@mitchellmckain, @Darek_Barefoot I will respond to you both later, you´re right and wrong on different occasions. But first let me finish OPs request and comment on the rest of the article.
In fact, Collins’ ignorance of world religion is prodigious. For instance, he regularly repeats the Christian talking point about Jesus being the only person in human history who ever claimed to be God (as though this would render the opinions of an uneducated carpenter of the 1st century especially credible). Collins seems oblivious to the fact that saints, yogis, charlatans, and schizophrenics by the thousands claim to be God at this very moment, and it has always been thus. Forty years ago, a very unprepossessing Charles Manson convinced a rather large band of misfits in the San Fernando Valley that he was both God and Jesus. (Should we consult Manson on questions of cosmology? He still walks among us—or at least sits—in Corcoran State Prison.) The fact that Collins, as both a scientist and as an influential apologist for religion, repeatedly emphasizes the silly fiction of Jesus’ singular self-appraisal is one of many embarrassing signs that he has lived too long in the echo chamber of Evangelical Christianity.
Is @ManiacalVesalius still active? He is certainly helpful when it comes to understanding of scholarship. However let´s make something clear: Harris accusing Collins of being oblivious when it comes to world religions is quite juicy. I confess, I laughed. However he would be right, that if Jesus merely proclaimed divinty for himself and that was it, that would be a quite paltry foundation of a religion. That much is clear. Now, it isn´t even clear, that Jesus claimed to be divine. I, following Brant Pietre, think that he did (at least to a certain extent) and that certain passages only make sense when read in that light. Larry Hurtado doubted that. Nontheless, if the mere claim was the foundation, we would have nothing. But, paraphrasing Nils Dahl, something must have happened within the lifetime of Jesus´ ministry that he fueled the hope of his followers that indeed the messiah has arrived. And no scholar, no matter which theological background, denies that Jesus was known as a miracle worker and exorcist. So we have more than Harris claims. Who would have thought?
It is simply astounding that this passage was written by a scientist with the intent of demonstrating the compatibility of faith and reason. While Collins argues for the rational basis of his faith, passages like this make it clear that he “decided” (his word) to believe in God for emotional reasons. And if we thought Collins’ reasoning could grow no more labile, he has since divulged that the waterfall was frozen into three streams, which put him in mind of the Holy Trinity.
I understand Collins as having had some kind of religious experience. Now, when debating, experiences, because of their subjective nature, aren´t worth much. However they can provide irrefuatble evidence for the person experiencing them.
Now to the “decision” to believe. It is rather astounding that he would write that, wasn´t it his buddy Christopher Hitchens writing with fiery hatred about a, as he took it, fictional entity, namely God. That there is emotional attachement on both sides is undeinable. On the top of my head I can name the atheists Thomas Nagel, Patrick Grim, Klaas Kraay and Graham Oppy as atheists who would prefer and have argued for it being better that God would not exist and natrualism were true. Therefor denying emotional attachement to certain convictions becomes a ridicolous position. The Freedom From Religion Foundation is full of such people.
Another good example is the metaphysical problem consciousness provides. Now, this is only one of the problems naturalism hasn´t offered a good metaphysical foundation for. The other would be e.g. conscience, normativity, rationality, reason, intentionality, the existence of contingent things. Does that drive the normal naturalist to the conclusion that his position must be false? No, normally he just goes back to the drawing board and no matter how many times the model gets refuted, the conviction is that naturalism just has to be true, and it goes back to the drawing board.
The theist never denied the will to believe. There is an obvious distinction between acknowledging that God exists, e.g. as a trancedent intelligent foundation of reality, as I think can be shown by the tools of natural theology, and believing in God as the foundation who wants to be in a relationship with his creatures. An unwilling person obviously is neither able nor willing to take the second step. But this comes a surprise to absolutely noone.
As believers, you are right to hold fast to the concept of God as Creator; you are right to hold fast to the truths of the Bible; you are right to hold fast to the conclusion that science offers no answers to the most pressing questions of human existence; and you are right to hold fast to the certainty that the claims of atheistic materialism must be steadfastly resisted…. (Collins, 2006, p.178)
God, who is not limited to space and time, created the universe and established natural laws that govern it. Seeking to populate this otherwise sterile universe with living creatures, God chose the elegant mechanism of evolution to create microbes, plants, and animals of all sorts. Most remarkably, God intentionally chose the same mechanism to give rise to special creatures who would have intelligence, a knowledge of right and wrong, free will, and a desire to seek fellowship with Him. He also knew these creatures would ultimately choose to disobey the Moral Law. (Ibid, p. 200-201)
Imagine: the year is 2006; half of the American population believes that the universe is 6,000 years old; our president had just used his first veto to block federal funding for the most promising medical research on religious grounds; and one of the foremost scientists in the land had that to say, straight from the heart (if not the brain).
In this passage Harris and Collins are both correct, though the former, again, only with qualification. The atheistic materialism is not a scientific, but a philsoophical position. And, as I would argue, a nonsensical one, on which the success of the science becomes a much greater miracle. The philosophy of the modern age really is a trainwreck.
Harris is correct to decry the fact that such a huge portion of the population are adherents of YEC. However here it also shows his own childish picture of religion, as he conflates this with the position of orthodox and traditional Christianity, rather than the wrongheadedness of denominations who invented a strict literalism, never found in traditional denominations. A myth Harris helped invent and which I come across all too often on the internet is the ridicolous idea that the churchfathers, like Aquinas and Augustine, or the orthodox Jews were themselves YEC. It is clear by just reading their own texts that they never hold to such a strict literalism and especially when it comes to orthodox Judaism, which with I engage currently, although holds to the divinity of the Torah, never required or believed the texts to be strict recollections of historical events.
Collins has since started an organization called the BioLogos Foundation, whose purpose (in the words of its mission statement) is to demonstrate “the compatibility of the Christian faith with what science has discovered about the origins of the universe and life.” BioLogos is funded by the Templeton Foundation, a religious organization that, because of its astonishing wealth, has managed to purchase the complicity of otherwise secular scientists as it seeks to re-brand religious faith as a legitimate arm of science.
Would Collins have received the same treatment in Nature if he had argued for the compatibility between science and witchcraft, astrology, or Tarot cards?
The last time I read something this stupid I was reading earlier passages of the same article.
Collins states, correctly, that “monotheism and polytheism cannot both be right.” But doesn’t he think that at some point in the last thousand years a Hindu or two has prayed in a temple, perhaps to the elephant-headed god Ganesh, and experienced similar feelings of peace? What might he, as a scientist, make of this fact?
It would be a non-sequitar to therefor conclude that one or both were wrong.Two answers can be offered. First, as e.g. hold by the Catholic Church, that there are truths to be found in every religion. Thís doesn´t mean that every religion is correct, but that one is not excluded from relating to God when doesn´t adhere to a certain religion. I reject strict particularism. David Bentley Hart is an author who is worth reading and who writes on that topic.
Also, again, experiences are context-dependend. And it is rather peculiar that the experiences found in two religions is taken as an argument for atheism. Why would it?
Collins argues that science makes belief in God “intensely plausible”—the Big Bang, the fine-tuning of Nature’s constants, the emergence of complex life, the effectiveness of mathematics, all suggest to him that a “loving, logical, and consistent” God exists; but when challenged with alternate (and far more plausible) accounts of these phenomena—or with evidence that suggests that God might be unloving, illogical, inconsistent, or, indeed, absent—Collins declares that God stands outside of Nature, and thus science cannot address the question of His existence at all.
There are certain inductive arguments which can be made from such phenomena and the success of science. For the interested, please check out Robin Collins. Also Francis Collins is pointing at the success which suggest the truth of the PSR, which, following the Rationalist school and the Leibnizian arguments, necessarily leads to a necessary ground with divine attributes. But I´m not surprised that Harris was unaware.
Indeed, Collins freely admits that if all his scientific arguments for the plausibility of God were proven to be in error, his faith would be undiminished, as it is founded upon the belief, shared by all serious Christians, that the Gospel account of the miracles of Jesus is true.
I skipped something, as it is obvious that discussing religion or Aristotelian philosophy (a Polkinghorne quote) with Harris is about as fruitful as discussing Beethoven with a tone deaf.
But the quote above summarizes everything that is wrong with the article. Harris, similarily to Dawkins, takes God as a scientific theory, while for the classical theist God is the explanation as to why there can be any science at all. The scientific theories, e.g. big bang cosmology, fine-tuning etc. provide evidence, but they aren´t, for most people, the ground for the belief. It would be a very weak ground indeed. The metaphysical arguments need no science at all.
Biblical scholars generally agree that the earliest Gospel, the Gospel of Mark, was written several decades after the events it purports to describe. Of course, no one has access to the original manuscript of Mark, or of any of the other Gospels: rather, there are thousands of fragmentary copies of copies of copies, many of which show obvious errors or signs of later interpolation. The earliest of these fragments dates to second century, but for many other sections of the text we must rely on copies that were produced centuries later. One would hope that a scientist might see that these disordered and frequently discordant texts constitute a rather precarious basis for believing in the divinity of Jesus.
Biblical scholars also agree that the sources go back until a very short time, at most two years after the cross. And they are in agreement that we, in essence, have the original text. Even atheistic biblical scholars, like Gerd Lüdemann or the Jesus Seminar, concede way more to the Christian tradition than Harris seems to be aware. If one doesn´t apply an arbitrary methodological naturalism to the area of history, it can be concluded that the Christian tradition at least has a reasonable foundation for the core of the belief.
Indeed, first-hand accounts of miracles are extremely common, even in the 21st century. I’ve met scores of educated men and women who are convinced that their favorite Hindu or Buddhist guru has magic powers, and many of the miracles that they describe are every bit as outlandish as those attributed to Jesus. Stories about yogis and mystics walking on water, raising the dead, flying without the aid of technology, materializing objects, reading minds, foretelling the future are circulating right now, in communities where the average levels of education, access to information, and skeptical doubt are far higher than we would expect of first century fishermen and goatherds
I don´t see how that could possibly threaten the Christian worldview, when one isn´t committed to a strict particularism. More importantly how in the world could anyone take that as evidence for atheism. Remember my point about the worth of contemporary academic philosophy! How could this nonsense graduate?!
In the following passage it just throws up the question as to how Harris would define “God”. As indicated by the article up to this point, I take the defintion to be rather childish. And the comparisons with Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great with Jesus, just provides further evidence for his historical illiteracy.
It is on this basis that the future head of the NIH recommends that we believe the following propositions:
-
Jesus Christ, a carpenter by trade, was born of a virgin, ritually murdered as a scapegoat for the collective sins of his species, and then resurrected from death after an interval of three days.
-
He promptly ascended, bodily, to “heaven”—where, for two millennia, he has eavesdropped upon (and, on occasion, even answered) the simultaneous prayers of billions of beleaguered human beings.
-
Not content to maintain this numinous arrangement indefinitely, this invisible carpenter will one day return to earth to judge humanity for its sexual indiscretions and skeptical doubts, at which time he will grant immortality to anyone who has had the good fortune to be convinced, on mother’s knee, that this baffling litany of miracles is the most important series of truth-claims ever revealed about the cosmos.
-
Every other member of our species, past and present, from Cleopatra to Einstein, no matter what his or her terrestrial accomplishments, will be consigned to a far less desirable fate, best left unspecified.
-
In the meantime, God/Jesus may or may not intervene in our world, as He pleases, curing the occasional end-stage cancer (or not), answering an especially earnest prayer for guidance (or not), consoling the bereaved (or not), through His perfectly wise and loving agency.
What is there even to comment? I take this as further evidence, that discussing such matters with him is superflous.
Harris goes on to comment about the backlash he received and how he supposedly carricatures religion. He calls for the value of reason and rationality. As someone who values the school of Rationalism and their worth for science, I agree. I take Harris to be unaware of the metaphysical committments he forces himself to.
The soul-doctrine suffers further upheaval in light of the fatal resemblance of the human brain to the brains of other animals. The obvious continuity of our mental powers with those of ostensibly soulless primates raises special difficulties. If the joint ancestors of chimpanzees and human beings did not have souls, when did we acquire ours? Most religions ignore these awkward facts and simply assert that human beings possess a unique form of subjectivity that has no homolog among lower animals. Indeed, Collins asserts this. He claims that the human mind cannot be the product of the human brain or the human brain the product of unguided evolution: rather, at some glorious moment in the development of our species God inserted crucial components—including an immortal soul, free will, the moral law, spiritual hunger, genuine altruism, etc. This claim makes a mockery of whole fields of study—neuroscience, psychology, cognitive science, behavioral economics, among others—and, if taken seriously, would obliterate our growing understanding of the human mind. If we must look to religion to explain our moral sense, what should we make of the deficits of moral reasoning associated with conditions like autism, frontal lobe syndrome, and psychopathy? Are these disorders best addressed by theology?
The “soul-doctrine” isn´t threatened by modern science at all. And it was the arbitrary cartesian distinction between quantifiable matter and mind which introduced such classics like the mind-body problem or the ghost in the machince. The scientific interpretation rests on underlying metaphysics, their coherence have to be evaluated on seperate grounds. Even eliminativists like Karl Friston admit that their findings in neuroscience is compatible with every kind of dualism and even idealism. Because they don´t inform the question at all. And this modern confusion leads materialists like Christof Koch to become materialistic panpsychists. It is exactly the incoherence of the modern philosophy why Aristotle is making a return in the academia. And why scholastics are in conversation with analytic philosophers. I think thats great!
By the way, the mental distinction between animal and human is recognized also by atheistic scientists like Steven Pinker and Noam Chomsky. Also theologians like David Bentley Hart ascribe a soul to animals, albeit a lesser one due to the missing self-aware perspective.
Collins’ case for the supernatural origin of morality rests on the further assertion that there can be no evolutionary explanation for genuine altruism.
No, it doesn´t. To be clear, cases like extreme altruism (video below) are certainly hardly explainable by mere Darwinism. But the other point is that morality needs a transcendent foundation if we want it to be objective and not e.g. emotive. On utilitarian grounds I can argue for the goodness of a babies death because of the finitude of resources, weak genetics due to parents or even resource of needed organs for a valuable person in the group (Don´t look at me, I got this bs from Peter Singer!).
Video:
Then Harris argues about politics. I won´t comment on that.
I will conclude with Harris´ last passage:
Collins has written that “science offers no answers to the most pressing questions of human existence” and that “the claims of atheistic materialism must be steadfastly resisted.” One can only hope that these convictions will not affect his judgment at the NIH. Understanding human wellbeing at the level of the brain might very well offer some “answers to the most pressing questions of human existence”—questions like, Why do we suffer? How can we achieve the deepest forms of happiness? Or, indeed, is it possible to love one’s neighbor as oneself? And wouldn’t any effort to explain human nature without reference to a soul, and to explain morality without reference to God, constitute “atheistic materialism”? Must we really entrust the future of biomedical research in the United States to a man who believes that understanding ourselves through science is impossible, while our resurrection from death is inevitable?
I take Harris to be unaware, that atheistic materialism necessarily entails nihilism. I can´t explain it otherwise, but after this howler of an article, I´m not even surprised anymore.
Whats stranger though is his assertion, found in other writings by him as well, that the brain could provide answers for the existential questions. Harris generally argues that neuroscience can solve our quest for happiness, when we can immediately react to the desires of the brain, once we have the tools to find those out immediately. This view is childish and naive. Once someone asks the existential questions and comes to a negative, depressing conclusion, that life is meaningless, our appaerance random and life is only suffering, then no amount of shorttime pleasures will ultimately lead to a good life. We can try to distract ourselves from those realizations, but we aren´t able to completely hide from them and then, when we lay ourselves down, those realizations hit full force before sleep sets in. Not even on the naturalistic view can a life be said to be a good life, when one throws himself into every pleasure available. The popularity of Jordan Peterson should come to the surprise of nobody.
Harris further strawmans Collins´ own and the position of other Christian believers. We would never claim that we can´t understand ourselves through scienc. What we deny is the extent, exhaustive understanding with merely the scientific tool is impossible. On the scientific method we are matter in physical motion. Good luck trying to construe an coherent ontological picture on that one.
