"...and even the clerics give in."

Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan have been exchanging posts about religion. You can see their first exchange here and follow links to the second, third, etc.

Harris has now posted his fourth missive, and it's full of arguments (not new to me or any other atheist/agnostic -- and probably not new to many religious people, either, for that matter -- but well articulated here) that leave me very curious as to how Sullivan (a trained debater and all-around smart guy) will respond. Here's a bit of Harris:

It is the willingness of scientists to say "I don't know" -- to really integrate doubt into their view of the world -- that constitutes their privileged position with respect to truth. As you know, there are an uncountable number of questions upon which religion once offered a faith-based answer, which have now been ceded to the care of science. Indeed, the process of scientific conquest and religious forfeiture is relentless, unidirectional, and highly predictable. Some smart person begins to doubt received opinion -- about the causes of illness, the movement of celestial bodies, the nature of sensory perception, etc. -- he or she then observes the world more closely (often making shrewd use of technology and/or mathematics) and makes predictions that can be verified by others. What we see, time and again, is a general unwillingness for religious people to seriously interact with this discourse (and even an eagerness to subjugate or murder its perpetrators) whenever it challenges doctrines to which they are emotionally attached. Eventually, however, the power that comes with actually understanding the world becomes too seductive to ignore, and even the clerics give in. In this way, real knowledge, being truly universal, erodes the basis for religious discord. Muslims and Christians cannot disagree about the causes of cholera, for instance, because whatever their holy books might say about infectious disease, a genuine understanding of cholera has arrived from another quarter. Epidemiology trumps religion (or it should), especially when people are watching their children die. This is where our hope for a truly nonsectarian future lies: when things matter, people tend to want to understand what is actually going on in the world. Science (and rational discourse generally) delivers this understanding and offers a very frank appraisal of its current limitations; Religion fails on both counts.

I think the disconnect between the two writers exists almost entirely because of organized religion. I'm almost certain Sullivan would deny this, but to him and other intellectually rigorous believers, the doctrines of Christianity seem less important as Truth than as symbol. The reason I respect Sullivan's religion is that I honestly believe the crucial thing to him is not dogma but simply the exercise of faith, the almost romantic embrace of mystery and the belief that there are some mysteries we will never solve through science (a belief I share). But I think he's far from wedded to defending everything that a literal reading of the Bible would yield. It's why he's perfectly capable of respecting the religious views of others (including atheists) in a way that an argument about truth rarely, if ever, allows. (If someone told him that they earnestly believed, with all their heart and mind, that 3 and 4 totaled 8, or that cancer was caused by thinking too long about television while jogging, I doubt Sullivan would respect that in any meaningful way.) The fact is that many of the details in religion's stories stretch rational belief past its breaking point, never mind the additional fact that many of those details and stories contradict each other, something that competing claims for the truth can do only if one of them isn't really the truth.

But while Sullivan smartly and compassionately writes about his belief (and doubt), and there are undoubtedly many who share his temperament, millions don't. Check this out, and then come back to me:



The narrow focus of that clip might make it a cheap shot in a broader debate, but if that statistic of 54 million American adults not believing in evolution is even close to accurate, that's plenty broad. And Sullivan most certainly doesn't deserve to have to tackle the impulses in that clip, but given the terms of the debate, I think he must. Considering religious faith as broadly as possible, someone of Sullivan's deep intelligence has to confront the unique ways in which that faith can license certain types of ignorance and intolerance. (Sorry for all the italics. I'm used to talking about things like this -- a former debater myself -- and I miss spoken emphasis sometimes.)

Harris, like so many rational atheists before him, is having a field day because of this gap, between the ineradicable, beautiful (in my opinion, despite even that clip) human impulse to believe in something grand, mysterious, and organizing, and the unfortunate impulse to codify that imagined thing until it becomes shabby, baseless, and arrogant -- far less grand and not at all mysterious. In short, because of humanity's stubborn, misguided insistence that our deepest, most meaningful searches lead to math, not metaphor.