Sam Harris’ final chapter in The End of Faith is entitled, “Experiments in Consciousness.” In light of the basic premise of his book (i.e. faith is destructive and irrational, and needs to come to an end), it will surprise the reader to find that Harris essentially advocates for eastern meditation and religious practices, all the…
Yesterday, I began to look at Sam Harris’ attempt to root morality within the field of science. Needless to say, such a claim is highly problematic. As I should in yesterday’s post, not only does Harris acknowledge the problem, he also proves himself unable to resolve it. Today, I wish to conclude my comments on…
Despite his attacks on religion and “faith,” atheist Sam Harris nevertheless holds to his own presuppositional faith in “science,” namely that there can be a “scientific basis” for morality. Simply put, morality is not a matter of ethics, it is a matter of science. He writes, “Many people appear to believe that ethical truths are…
In yesterday’s post, I addressed Ken Ham’s use of the Parable of the Ten Virgins in Matthew 25, and his claim that Christian pastors and academics who don’t support his young earth creationism were not only like the “five foolish virgins,” but were, in fact, false prophets. I gave a brief overview of Matthew 21-27,…
By all means, please like this post, and please share it! A couple of days ago, Ken Ham re-tweeted a previous post he had written back on March 19, 2012: “The Door’s Still Open.” On one hand, nothing he said was particularly new for Ken Ham. On the other hand, what he said made me…
At the very beginning of his book, Sam Harris makes this very true statement: “Your beliefs define your vision of the world; they dictate your behavior; they determine your emotional responses to other human beings” (12). He is completely correct here—one’s beliefs do indeed define one’s vision of the world. Francis Schaeffer calls this “presuppositional apologetics”—namely, one…
Yesterday, I came across Ken Ham’s most recent entry on his blog entitled, “Why Don’t More Scientists Believe in Creation?” It’s a rather short post, but as I read it, I realized that it perhaps perfectly illustrates what truly lies at the heart of young earth creationist thinking: it is a modern form of Pharisaism….
We’ve now come to the point in our analysis of Sam Harris’ book, The End of Faith, where we will look at the specific things he has to say about “faith.” Intolerance and Religious Faith Early in his book, Harris makes was should be for any critical reader a glaring and shocking contradiction. He first states…
I’ve found that in the course of my critiques of books by atheist writers like Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, that it is actually quite invigorating exercise, albeit in a chaotic way. It is, I would assume, much the same feeling if one were engaged in a formal debate: most of your time doesn’t involve…
It should come as no surprise in a book entitled, The End of Faith, that Harris refuses to even consider that there might be something to religion in general, and Christianity in particular. When he says, therefore, “The fact that religious beliefs have a great influence on human life says nothing at all about their…