‘The End of Faith” and “Letter to a Christian Nation” contain plenty to outrage just about everyone. Sam Harris assails political correctness, evangelicals, liberals, right-wingers and even Judaism, which often gets a pass in such debates. (Harris charges that Jews have been complicit in their centuries-long persecution because they have insisted on setting themselves apart from the rest of the world.)
The one constant in these books is Harris’ absolutism about reason. If an idea can’t survive rigorous testing and scrutiny, he says, it ought to be tossed.
To Miroslav Volf, a Yale professor of theology, that is Harris’ first mistake.
“All of reason is informed by some faith, and there is no mature faith that hasn’t been coupled with and enlightened by some reason,” Volf says. It’s also wrong for Harris to assume that Christians consider the Bible the direct word of God, Volf says. Most don’t, so combing the Scriptures for the fingerprints of fallible authors, and then declaring victory once you find them, is silly.
“Most Christians believe that while the Bible was inspired by God, it is not free-floating, megaphone pronouncements out of nowhere by God. It was given through the medium of a culturally situated people, with the limitations of their knowledge at the time. And it’s our task to ask, ‘What does this mean to me today?’”
Islamic scholars say Harris has committed an equally egregious blunder with the Koran. He fails to understand the book in its historical context, and he cherry-picks the text for its most merciless verses.
“He couldn’t be more wrong about the Koran,” says Reza Aslan, the “No God but God” author. “In the history of the prophetic biblical canon that starts with Genesis, the Koran is by far the most tolerant of the views of other religions.”
The Koran is brutal on polytheists, Aslan acknowledges, but few of those are around these days. Harris, he claims, is making the same mistake that Muslims in Arab countries make when they locate the soul of Christianity with evangelicals who speak in tongues.
He has confused the outermost for the core. And ironically, Aslan notes, Harris is making the same mistake as fundamentalists, by taking scripture at its literal word.
Harris says that even if everyone decided that none of these texts is divine, it still would make sense to ditch them, since it would only be a matter of time before someone picked one up and said, “Hey, the creator of the universe hates homosexuals.”
“We have to start seeing religion for what it is,” he says, “a failed science, a failed description of the world, a holdover of discourse by our ancestors, who had no basis to demand good evidence and good argument.”
Of course, if religion were merely failed science, it would have been supplanted by real science centuries ago. But it has survived and thrived through a revolution in our understanding of the solar system as well as our bodies and our minds, which suggests that it offers something that deduction, data points and reason do not.
“Religion is never going to go away,” says Aslan, “and anyone who thinks it will doesn’t understand what religion is. It is a language to describe the experience of human nature, so for as long as people struggle to describe what it means to be alive, it will be a ready-made language to express those feelings.”
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