Sam Harris Speaks in Berkeley

by Robin Marie

Friday, November 12, 2010 at 07:40 AM EST

I was in Berkeley last night to see Sam Harris talk about his new book, The Moral Landscape. Harris makes a convincing case for how science, so broadly defined that I think ‘rationality' really serves as a more appropriate phrase, can allow us to determine right from wrong, or when one of those clear positions is not available, the ethically most optimal behavior.

Harris's argument really only requires you to accept one assumption -- that morality is based on human wellbeing; ie, human suffering (of all kinds, physical, psychological, ‘spiritual' if you will even) is bad, human happiness and fulfillment, good. I know that many of the religious will lay their objection precisely here -- that without God you cannot provide any reason for why human suffering should be considered bad -- and yet when Sam Harris asks his audience to imagine the worst possible world, one in which everyone is suffering the maximum amount of suffering possible, he points out that no one would ever find reason to argue that this would be a good or neutral world, whatever their metaphysics. (I could go a lot more into this, but I imagine he does so in a much better way than I could, so for the curious I would read the book.) But it also occurred to me that religion itself often lacks a compelling argument for why human suffering should be considered bad -- after all, the concept of original sin has been interpreted by many religious groups to mean we ought to be suffering, that we deserve suffering, and that our lives are hardly about happiness. It is difficult to see why this (and several other) religious metaphysics actually compels us to care about the well being of our fellow human beings any more than our reason and instinctual humanity does.

From there, Harris's argument is largely common sense or, at least this is how it came across to me. This is not to belittle his accomplishment; to display how clear his argument is, Harris has to cut through a lot of obfuscation caused by outdated philosophical debates and postmodern obsessions about subjectivity.

Of the three biggest "New Atheists," I have to say Harris is my favorite -- his background in philosophy and his interest in transcendent, emotional experience makes him more well-rounded, in my mind, than either Dawkins or Hitchens, and allows him to speak more broadly about the implications of atheism to the human condition, rather than simply discrediting religion and leaving it there. I was particularly impressed by his contribution to this discussion. He still, however, goes after Islam in a way which I feel unfairly leaves out the social and political context of Islamic terrorism -- and I will talk much more about that next week, when I post about my recent interview with Reza Aslan -- but no one is perfect.

This article originally appeared on An American Atheist.