Sam Harris — he wrote the bestsellers The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation. He’s also one-fourth of the New Atheist quartet informally called The Four Horsemen (where you’ll also find Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett.) And he has most recently argued that neuroscience can eventually answer all moral questions. Sam Harris is very much a public intellectual. He’s out there and in the mix. And he’s now answering questions from Reddit.com users. Give Harris 54 minutes and he’ll tell you how to promote public rationality, why meditation can change your life, and much, much more …
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I would ask Sam if he is a lizard. I’m being serious.
I don’t see how anyone can give credence to these “horsemen”. Agnostics cannot be accused of irrationality because they simply admit they do not know. Nor can believers be tarred with that label, because even children recognize that, in nature, something does not arise from nothing.
The “horsemen”, however, admit that the natural world exists, but reject that it has a cause. And if they conceded that the world has a cause, they are incapable of specifying that cause. Yet despite that knowledge deficit, they have no problem stating with certainty that the cause could not have been a creator. Thus, contrary to how they like to portray themselves, they strike me as the most irrational of all camps in this debate.
Thanks for sharing this :)
Hanoch,
Since when is it an atheist tenet that the universe necessarily “arose” at all? Perhaps it has always been. (Even a child might think of that.)
Mike:
“[P]erhaps” is my point, i.e., the atheist, in truth, does not know. Yet, unlike the agnostic, who says so, the atheist, with certitude, rules out an alternate “perhaps”. This is rational?
Sam has said, on a number of occasions, he doesn’t rule out a creator or intelligent design, but rather, he doesn’t think there is any evidence. He has also spoken at length about the problems he sees with atheism and why he would prefer to drop the term.