Why Sam Harris is wrong

As factual knowledge increases exponentially, the need to open the debate of religion and the need to reconcile religion with knowledge in the modern era has become a necessity. Around the world, religious, faith-bearing people are in a constant battle to protect and conserve their faith in their families and societies from those who espouse to demolish the religious construct in the name of facts and science.

One of the Four Horsemen of New Atheism, Sam Harris, has gained a lot of popularity for his criticism of religion, Islam in particular. Harris description of Islam has repeatedly been derogatory, in his view Islam is ‘all fringe and no center’, and a ‘doctrine that presents a unique danger to all of us’, and is ‘especially belligerent and inimical to the norms of civil discourse’, as it involves ‘bad ideas, held for bad reasons, leading to bad behavior’. For Sam to be a best-selling author and his frequency in media, this hate-mongering against Islam makes him a factor in rising Islamophobia in the West, and calls for a little scrutiny of his thinking.

Sam’s using science, neuroscience, politics and philosophy for rationalising his religion-free ethics has been a huge undertaking that would obviously be filled with controversies — the reason being that religion is a much larger domain than science or philosophy, just like looking at the Universe from one’s telescope can give information but can never give the full picture.

Sam’s book The Moral Landscape calls for a critical overview. In the book, Sam explains that people believe that morality has been derived from religion which is determined by a divine power — but that the study of the brain in modern times has shown that morality is actually a completely natural consequence of our neurology. Like all our other organs, our brain functions only through chemical, electrical and physical processes, which determine our brain state; these brain-states are near universals to all humans, so if two people both feel sad, the brain states will have the same pattern. This means that morality is also a matter of brain states: so, we decide whether an action is moral or immoral when it makes us feel good or bad, and the brain state of that is induced by the regulation of neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin. Sam then concludes that ‘morality’ can be generalized as the idea of ‘minimizing unnecessary suffering’ and increasing ‘well-being’, and that there is nothing mystical about that; they are universally intelligible ideas that can be traced back to the working of the brain.

So, how do dopamine and serotonin decide what to feel good or bad about? According to Sam, they are a result of a long chain of millions of years of evolutionary ‘accidents’ that have added up to direct the brain chemicals to make us ‘feel’ in certain ways.

Sam’s overrating of dopamine and serotine is clear. The two neurotransmitters are chemicals released by neurons, nerve cells of the brain, to send signals to other nerve cells. This mean that it is not the two chemicals that are dictating ‘good and bad’, but the brain cells that are producing them. And this brings us back to square one, where we ask whether it is the brain that influences the thought or the thought that influences the brain — or is it a good idea in the first place, to negate any one of the two vital entities, as neither of them can survive without the other. But even if we had to make such a choice, why would we not give the thinking, conceptualizing ‘thought’ precedence over senseless brain matter?

If one gives precedence to the chemical, material aspect of the brain, and one follows Sam’s line, of the human’s to be just a chemical structure, a product of millions of years of chemical and structural evolution, which in itself is not a scientifically viable idea, then we are led to believe that we are just another ‘accident’ in the ongoing evolutionary process upon which we have no real control. Thus our moral instincts may just as well be illusions that have in so many generations become our permanent delusions.

That is why Sam negates the idea of free will, even when the whole idea of negating religion was to allow humanity exercise its free will. But for Sam, humans are biochemical puppets, and free will is ‘incoherent’, as it ‘cannot be mapped on to any conceivable reality’. So, just to negate a morality-code unveiled by a Divine Being, Sam concludes a moral structure completely ‘determined’ by neurology which is in turn ‘determined’ by evolution.

The difference in the two lines of thought is clear: while religion, especially Islam, calls upon humanity’s free will to ‘chose’ good upon evil, and to understand the consequences of their choices and take responsibility of them, Sam just asks of humanity to do what feels good! Sam ‘believes’ that people will generally make the good choices. But then, can Sam justify good and bad, when it feels good to make wars and bomb other people’s homes; when it feels good to increase the rich-poor divide by accumulating wealth in transnational corporations; when it feels good to legalize prostitution, gambling, drinking and same-sex, and ban second-marriage and head-scarfs — is all this coming from dopamine? Or is there an even sinister underpinning?

There is more contradiction when, on the one hand Sam asserts that our moral compass is fickle, so we need objective science to answer moral questions; and on the other he concludes that there are no absolute answers, rather there are many right answers to moral questions which not only diminishes science’s meticulousness, but it also takes us to ‘moral relativism’ — something that practically erases the line between good and bad.

Sam portrays believers to be delusional, for believing in a ‘supposed’ God and doing good deeds with the selfish thought of getting rewarded in heaven or averting punishment in hell. Yet he asks us to put our ‘belief’ in senseless chemicals that are clueless of the myriad ‘selfish’ chemical reactions spanning in millions of years, that led them to be in the neurons of our brains. Why should we be dictated by chemicals? Why should we make a good choice to avert being caught by the police or being punished by the court of law? Why should we not kill, rape and steal when it feels the very right thing to do? Why are we delaying the evolutionary cycle of the ‘survival of the fittest’ and not getting rid of the unfit as soon as possible?

Unluckily for Sam and the likes, Divine interference has sent down, from time to time, a moral code that ‘felt good to common sense’ and showed the right way to people even when the wrong ways felt good too. The same Divine that has been behind all creation and all evolution, the same that has inspired ‘thought’ in the brain, inspired ‘belief’ in the thought, and inspired ‘divinity’ in the belief.

As for raw thought, it just doesn’t feel good to believe in dopamine — and it feels real good to believe in God!

Published in The Express Tribune, July 15^th, 2022.

Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.