I admire Sam Harris, I really do.
I disagree with him on almost every level, by the way, but I do really and truly admire him.
This weekend just gone, Harris kicked off the 2012 Sydney Festival of Dangerous Ideas with his talk The Delusion of Free Will, placing himself forever on my list of people to respect and defend.
For those of you who may have been living under a rock the last ten years or so, Harris is one of the ‘New Atheists’, and a member of the ‘Four Horsemen’. He is one of the world’s most outspoken atheists, second in notoriety only to Professor Richard Dawkins himself.
Let me quickly announce that, as a Christian and a career armchair philosopher, I do not share the irrational hatred of the Four Horsemen and that so many of my fellow theists seem to have. These men have done amazing things in bringing the big questions of life into the thoughts and conversations of the common layman and woman. However, I do often find myself shaking my head at these men, wondering how so many people can read their arguments as gospel truth (pun completely intended).
One of the bigger and more divisive issues of the a/theist debate is that of free will versus determinism.
Free will is, in a nutshell, the notion that we are independent and contrary agents. It suggests that we are able to make decisions freely, independent from and often contrary to, our own volition. It could be as simple as having eaten a ham sandwich for lunch every day for the last 20 years and then, just for the heck of it, switch to vegemite. No rhyme, no reason, just because.
Determinism tells us that we are part of an immensely complex and inconceivably huge chain of events and chemical reactions, going all the way back to the big bang and beyond, perhaps into some kind of random quantum hiccup. Everything we do is the sum of everything we have done, and everything that has happened to us and, to quote the ever-zen Morpheus “could not have happened any other way”.
Theists (the technical term for us God bothering folk, which includes Christians, Jews, Muslims, Wiccans, and anyone else who believes in any kind of a God) tend to be proponents of free will. After all, how else could we freely choose to accept a God of any kind, unless we had free will? How could any just God hold us responsible for our actions unless we freely chose them?
But here is where it gets tricky. Many atheists I have known, both online and in the great wide world, tend to shy away from advocating determinism. As conscious and sentient beings, we have a difficult time accepting the notion that we are powerless to stop the great chain of events, that we are merely strapped into our own bodies, enjoying the ride. The implications of determinism are oft ugly ones. The murderer, the thief, the abusive husband/wife/father/mother did not actually choose to act in a monstrous way, they were simply ‘programmed’ (for lack of a better word) to do so by their genes, their history, and the great chain of events that is the universe.
Consider what it would mean, were this true. Every bad thing you have done, you were programmed to do. Every bad thing you will do, you will be programmed to do, and will have no other choice but to do it.
Does this excuse the murderer? Can he stand before a judge and say “But your honour, my genes made me do it?” possibly he could. Of course, the judge could then say “True they did, and my genes are making me condemn you to life in prison.” and thus the status quo is preserved. But it certainly raises the question, what is there to life if we are all merely puppets, following instructions encoded into our bodies at the deepest levels?
At the core of many a/theistic debates lies the question “If there is no God, if there is no soul, if there is nothing but the natural world and the laws of physics what, then, is the value of human choice? How did we come to be the way we are, and what drives us to do the things we do?”
Enter Sam Harris the Brave. Finally, an atheist philosopher who is willing to accept the implications of atheism – naturalism (for those new to philosophy, ‘atheism’ is etymologically defined as belief that God or gods do not exist; ‘naturalism’ is defined as belief that only the material world exists, and everything can be explained by natural sciences and chemical reactions).
Is the possibility that we are automatons following set commands in our genes so horrifying that it must be considered false? Certainly not. The truth is the truth, no matter how distasteful.
I am not going to make arguments for or against Sam Harris’ theory at this point. He could be right, he could be wrong.
But I’d happily shake his hand for being brave enough to say what many other atheists won’t.
Bravo, Harris the Brave.
