Yesterday, I began to look at Sam Harris’ attempt to root morality within the field of science. Needless to say, such a claim is highly problematic. As I should in yesterday’s post, not only does Harris acknowledge the problem, he also proves himself unable to resolve it. Today, I wish to conclude my comments on Harris’ “scientific basis for good and evil.”
The Golden Rule?
Ironically, in the middle of his attempts to claim that there is a scientific basis for morality, Harris holds up the Golden Rule as an example of morality, saying, “The Golden Rule really does capture many of our intuitions here” (190).
That’s right, Harris is getting his “moral rule” from…Jesus, the founder of Christianity, the religion that Harris says is such a huge part of society’s problems: “do to others as you would have them do to you, for this is the law and the prophets” (Matthew 7:12). This is simply another version of what Jesus said when he was asked, “What is the greatest commandment?” He replied by quoting the Shema, “Love the LORD your God with all your heart, soul, and mind,” and then adding, “and love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandment hang all the law and the prophets” (Matthew 22:37-40).
Now someone might say, “Jesus didn’t come up with that; it’s found in other religious traditions as well.” If that’s the case, then it damages Harris’ argument even further, for it shows that one of the foundational ideas for morality is, in fact, found in religion, not in science. In addition, there is something else that needs to be pointed out here: the foundation for morality that Jesus puts forward isn’t “science,” nor is it some kind of arbitrary pronouncement from the great judgment seat of God. It is, in fact, love: love of God and love of neighbor is the basis for morality.
It is quite clear that Jesus is linking these two commandments together: what makes it possible to love our neighbors as ourselves is a loving relationship with God: loving your neighbor flows out of loving God–and that should drive our understanding of morality.
This, though, is something that Harris cannot see, or chooses to ignore. Now, I’m sure he will say, “Jesus was such a good moral teacher because he was really in touch with his intuition.” But Jesus was quite clear: love of neighbor is rooted in the love of God, not in getting in touch with our “intuition.” Harris likes what Jesus has to say about ethics, but yet rejects the very basis of the ethics Jesus espouses. Just as he does with the concept of “faith,” Harris just conveniently takes “God” out of the equation and inserts the word “intuition” to takes its place. It’s a semantic trick in order to avoid the obvious: morality comes from faith in, and love of, God.
Is Reason the Guardian of Love?
As he advocates for science and reason being the basis of morality, Harris can certainly write with considerable flourish at times. Consider the following quote:
“How can we encourage other human beings to extend their moral sympathies beyond a narrow locus? How can we learn to be mere human beings, shorn of any more compelling national, ethnic, or religious identity? We can be reasonable. It is in the very nature of reason to fuse cognitive and moral horizons. Reason is nothing less than the guardian of love” (190).
That may sound good, but when one looks more closely at this quote, it is quite ridiculous. How can we encourage ethical and loving behavior that cuts across racial and national boundaries? Harris answers, “Hey guys, let’s just be reasonable!” If only it were that easy. What happens when we try to “be reasonable” with the likes of Stalin, Hitler, Al-Qaeda, ISIS, or Iran? A lot of death, that’s what happens. For men and groups like that, it was “very reasonable” to invade France, kill millions of Christians for the good of the state…you get the picture. “Being reasonable” can be quite a slippery and relative term. Do we really want to base our morality in our faith in human beings’ capacity to “be reasonable”?
When Harris says “reason is the guardian of love,” he actually gets it backwards. Love is actually the guardian of reason. One’s reason goes haywire when one refuses love and chooses to hate. Osama bin Laden’s decision to blow up the twin towers on 9/11 was completely reasonable, given his presuppositions and worldview of hate. If Harris came up to ISIS and said, “Hey, let’s be reasonable!” ISIS would call him an infidel, condemn him for not submitting to their brand of Islam, and then either behead him or burn him alive. For ISIS, that is the “reasonable” thing to do.
So reason is not the guardian of love. Rather, it is the faith, hope, and love found in Christ that is the source and guarantor of reason, ethics, and true humanity. That, in fact, is the heart of the Christian message: the worship and love of God makes us more human by transforming us into the image of Christ. In Christ we see perfectly mature love in action, and that leads to clarity, light, and reason—that leads to God re-creating and resurrecting His image within this human clay, as we are molded more into His image.
Simply put, it is our faith in, and practice of, the love of Christ that leads us to reason, and the sure hope that we too will one day be fully like him as well. All the reason and morality that Harris longs for is found in Christ. But it does not start with “being reasonable.” It starts with faith and love, and it leads us to reason.
Harris’ Commits Intellectual Suicide
Ironically, despite Harris’ claims that we can come to a scientific understanding of good and evil, by the end of chapter six in his book he completely blows the legs out from underneath his own premise when he says,
“Hate, envy, spite, disgust, shame—these are not sources of happiness, personally or socially. Love and compassion are. Like so much that we know about ourselves, claims of this sort need not be validated by a controlled study” (192).
Did you catch that last little bit? Harris says that love and compassion, along with so many other things about human beings, do not need to be “validated by a controlled study.” In other words, Harris has just said, “We don’t need science to validate these things!” How then, may I ask, can science be the basis of morality? It can’t, and Harris knows it.
In any case, this idea of loving others is summed up in a curious quote by Harris near the end of chapter six: “This is not a proposition to be merely believed. It is, rather, a hypothesis to be tested in the laboratory of one’s life” (192). In the first part of this quote we see Harris misunderstanding just what “faith and belief” are. Faith is not merely believing in certain propositions—in fact, mental assent to stated propositions is more rightly what science is. Certain propositions must have evidence to back up their claims to reality. And certainly there are aspects to the Christian faith that fall under this idea, namely the historic truth claims surrounding the life of Christ, the history of Israel, and the realities of a historical resurrection, Jesus’ miracles, Pentecost, and the events of the early Church.
But biblically-defined faith actually is what Harris says in the second part of the quote: it is the living out in real life one’s trust in God. And yes, in a sense, a life of faith is a great test, a great experiment, that is continually challenged in the “laboratory of life.” And so what we see with Harris is that he actually gets a lot actually right—he has just given a pretty good biblical definition of faith! Unfortunately, because he refuses to acknowledge the existence of God, his good definition falls apart, for he attempts to root morality in something that cannot sustain it.
Final Thought on Morality
A lot more can be said on the topic of morality, but I’d like to end with this thought. Harris is wrong to try to root ethics and morality in science. Science can only explain and describe what is, not what people should be like or how they should act. At the same time, I think Christians often have the wrong concept of morality as well, namely that morality is the result of divine fiat–God simply declares that “this” will be “good,” and “that” will be “bad,” as if God could have declared rape and pedophilia to be “moral” and monogamy to be “immoral.”
Simply put, it is a mistake to think that morality and ethics are the outcome and result of divine law. Look again at what Jesus said about loving God and loving your neighbor: He is asked about what the greatest commandment is, and he points to the command to love, and then says all the law and the prophets (i.e. morality) is summed up and rests on those two things.
Morality and ethics is rooted and established in relationship and love, not in some “objective science” or “absolute law.” When understood correctly, the Torah (Jewish Law) is an expression of what love of God and love of neighbor was to look like in that given culture. Therefore, the reason why rape and pedophilia are wrong isn’t simply because “God said so.” It is because such things conflict with loving God and loving our neighbor. You can’t love God and your neighbor if you are raping your neighbor who is made in God’s image.
Yes, morality can be a tricky thing. I think the reason why so many people want 100%, clear cut absolutes is because they are too afraid to really live out that love of God and love of neighbor on a day to day basis. They want to be simply told what to do, and thus be slaves to absolute law. But God wants us to be free image-bearers, basing our actions in love and relationship.
Far from reducing morality to some sort of quagmire of relativity, I think it anchors it in a whole different kind of “absolute” than we’re used to. Anyway, it’s something to think about.
