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…
Sam Harris, despite all his claims of rationality and reason, is actually rather ignorant when it comes to Christian belief. Sadly, it is rather obvious that he is more interested in attacking the caricature that he himself has constructed, than he is at getting at the actual truth about what Christianity is and what it…
One of Sam Harris’ main arguments in The End of Faith against Christianity is that, according to him, the roots of intolerance, repression, and violence are found within that “God-authored book” right from the start. He essentially asks, “Why are all Christians violent raving lunatics?” and then provides the answer: “Because they believe God tells…
After a week off from blogging to celebrate Christmas, it’s time to start posting again, well sort of. Over the next few weeks I am going to re-post a series I wrote on the atheist Sam Harris from my previous blog from five years ago. I have found it is a helpful exercise to read…
In my last post, I told about the life-changing car wreck I was in as a teenager on December 22, 1985. I said that it was that car wreck that changed my life, but that post really didn’t go into details as to how my life changed. In this post, I want to share a…
Thirty years ago, almost to this day, I was involved in a car crash that changed the course of my life. I was a 16-year-old junior in high school who had his driver’s license for all of six weeks. It was the evening of December 22, 1985, and Christmas was in a few days. My…