In this corner, representing reason, is Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith and #1 militant fundamentalist atheist; in the other corner, representing faith, is science writer and accommodationist Philip Ball. See them battle it out at the Reason Project website.
Mano a mano, Sam Harris vs. Phillip Ball
June 24, 2009 • 5:31 am
After reading the whole tiresome exchange I’m left with more questions than answers. Phillip Ball just doesn’t make sense. He not only seem like an accommodationist, but as someone who is in large very positive to religion.
Either he in extremely inconsistent in his arguments, or I am just lacking coffee.
Spoiler: neither Harris nor Ball convince each other of their positions.
I almost choked on some food there…
Very droll 😀
Somewhere in middle America an idealistic college freshman just lost his innocence.
Great line from Sam:-
“Religion is probably the most consequential and divisive species of ignorance at work in the world today, and yet it is systematically shielded from criticism, even where it explicitly conflicts with science”
Jerry, it’s unfortunate that you’ve propagated Harris’s mistake in reading Ball as an “accommodationist”. If it wasn’t already clear from the original article, Ball made it perfectly clear in his blog that he does not think religion and science are compatible.
I must say that Harris has gone down in my estimation after reading this exchange. While he was right to criticise Nature’s general accommodationist stance, he was too quick to jump to the conclusion that Ball’s article was more of the same, and after his error was pointed out to him he refused to backtrack but instead searched for increasingly flimsy reasons to condemn Ball.
One can certainly disagree with Ball’s relative complacency about the dangers of religion, a complacency arising perhaps from his safer British perspective. But there was nothing particularly unreasonable about his article, and for Harris to assign it to The Reason Project’s Hall of Shame does not reflect well on the reasonableness of that project.
Note: I’ve only read the freely available part of Ball’s article. It appears there may be more available to subscribers.
I feel the same as stated here by RichardW.
Harris makes many good points but his aim should not have been at Ball. I agree with Harris’ position but I can see where Ball is coming from, his position is not accomadationist, but wishy-washy.
Wrong. Ball makes perfectly clear his NOMA’esque views about how religion finds some “truth” that science can’t touch, and that we, for this reason, shouldn’t be to harsh on it. Sam DESTROYS Ball in his latest reply, and I do think its a bit of a shame that he isnt given the chance to reply. It would be fun, but probably not very fruitful to hear it.
I may be alone amongst atheists in this regard, but I really don’t like Sam Harris. His gullibility towards ESP and other “paranormal” phenomena is very hypocritical for someone who constantly berates others for not being rational. His stance on the Iraq war is simply appalling. The fact that he actually pulls out the BS “ticking time bomb” scenario for torture in The End of Faith is even worse. Though he constantly trumpets science and evidence, if you actually look at the claims he makes about the world you find they are often wildly inaccurate and sloppy. And if you read his stuff, he’s really just repeating the same points over and over and over in different words. It’s been a while since he came up with anything new. As far as I can tell, he’s more bark than bite when it comes to reason and science.
Gimme Dawkins or Dennett any day over Harris.
Wes,
You don’t really have Harris’ views straight:
http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/response-to-controversy2/
Accomodationist always get incoherent to avoid acknowledging that they are giving some brands of superstition that they would not give others, and in doing so, they are propping up this damaging notion that faith is something to be respected… coddled… encouraged!
Faith is not a means of knowledge. All brands of magical thinking should be dismissed equally (or ignored equally) in the realm of science. Religionists need to be encouraged to keep their beliefs as private as they wish those other wacky cultists would keep theirs.
Rock on, Sam.
The statement he made most coherently did in fact acknowledge that he coddles most superstition, except for some specific brands, while confusing faith and knowledge:
“I know plenty of religious people who believe because it helps them in life and makes them feel better. That seems a pretty good reason to me, even if I don’t share the view. (I hope it’s clear that, if ‘good reasons’ like that lead people to deny evolution or refuse blood transfusions, my magnanimity soon evaporates. I guess that makes me one of those British empiricists.) ”
I’m pretty sure this statement is the one that convinced Sam to end the exchange.
Yes, but when you pin them down on that, they began the straw manning, courtier’s reply, and “atheists are shrill” whining.
Scientology makes people feel better; apparently it’s also helped a lot of people get off drugs. I know lots of people who feel super after visiting psychics, homeopaths, and astrologists. Heck, I even hear that smoking helps schizophrenia. But that doesn’t mean that science needs to give these notions special standing. I wish Nature had treated Francis Collins bogus claims the same way they would have treated these viewpoints– for the same reason. Either dismiss these notions,ignore them, or comment on them in regards to what science can say–even if it hurts feelings and pokes wholes in the delusion people feel “saved” for believing in. To fail to do so is hypocritical.
Science is our best means of inoculating against woo memes. And when you defend this idea that there is divine knowledge, you are responsible on some level for the damage that comes from such beliefs. You can’t respect one persons “divine truths” or “invisible savior” without respecting all of them since there is no way to tell one from the other nor from the imaginary or “harmful”.
I have slightly mixed feelings about this, now I’ve read it all. I’m kind of on Sam’s side (surprise! surprise!), but Ball isn’t exactly what I’d think of as an accommodationist. He seems to me to be someone who agrees with Sam (and me, and obviously Jerry) that there are genuine incompatibilities between religion and science. He just underestimates the dangers posed by religion because he seems to imagine that the typical religionist in the world today is like his pals in the Anglican church who may have very liberal theological and political views. Well, yes, I like such people, too, and am happy to have some of them as friends. But they are not typical of religion as we have known it historically or as it is understood by the majority of its current adherents or by its most powerful current adherents.
The other thing is that the original article that he wrote was, at best, patronising towards people like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, affecting a superior tone and casting them as naive. If he never says anything with an explicitly accommodationist meaning, he certainly plays to an audience that he assumes will (of course) see people like Richard Dawkins as unreasonable. I find this annoying. By contrast, the article was soft on BioLogos.
If Ball can’t “get” that this is how the piece comes across when you read it cold, he deserves the relentless interrogation that he receives in the exchange with Sam Harris. If the original article hadn’t been so bad, I’d say that Harris is too hard on him when he’s actually being quite conciliatory. The trouble is that the original article really was that bad and Ball never ackowledges it clearly.
Ball starts his article with:
“To my mind, the most problematic of these is the distinction between those who believe in the value of knowledge and learning, whether artists, scientists, historians or politicians, and those who reject, even denigrate, intellectualism in world affairs.
“But others feel that the most serious disparity is now between those who trust in science and Enlightenment rationalism, and those who are guided by religious dogma.”
and concludes with:
“In other words, this is not a matter of science versus faith, but of the rejection of scientific ideas that challenge power structures…
“So there is little to be gained from trying to topple the temple — it’s the false priests who are the menace.”
The first part appears to mean that being guided by religious dogma isn’t a big deal as long as people “value knowledge and learning”. He says similar things elsewhere, so I will assume that he really means this. His conclusion appears to be what Coyne described (in Truckling to the Faithful) as taking accomodationism not as a philosophical position, but only as a tactical one, since I don’t remember him actually arguing that faith and reason actually are compatible, only that we shouldn’t poke the dragon.
I have to conclude that if he has a point at all, it is accomodationist in nature; though to his credit, he isn’t accusing “militant atheists” of hurting anything and telling them to shut up, but only arguing that the fight is pointless. He mentioned Dawkin’s article “I’m an atheist, BUT”, but I think the line “I could bear any of these downers, if they were uttered in something approaching a tone of regret or concern.” would apply to him.