Sam Harris: 'The language of ignorance'

Sam Harris, The Language Of Ignorance

In this essay, the bestselling secularist author of "The End of Faith"
delivers a scathing review of "The Language of God," a new book by Human
Genome Project head Francis Collins that attempts to demonstrate a harmony
between science and evangelical Christianity.

Francis Collins-physical chemist, medical geneticist and head of the Human
Genome Project-has written a book entitled "The Language of God." In it, he
attempts to demonstrate that there is "a consistent and profoundly
satisfying harmony" between 21st-century science and evangelical
Christianity. To say that he fails at his task does not quite get at the
inadequacy of his efforts. He fails the way a surgeon would fail if he
attempted to operate using only his toes. His failure is predictable,
spectacular and vile. "The Language of God" reads like a hoax text, and the
knowledge that it is not a hoax should be disturbing to anyone who cares
about the future of intellectual and political discourse in the United
States.

Most reviewers of "The Language of God" seem quite overawed by its author's
scientific credentials. This is understandable. As director of the Human
Genome Project, Collins participated in one of the greatest scientific
achievements in human history. His book, however, reveals that a stellar
career in science offers no guarantee of a scientific frame of mind. Lest we
think that one man can do no lasting harm to our discourse, consider the
fact that the year is 2006, half of the American population believes that
the universe is 6,000 years old, our president has just used his first veto
to block federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research on religious
grounds, and one of the foremost scientists in the land has this to say,
straight from the heart (if not the brain):

As believers, you are right to hold fast to the concept of God as Creator;
you are right to hold fast to the truths of the Bible; you are right to hold
fast to the conclusion that science offers no answers to the most pressing
questions of human existence; and you are right to hold fast to the
certainty that the claims of atheistic materialism must be steadfastly
resisted....

God, who is not limited to space and time, created the universe and
established natural laws that govern it. Seeking to populate this otherwise
sterile universe with living creatures, God chose the elegant mechanism of
evolution to create microbes, plants, and animals of all sorts. Most
remarkably, God intentionally chose the same mechanism to give rise to
special creatures who would have intelligence, a knowledge of right and
wrong, free will, and a desire to seek fellowship with Him. He also knew
these creatures would ultimately choose to disobey the Moral Law.
According to Collins, belief in the God of Abraham is the most rational
response to the data of physics and biology, while "of all the possible
worldviews, atheism is the least rational." Taken at face value, these
claims suggest that "The Language of God" will mark an unprecedented
breakthrough in the history of ideas. Once Collins gets going, however, we
realize that the book represents a breakthrough of another kind.

After finding himself powerless to detect any errors in the philosophizing
of C.S. Lewis (a truly ominous sign), Collins describes the moment that he,
as a scientist, finally became convinced of the divinity of Jesus Christ:
On a beautiful fall day, as I was hiking in the Cascade Mountains ... the
majesty and beauty of God's creation overwhelmed my resistance. As I rounded
a corner and saw a beautiful and unexpected frozen waterfall, hundreds of
feet high, I knew the search was over. The next morning, I knelt in the dewy
grass as the sun rose and surrendered to Jesus Christ.
If this account of field research seems a little thin, don't worry-a recent
profile of Collins in Time magazine offers supplementary data. Here, we
learn that the waterfall was frozen in three streams, which put the good
doctor in mind of the Trinity...

It is at this point that thoughts of suicide might occur to any reader who
has placed undue trust in the intellectual integrity of his fellow human
beings. One would hope that it would be immediately obvious to Collins that
there is nothing about seeing a frozen waterfall (no matter how frozen) that
offers the slightest corroboration of the doctrine of Christianity. But it
was not obvious to him as he "knelt in the dewy grass," and it is not
obvious to him now. Indeed, I fear that it will not be obvious to many of
his readers.

If the beauty of nature can mean that Jesus really is the son of God, then
anything can mean anything. Let us say that I saw the same waterfall, and
its three streams reminded me of Romulus, Remus and the She-wolf, the
mythical founders of Rome. How reasonable would it be for me to know, from
that moment forward, that Italy would one day win the World Cup? This
epiphany, while perfectly psychotic, would actually put me on firmer ground
than Collins-because Italy did win the World Cup. Collins' alpine conversion
would be a ludicrous non sequitur even if Jesus does return to Earth
trailing clouds of glory.

While the mere sighting of a waterfall appears to have been sufficient to
answer all important questions of theology for Collins, he imagines himself
to be in possession of further evidence attesting to the divinity of Jesus,
the omnipotence of God and the divine origin of the Bible. The most
compelling of these data, in his view, is the fact that human beings have a
sense of right and wrong. Collins follows Lewis here, as faithfully as if he
were on a leash, and declares that the "moral law" is so inscrutable a thing
as to admit of only a supernatural explanation. According to Collins, the
moral law applies exclusively to human beings:
Though other animals may at times appear to show glimmerings of a moral
sense, they are certainly not widespread, and in many instances other
species' behavior seems to be in dramatic contrast to any sense of universal
rightness.
One wonders if the author has ever read a newspaper. The behavior of humans
offers no such "dramatic contrast." How badly must human beings behave to
put this "sense of universal rightness" in doubt? And just how widespread
must "glimmerings" of morality be among other animals before Collins-who,
after all, knows a thing or two about genes-begins to wonder whether our
moral sense has evolutionary precursors in the natural world? What if mice
showed greater distress at the suffering of familiar mice than unfamiliar
ones? (They do.) What if monkeys will starve themselves to prevent their
cage-mates from receiving painful shocks? (They will.) What if chimps have a
demonstrable sense of fairness when receiving food rewards? (They have.)
Wouldn't these be precisely the sorts of findings one would expect if our
morality were the product of evolution?

Collins' case for the supernatural origin of morality rests on the further
assertion that there can be no evolutionary explanation for genuine
altruism. Because self-sacrifice cannot increase the likelihood that an
individual creature will survive and reproduce, truly self-sacrificing
behavior stands as a primordial rejoinder to any biological account of
morality. In Collins' view, therefore, the mere existence of altruism offers
compelling evidence of a personal God. (Here, Collins performs a risible
sprint past ideas in biology like "kin selection" that plausibly explain
altruism and self-sacrifice in evolutionary terms.) A moment's thought
reveals, however, that if we were to accept this neutered biology, almost
everything about us would be bathed in the warm glow of religious mystery.
Forget morality-how did nature select for the ability to write sonnets,
solder circuit boards or swing a golf club? Clearly, such abilities could
never be the product of evolution. Might they have been placed in us by God?
Smoking cigarettes isn't a healthy habit and is unlikely to offer an
adaptive advantage-and there were no cigarettes in the Paleolithic-but this
habit is very widespread and compelling. Is God, by any chance, a tobacco
farmer? Collins can't seem to see that human morality and selfless love may
be derivative of more basic biological and psychological traits, which were
themselves products of evolution. It is hard to interpret this oversight in
light of his scientific training. If one didn't know better, one might be
tempted to conclude that religious dogmatism presents an obstacle to
scientific reasoning.

Having established that our moral sensitivities are God-given, Collins finds
himself in a position to infer the nature of our Creator:
And if that were so, what kind of God would this be? Would this be a deist
God, who invented physics and mathematics and started the universe in motion
about 14 billion years ago, then wandered off to deal with other, more
important matters, as Einstein thought? No, this God, if I was perceiving
him at all, must be a theist God, who desires some kind of relationship with
those special creatures called human beings, and has therefore instilled
this special glimpse of Himself into each one of us. This might be the God
of Abraham, but it was certainly not the God of Einstein.... Judging by the
incredibly high standards of the Moral Law ... this was a God who was holy
and righteous. He would have to be the embodiment of goodness.... Faith in
God now seemed more rational that disbelief.
I hope the reader will share my amazement that passages like this have come
from one of the most celebrated scientists in the United States. I find that
my own sense of the moral law requires that I provide a few more examples of
Collins' skill as a philosopher and theologian.

On the question of why God simply doesn't provide better evidence for his
existence:
If the case in favor of belief in God were utterly airtight, then the
world would be full of confident practitioners of a single faith. But
imagine such a world, where the opportunity to make a free choice about
belief was taken away by the certainty of the evidence. How interesting
would that be?
One is tempted to say that it might be more "interesting" than a world
unnecessarily shattered by competing religious orthodoxies and religious
war, only to be followed by an eternity in hell for all those who believe
the wrong things about God. But, to each his own.

How does Collins settle the problem of theodicy-the mystery of why there is
evil and misfortune in a world created by an omniscient, omnipotent and
perfectly benevolent God? He takes it very much in stride:
Science reveals that the universe, our own planet, and life itself are
engaged in an evolutionary process. The consequences of that can include the
unpredictability of the weather, the slippage of a tectonic plate, or the
misspelling of a cancer gene in the normal process of cell division. If at
the beginning of time God chose to use these forces to create human beings,
then the inevitability of these other painful consequences was also assured.
Frequent miraculous interventions would be at least as chaotic in the
physical realm as they would be in interfering with human acts of free will.
But why was God obliged to make cell division susceptible to the perversity
of cancer? And why couldn't an all-powerful, all-knowing, perfectly
benevolent God perform as many miracles as He wanted? There isn't time to
entertain such questions, however, as Collins must solve all outstanding
problems in the science of cosmology:
The Big Bang cries out for a divine explanation. It forces the conclusion
that nature had a defined beginning. I cannot see how nature could have
created itself. Only a supernatural force that is outside of space and time
could have done that.
It is worth pointing out the term "supernatural," which Collins uses freely
throughout his book, is semantically indistinguishable from the term
"magical." Reading his text with this substitution in mind is rather
instructive. In any case, even if we accepted that our universe simply had
to be created by an intelligent being, this would not suggest that this
being is the God of the Bible, or even particularly magical. If
intelligently designed, our universe could be running as a simulation on an
alien supercomputer. As many critics of religion have pointed out, the
notion of a Creator poses an immediate problem of an infinite regress. If
God created the universe, what created God? To insert an inscrutable God at
the origin of the universe explains absolutely nothing. And to say that God,
by definition, is uncreated, simply begs the question. (Why can't I say that
the universe, by definition, is uncreated?) Any being capable of creating
our world promises to be very complex himself. As the biologist Richard
Dawkins has observed with untiring eloquence, the only natural process we
know of that could produce a being capable of designing things is evolution.

Any intellectually honest person must admit that he does not know why the
universe exists. Secular scientists, of course, readily admit their
ignorance on this point. Believers like Collins do not.
The major and inescapable flaw of ... [the] claim that science demands of
atheism is that it goes beyond the evidence. If God is outside of nature,
then science can neither prove nor disprove His existence. Atheism itself
must therefore be considered a form of blind faith, in that it adopts a
belief system that cannot be defended on the basis of pure reason.
Is disbelief in Zeus or Thor also a form of "blind faith"? Must we really
"disprove" the existence of every imaginary friend? The burden of producing
evidence falls on those making extravagant claims about miracles and
invisible realities. What is more, there is an enormous difference between
acquiring a picture of the world through dispassionate, scientific study and
acquiring it through patent emotionality and wishful thinking-and only then
looking to see if it can survive contact with science.

Consider the following fact: Ninety-nine percent of the species that have
ever lived on Earth are now extinct. There are two very different questions
one could ask about a fact of this sort, if one wanted to assess the
reasonableness of believing in God. One could ask, "Is this fact compatible
with the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient and compassionate God?" Or,
one could ask, "Does this fact, alone or in combination with other facts,
suggest that an omnipotent, omniscient and compassionate God exists?" The
answer to the first question is always, "Well, yes-provided you add that
God's will is utterly mysterious." (In the present case, He may have wanted
to destroy 99%% of his creatures for some very good reason that surpasses our
understanding.) The answer to the second question is "absolutely not." The
problem for Collins is that only the second question is relevant to our
arriving at a rational understanding of the universe. The fact that a
bowdlerized evangelical Christianity can still be rendered compatible with
science (because of the gaps in science and the elasticity of religious
thinking) does not mean that there are scientific reasons for being an
evangelical Christian.

Collins' sins against reasonableness do not end here. Somewhere during the
course of his scientific career, he acquired the revolting habit of quoting
eminent scientists out of context to give an entirely false impression of
their religious beliefs. Misappropriation of Einstein and Hawking, while
common enough in popular religious discourse, rises to level of intellectual
misconduct when perpetrated by a scientist like Collins. Where either of
these physicists uses the term "God"-as in Einstein's famous "God does not
play dice..."-he uses it metaphorically. Any honest engagement with their
work reveals that both Einstein and Hawking reject the notion of Collins'
God as fully as any atheist. Collins suggests otherwise at every
opportunity.

In his role as Christian apologist, Collins also makes the repellent claim
that "the traditional lore about Galileo's persecutions by the Church is
overblown." Lest we forget: Galileo, the greatest scientist of his time, was
forced to his knees under threat of torture and death, obliged to recant his
understanding of the Earth's motion, and placed under house arrest for the
rest of his life by steely-eyed religious maniacs. He worked at a time when
every European intellectual lived in the grip of a Church that thought
nothing of burning scholars alive for merely speculating about the nature of
the stars. As Collins notes, this is the same Church that did not absolve
Galileo of heresy for 350 years (in 1992). When it did, it ascribed his
genius to God, "who, stirring in the depths of his spirit, stimulated him,
anticipating and assisting his intuitions." Collins clearly approves of this
sordid appropriation, and goes on to say that all the fuss about Galileo
was, in the end, unnecessary, because "the claims that heliocentricity
contradicted the Bible are now seen to have been overstated...." (And what
if they weren't overstated? What then?) It is simply astonishing that a
scientist has produced such a pious glossing of the centuries of religious
barbarism that were visited upon generations of other scientists.

If one wonders how beguiled, self-deceived and carefree in the service of
fallacy a scientist can be in the United States in the 21st century, "The
Language of God" provides the answer. The only thing that mitigates the harm
this book will do to the stature of science in the United States is that it
will be mostly read by people for whom science has little stature already.
Viewed from abroad, "The Language of God" will be seen as another reason to
wonder about the fate of American society. Indeed, it is rare that one sees
the thumbprint of historical contingency so visible on the lens of
intellectual discourse. This is an American book, attesting to American
ignorance, written for Americans who believe that ignorance is stronger than
death. Reading it should provoke feelings of collective guilt in any
sensitive secularist. We should be ashamed that this book was written in our
own time.

Sam Harris is the author of the New York Times bestseller, The End of Faith:
Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason and Letter to a Christian Nation.
He is a graduate in philosophy from Stanford University and has studied both
Eastern and Western religious traditions, along with a variety of
contemplative disciplines, for twenty years. Mr. Harris is now completing a
doctorate in neuroscience. His work has been discussed in The New York
Times, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Chicago
Tribune, The Economist, The Guardian, The Independent, The Globe and Mail,
New Scientist, SEED Magazine, and many other journals. Mr. Harris makes
regular appearances on television and radio to discuss the danger that
religion now poses to modern societies. The End of Faith won the 2005 PEN
Award for Nonfiction. Several foreign editions are in press. Mr. Harris
lives in New York City.

His most recent book is "Letter to a Christian Nation" (Amazon)

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