuals such as Stephen Jay Gould, E.O. Wilson, Carl Sagan, and Douglas Hofstadter forthrightly applying their insights and methods beyond their disciplinary confines.
Sam Harris’s scholarly base is in the biological sciences, with a PhD in neuroscience. That combines with his undergraduate degree in philosophy and his travels to the far East to experience first-hand its traditions of religion. That positions him with the knowledge-set and the skill-set with which—aided by a considerable dose of chutzpah—to launch his comprehensive intellectual project.
Whether Harris’s particular positions on the big issues are correct is not the key point here. His significance is in his project of explaining (or explaining away, sometimes) the whole shebang by applying the best of science and scientific method to those humanistic questions. That is the future-oriented commitment relevant to all genuine intellectuals.
This volume of essays, then, is well-timed. It is also a well-selected range of lively and qualified thinkers who have taken up those aspects of Harris’s ideas most worthy of further exploration. I commend editor Sandra Woien, a wide-ranging philosopher in her own right, for her fine work in producing this volume. It’s also a strong successor to her Jordan Peterson: Critical Responses (2022), focused on another scientifically trained thinker with Third Culture aspirations. I recommend both volumes for careful reading.
The Sam Harris Phenomenon
As a young upstart, Sam Harris popped up on the public radar with his book The End of Faith (2004). Aptly dubbed as one of the “New Atheists,” he quickly gained prominence for his darin