Sam Harris Responds

I think Andrew Sullivan is in over his head with Sam Harris. He demolishes 2 big pro-religion/pro-god arguments fairly quickly. The first is one of the oldest: if science can't tell me what happens after death, it must be god.

Contrary to your assertion, I have not made any claims about there being a "nothingness at the end of our mortal lives." The truth is, I don't know what happens after death. Is it dogmatic for me to doubt that you and the pope do? What reason have you given me to believe that you know that "something" happens after death, or that your something is more probable than the Muslim something, the Hindu something, or the Buddhist something? The question of what happens after death (if anything) is a question about the relationship between consciousness and the physical world. It is true that many atheists are convinced that we know what this relationship is, and that it is one of absolute dependence of the one upon the other. Those who have read the last chapters of The End of Faith know that I am not convinced of this. While I spend a fair amount of time thinking about the brain (as I am finishing my doctorate in neuroscience), I do not think that the utter reducibility of consciousness to matter has been established. It may be that the very concepts of mind and matter are fundamentally misleading us. But this doesn't entitle religious people to imagine that all their crazy ideas about miraculous books, virgin births, and saviors ushering in the end of the world are remotely plausible.

The second is the one I didn't want to make with Nick, in part because it's kind of mean and once made , the other side usually goes for shouts of bigotry rather than answer it. The idea is, basically, any logical argument you make for god can also be made for the devil. It's impossible to construct a reasonable argument for one which precludes the other. You can then extend that to polytheism, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Arguments for their existance are essentially the same as the argument for god. In fact the Catholic church has made exactly this extention to extend divinity to Jesus, the Holy Spirit, Mary and a bunch of other gods and demi-gods they call saints. It's a surprisingly polytheistic religion, all ased on the extention that if one god exists and you can prove he doesn't, other could exist too.

Needless to say, your attempt to pull theism up by its bootstraps ("since God is definitionally the Creator of such a universe; and the meaning of the universe cannot be in conflict with its Creator") could be used to justify almost any metaphysical assertion. "The Flying Spaghetti Monster who created the universe" is also "definitionally" the Creator of the universe; this doesn't mean that he exists, or that the universe had a Creator at all. Many other chains of pious reasoning could be cashed-out in the same way: "Satan is the Tempter; I find that I am tempted on a hourly basis to eat ice cream and have sex with my neighbor's wife; ergo, Satan exists." Or what if I suggested that what we know about the brain renders the idea of a human soul rather implausible, and one your brethren countered: "The immortal soul governs all the activity in a person's brain; I have no fear about what neuroscience will tell me about the brain, because the soul is definitionally the brain's operator." Would this strike you as an argument for the existence of souls? Granted, there are still many gaps in neuroscience into which a soul might still be inserted, just as there are gaps in our understanding of the cosmos into which the faithful eagerly insert God, but such maneuvers are utterly without intellectual merit. You can insert almost anything "definitionally" into those gaps. The Muslims have inserted Allah, and the Qur'an is His perfect word. The Hindus have inserted Gods of every color and flavor. Why don't these efforts persuade you?

All in all, Sam's doing well and, I think, Andrew's rather weak argument boils down to, "The truth will prove me right, you'll see. Besides people like religion so it must be true." I may be being unfair to AS though, so we'll see how he responds.

EDIT: Andrew responds here
An interesting approach, pointing out that there are kinds of truth beyond the emperical. That is certainly correct, for example, one cannot prove emperically that something is beautiful. However, in this context, what he's done is change the underlying framework of the argument, i.e. does god exist. If gods exist, they must exist within the physical confines of the universe, and hence, should be detectable. AS has changed the debate to to say god exists as a subjective reality rather than an objective one, and hence may not be subjected to the standards of emperical evidence. This is a sly bit of rhetorical slight-of-hand which pretty much ends the debate. From this point, you can claim almost anything since you've put it beyond the test of objective reality. We'll see how Sam responds, but I think Andrew has basically conceeded that god cant be objectively proven to exist and is attempting to bridge to a different set of criteria.