The title is a bit misleading. I'm only going to talk about New Atheism, and specifically Sam Harris' mongoloid ass-pinions about religion. I've been planning on making youtube videos for a decade now but so far have only succeeded in uploading a handful to an inactive channel about a decade ago. Because laziness, work and unable/unwilling to figure out how to properly fit my areas of interest into that medium in a stimulating way. However, I have managed to write a number of "scripts" for planned videos, that are actually just repositories for excess Brain squeezins.
The following is a (just now) edited copypasta of one such script, originally written ~2015 when I was obsessed with the issue of e-atheist myopia and hypocrisy wrt religion, especially the uniquely maliciously irrational character of Islamic religious belief and indoctrination. Nevertheless this essay does fit into the "flow" of topics and Serious Conversation to the extent that it pins down exactly how fake and worthless is the kind of white lower-middle-class aspirational performative rationality that has established itself as the default mode of argument on this forum.
Anyway:
In regard to women, indeed, those laws of your fathers, which used to be such an encouragement to modesty and sobriety, have also fallen into desuetude, when a woman had yet known no gold upon her save on the finger, which, with the bridal ring, her husband had sacredly pledged to himself; when the abstinence of women from wine was carried so far, that a matron, for opening the compartments of a wine cellar, was starved to death by her friends — while in the times of Romulus, for merely tasting wine, Mecenius killed his wife, and suffered nothing for the deed. With reference to this also, it was the custom of women to kiss their relatives, that they might be detected by their breath.
Where is that happiness of married life, ever so desirable, which distinguished our earlier manners, and as the result of which for about 600 years there was not among us a single divorce? Now, women have every member of the body heavy laden with gold; wine-bibbing is so common among them, that the kiss is never offered with their will; and as for divorce, they long for it as though it were the natural consequence of marriage. The laws, too, your fathers in their wisdom had enacted concerning the very gods themselves, you their most loyal children have rescinded. The consuls, by the authority of the senate, banished Father Bacchus and his mysteries not merely from the city, but from the whole of Italy. The consuls Piso and Gabinius, no Christians surely, forbade Serapis, and Isis, and Arpocrates, with their dogheaded friend, admission into the Capitol — in the act casting them out from the assembly of the gods — overthrew their altars, and expelled them from the country, being anxious to prevent the vices of their base and lascivious religion from spreading. These, you have restored, and conferred highest honours on them. What has come to your religion — of the veneration due by you to your ancestors? In your dress, in your food, in your style of life, in your opinions, and last of all in your very speech, you have renounced your progenitors. You are always praising antiquity, and yet every day you have novelties in your way of living. From your having failed to maintain what you should, you make it clear, that, while you abandon the good ways of your fathers, you retain and guard the things you ought not. Yet the very tradition of your fathers, which you still seem so faithfully to defend, and in which you find your principal matter of accusation against the Christians— I mean zeal in the worship of the gods, the point in which antiquity has mainly erred — although you have rebuilt the altars of Serapis, now a Roman deity, and to Bacchus, now become a god of Italy, you offer up your orgies.
- Tertullian's Apology c. 200 CE.
1. The NAT Case.
Sam Harris shall serve as a metonym for the broader New Atheist (abbreviated hereby 'NAT' and 'NATism') hypothesis about religion's role in global violence. My goal is not necessarily to prove the case that religion never causes behaviour, or never causes violence (though I do not rule this possibility out). My claim is narrower in scope - I argue that if all the evidence we have for religion's role in violence is the suite of Sam Harris' arguments presented in his writings, then the conclusion must be that it has none at all. The received view of Harris’ style and quality of argument, held by his fans at least, is that his arguments are strong and well-researched. By the end of this article I hope to demonstrate that this impression couldn’t be further from the truth. The *presentation* of Sam’s arguments is infinitely superior to their contents, which are unfailingly unscholarly, lazily structured and just plain wrong. Harris’ reputation for clarity of thought and strength of argument is a well-presented myth.
Having exposed the general weakness of the NAT case presented by Sam Harris, I'll advance available scientific and philosophical evidence (or at least, that among these known to me) that undermines further the argument that religion causes violence. I also argue that, despite the years it has had to develop, the NAT argument has not adopted a credible thesis, instead remaining ignorant of contemporary academic work in favour of women's intuition.
First, a brief catalogue of the broad claims Sam makes about the role religion, in particular Islam, plays in violence:
Harris’ central claim expressed here is that religious beliefs matter to behaviour. In fact, certain beliefs associated with religious ideologies are a huge factor in people’s actions. Wars are fought and terrorists touch off suicide vests because of dangerous and illogical beliefs spread by religious texts and teachings.“So let us now make sense of the impossible by acknowledging the obvious: there is a direct link between the doctrine of Islam and Muslim terrorism” i
Religious beliefs, like a mental pandemic, infect people's minds and drive them to behave in irrational ways. There is, according to NATs, a direct causal link between people's religious beliefs and their violent behaviours.“Every person living in a western democracy should read the Koran and discover the relentlessness with which non-Muslims are vilified in its pages. The idea that Islam is a “peaceful religion hijacked by extremists” is a dangerous fantasy—and it is now a particularly dangerous fantasy for moderate Muslims to indulge.” ii
Putting all of the above into a rough argument will give us a hard target:
1>>Religious beliefs are conveyed to believers by religious texts.
2>>These religious texts and beliefs encourage particular acts of violence.
3>>Religious people do in fact perform these particular acts of violence.
4>>These particular acts of violence are caused by the religious beliefs held by religious people.
5>>Conclusion: Religious beliefs, conveyed directly to religious believers by religious texts, are the cause of particular acts of violence.
It's this overall argument, and Sam's attempts defend these premises, that the reader should bear in mind when getting into the criticisms I level below.
2. Religion as Difference-Maker to Behaviour.
Sam Harris argues that when considering the causes of violence, we should consider religion the primary cause in many cases. So we're currently targeting the fourth premise:
Let's narrow down the claim to something concrete, an example that Sam and his detractors frequently discuss - suicide bombing. On suicide bombing, Harris makes the following claims about its cause:These particular acts of violence are caused by the religious beliefs held by religious believers.
Both religion generally, and Islam specifically, are what Sam argues make the difference to suicide bombing. Here Sam touches on a widespread intuition in the philosophy of science about causation: that the causes of events are those things that make a difference to the outcome. The hunt for causes is the hunt for difference-makers, those variables that have the last say in how events turn out. This is a highly influential view, and we might as well test out whether this difference making account of cause and effect that Sam invokes supports his claims or not.“What is the difference that makes the difference? Religion.” iii
“What is the difference that makes the difference? The difference lies in the specific tenets of Islam.” iv
“…if the doctrine of Islam were different, the beliefs of devout Muslims would be different, and this difference would have consequences at the level of their behavior.” v
To test out whether Sam is right about religion and suicide bombing, we need to flesh out the philosophical aspect some more. It's widely agreed amongst philosophers interested in causal explanation that the best way to look for difference-makers is via an intervention. An intervention is some kind of manipulation of the value of a particular variable. Once we've manipulated that variable (and no other) we can measure its influence on the value of a second variable. If an intervention on the value of X changes (or increases the likelihood of a change in) Y, then X is the cause of Y.
Let's say Mary has a pack of matches. She strikes one and it lights. What was the cause of the lighting? There are some background conditions required, like the presence of oxygen in the air surrounding Mary and the match. But oxygen isn't the difference-maker to the match's lighting – adding or removing oxygen from the environment doesn't cause the match to light. The difference-maker is, of course, Mary's striking of the match. Without that, the outcome would be entirely different. Hence, there is a causal relationship between Mary striking the match and the match being lit (under the right background conditions).
This should be distinguished from a mere correlation. What we need here is a principled way of distinguishing a causal relationship from a correlation. Sometimes holding all the confounding or background variables steady can become confusing, and which variable is the genuine cause and which is merely a background condition can become murky. To solve this problem, we bring back our notion of the difference-maker – a mere background variable won't (ceteris paribus) ever make the difference to an outcome.
So, to establish that Islam is a cause of increased violence and make sure it's not just a correlation, let's formalise the argument:
If Islamic beliefs (or any kind of religious belief) cause violence, then when the value of RB changes, there should be a concurrent change in V. Islamic, more violence. Not Islamic, less violence. Pretty straightforward, and something biologists, sociologists, statisticians, psychologists and other scientists use as their standard account of causation.Religious Belief (RB) causes Violence (V) if and only if there are background circumstances B such that if some intervention that changes the value of RB (and no other variable) were to occur in B, then V would change.
The first test of these claims is to see whether religion (taking Islam as my exemplary case, since it is Sam's target too) has this kind of systematic difference-making association with terrorism. According to the data analysed by Robert Pape:
This, to be sure, is an early stumbling block. If a phenomenon occurs in the absence of a particular variable's manipulation, it suggests that this variable is not the difference-maker for that phenomenon. We've intervened on RB, turning it off. The Tamil Tigers don't have an Islamic (or even religious) belief motivating them, yet V holds steady. On the difference-making view of causation, it's looking unlikely that RB causes V. At the very least we need further investigation."I have compiled a database of every suicide bombing and attack around the globe from 1980 through 2003—315 attacks in all…the leading instigators of suicide attacks are the Tamil Tigers, a Marxist-Leninist group...who are adamantly opposed to religion. This group committed 76 of the 315 incidents, more suicide attacks than Hamas." (Pape 2005 pg. 2-3).
In response to this (kind of obvious) complication, Sam makes a move to rule out all other potential causal variables, like political and economic grievances:
Apparently, he is claiming that by showing an example of a political and economic grievance that is not associated with violence, he has demonstrated that political and economic grievances cannot possibly be the cause of religious violence. This does not follow. Observing a case where Mary striking a match doesn't light the match does not prove that matches are never lit by being struck. The argument is dead-on-arrival but it's all Sam ever offers (feel free to let me know if I've missed something)."Anyone who imagines that terrestrial concerns account for Muslim terrorism must answer questions of the following sort: Where are the Tibetan Buddhist suicide bombers? ... Where are the throngs of Tibetans ready to perpetrate suicidal atrocities against Chinese noncombatants? They do not exist. What is the difference that makes the difference? The difference lies in the specific tenets of Islam."
"Our enemies—as witnessed by their astonishing willingness to slaughter themselves—are not principally motivated by political or economic grievances. How many more architects and electrical engineers must fly planes into buildings before we realize that the problem of Muslim extremism is not merely a matter of education? How many more middle-class British citizens must blow themselves up along with scores of noncombatants before we acknowledge that Muslim terrorism is not matter of poverty or political oppression?" vi
Harris also shoots himself in the foot with the Buddhist example. He admits that by the standards he himself sets up (a correlation between religious belief and violence), Buddhism is a cause of violence much like Islam. To cover himself and provide some way of differentiating Islam and Buddhism, Harris confabulates some defensive claims:
It was "never pure Zen". That's a No True Scotsman if I ever saw one. When Buddhism is reasonably accused of association with violence in the same way Harris accuses Islam, he suddenly locates mitigating circumstances for the Buddhists that make other things – Shintoism, being Japanese or something – the real cause."Now, the truth is it was never pure Zen. It was Zen mixed with Shinto mixed with a kind of Japanese nationalism and war ethic. So it was a weird brew, but it was not at all a surprise that certain Zen teachings, which do not emphasize compassion to the degree that most Buddhist teachings do, could be spun into this sort of martial ethic." vii
Doesn't this necessarily raise the question: couldn't this be the case then for Islam, or Christianity, or any other religion? After all, it's not pure Islam, it's Islam mixed with Shi'a doctrine, or it's Islam mixed with political directives driven by US imperialism, and so on. I think this problem reveals either an intellectual dishonesty – Sam is willing to flagrantly make up excuses for Buddhism so that his chosen target of Islam continues to look bad while his favoured religion keeps looking good – or worse, an inflexible bias against Islam that is not susceptible to evidence to the contrary.
The same move is used by Sam when considering that the Tamil Tigers, a national liberation movement with an explicitly secular position were pioneers in developing suicide bombing as a tactic. Harris claims:
This seems like a bizarre claim, given the facts. The Tamil Tigers terrorist group (the LTTE) and their occasional compatriots the DMK and the DK, were and are all explicitly anti-Hindu, pro-Tamil, pro-secular political groups that grew out of the anti-caste-system Dravidian movement. So, accusing them of being secret Hindus smacks of inventing evidence to suit the argument – a problem I address in greater detail, with more examples from Sam's writing, later."...it is misleading to describe the Tamil Tigers as ‘secular' ... While the motivations of the Tigers are not explicitly religious, they are Hindus who undoubtedly believe many improbable things about the nature of life and death. The cult of martyr-worship that they have nurtured for decades has many of the features of religiosity that one would expect in people who give their lives so easily for a cause." viii
I find it hard to believe that anyone could be satisfied by Sam's arguments here. Confronted with the fact that his favoured religion Zen Buddhism has similar associations to suicide bombing historically to Islam, he briefly confabulates and asserts that all the times Buddhists did a suicide bombing it wasn't real Buddhism, and hence not evidence that Buddhism causes suicide bombing. On the other hand, every time a Buddhist doesn't do a suicide bombing, it is definitely real Buddhism. And thereby evidence that it doesn't cause suicide bombing. This is a blatant case of selecting on the dependent variable.
Robert Pape's take on the inconsistent evidence is, in interventionist terms, more enlightening, pointing out that a good causal explanation ought to explain the observed phenomenon, not a simplified or limited version of that phenomenon:
Yet the approach Sam takes when confronted with compelling evidence to the contrary indicates that he believes his hypothesis is unfalsifiable - a bit of a no-goer when making empirical claims:"...psychological explanations cannot explain why suicide terrorism occurs only in certain societies and at certain times. While suicide rates vary from one society to another, they do not vary enough to explain why the overwhelming majority of societies—even those experiencing political violence—exhibit no suicide terrorism but a handful of societies have experienced dozens of attacks each. This requires a political or social explanation. Similarly, while the supply of suicidal individuals may vary somewhat over time, psychological explanations cannot account for why over 95 percent of all suicide terrorist attacks occur in organized campaigns that are concentrated in time." (Pape 2005, pg. 27).
There may be a case where religion is the genuine cause of violence. I'd be happy to agree with Sam that our third premise:"...if a theory is incompatible with possible empirical observations it is scientific; conversely, a theory which is compatible with all such observations, either because...it has been modified solely to accommodate such observations, or because...it is consistent with all possible observations, is unscientific." (Thornton 1997).
... is not particularly controversial – people with religious beliefs can be violent, they can do suicide bombings. But this should not be conflated with the claim that religion is the cause of this violence. Unfortunately for those who would like to demonstrate this claim, none of the examples used by Harris make this case with any rigour. If anything, they make the alternatives more plausible.Religious believers do in fact perform these particular acts of violence.
3. Women's Intuition aka 'Common Sense'.
Returning to the topic of Buddhist terrorism:
How does Sam know this? Has he figured out some ingenious research paradigm and conducted experiments that demonstrate Muslims don't need to "work as hard" to justify suicide bombing? Again, Sam doesn't bother evidencing his claims. The evolution of this technique is Sam's occasional claim that he doesn't need to provide evidence for what he says: his claims are just so obvious that he doesn't need to show that they're actually true."This is not to say that Buddhism could not help inspire suicidal violence. It can, and it has (Japan, World War II). But this concedes absolutely nothing to the apologists for Islam. As a Buddhist, one has to work extremely hard to justify such barbarism. One need not work nearly so hard as a Muslim." ix
In this case, a lack of evidence is treated as indicative of the strength of his argument! The point is so obvious that he doesn't even need to provide any evidence."The reality, however, is that if the doctrine of Islam were different, the beliefs of devout Muslims would be different, and this difference would have consequences at the level of their behavior. If the Koran contained a verse which read, "By all means, depict the Prophet in caricature to the best of your abilities, for this pleaseth Allah", there wouldn't have been a cartoon controversy. Can I prove this counterfactual? Not quite. Do I really need to?"x
The point is so obvious, you should just believe it!"Beliefs matter. It's amazing that the point needs to even be made—but it does, again and again." (Harris & Nawaz 2015, pg. 126).
My suspicion is that while Sam's claims about religion are often in line with (((CERTAIN))) people's intuitions, making them work as actual, rigorous arguments ends up being unworkable. Much easier to just ignore that problem.
4. Prima Facie Ascriptions of Motive.
Another of Harris' arguments is: we need only listen to what extremists say about their own motives in order to figure out that religion, particularly Islam, is the cause of their behaviour. Surely this can prove that our premise, that religion causes suicide bombing, is true! There's a rhetorically potent but not particularly philosophically strong challenge in here – if we can't accept professions of religious motivation by violent extremists, then what standard of evidence will we accept? Will the lunatic regressive Postcultural Neomodernists not permit even people's own words to incriminate Islam? Harris states the position succinctly:
There are a few reasons to be critical of this approach. The first is that Harris frequently makes this claim about terrorists and Islam, but never seems to be able to find concrete instances of it. The second, and more importantly, is that despite Harris' constant assertions that Jihadists or terrorists generally cite Islam as their rationale, the available evidence doesn't support the claim that this is as consistent as Harris would like. For instance, Harris-nemesis Scott Atran cites his data suggesting much more earthly motives:"I believe we should take declarations of this kind at face value—and understand that those who think this way pose a genuine danger to civilization." (Harris & Nawaz 2015, pg. 86).
So far from showing that a pre-existing religiously motivated belief that infidels deserve to be suicide bombed, Atran's data shows a relationship between people's belief that suicide bombing is acceptable and their feeling of having been wronged (in purely concrete, non-religious grounds) and "surprisingly" that these earthly motives were stronger amongst those who believed that Islam is consistent with suicide bombing. Similar sentiments are reported by the researcher Lydia Wilson when interviewing captured Islamists:"In 2005, our research group... a random survey of 1,250 Palestinians from 120 locales in the West Bank and Gaza. We found that around 80 percent of Palestinians support suicide bombings and believe that "Islam allows a bombing attack...where the bomber kills himself with the aim of killing his enemies."
...But our research also clearly demonstrated that Palestinian support for suicide bombing is unrelated to a belief in the immutability of the conflict between Jews and Muslims, or some essential or inherent quality of Jews or Israelis...
...What does predict a belief that Islam sanctions martyrs is a perceived sense of injustice. For example, we asked participants to choose between two reasons why it's socially and religiously permissible to kill other people: because of what other people had done, or because of the contrary beliefs and religion of other people. Participants overwhelmingly believed the former, but this was slightly stronger for those that believed Islam sanctioned suicide bombers than for those who did not." (Atran 2010, pg. 359-360).
You might say at this point: who in fuck are Scott Atran and Lydia Wilson to say that they know Islamic terrorists don't have religious motives, just because of their answers on a survey or verbal reports? To which I say: sure. Just because people push a certain narrative doesn't mean that this narrative is necessarily true, nor that it accurately reports their motives (which may be opaque even to them). So why does Sam decide that certain utterances by a few individuals are damning proof of belief and motive? Is his method more rigorous than Scott Atran's? Has he collected contrary data? (In case you haven't noticed the trend yet, no.)"More pertinent than Islamic theology is that there are other, much more convincing, explanations as to why they've fought for the side they did. At the end of the interview with the first prisoner we ask, "Do you have any questions for us?" For the first time since he came into the room he smiles—in surprise—and finally tells us what really motivated him, without any prompting. He knows there is an American in the room, and can perhaps guess, from his demeanor and his questions, that this American is ex-military, and directs his "question," in the form of an enraged statement, straight at him. "The Americans came," he said. "They took away Saddam, but they also took away our security. I didn't like Saddam, we were starving then, but at least we didn't have war. When you came here, the civil war started...
This whole experience has been very familiar indeed to Doug Stone, the American general on the receiving end of this diatribe. "He fits the absolutely typical profile," Stone said afterward. "The average age of all the prisoners in Iraq when I was here was 27; they were married; they had two children; had got to sixth to eighth grade. He has exactly the same profile as 80 percent of the prisoners then...and his number-one complaint about the security and against all American forces was the exact same complaint from every single detainee." xi
Further, consider that the only necessary refutation of Harris' case here is the presentation of evidence that is contrary to his. That's all. Harris' entire case rests on the fact that allegedly (let's assume he's correct despite the complete lack of evidence he presents) terrorists state that Islam caused their terrorism, and we should take this at face value. So if I present evidence that a person stated that something else (political or economic factors) caused their terrorism, then we should also take that at face value? Like the reports taken by Atran and Wilson. Unless Sam has some reason why one utterance should be taken at face value, and the other shouldn't, then Sam's argument has already lost much of its footing.
Harris is guilty of exactly of what he accuses his opponents of. When violence is self-attributed to Islam, Harris thinks it should be taken at face value. However, when Muslim people deny or give responses contrary to the belief that Islam was their motivation, Harris excuses this problem with his account like so:
Again, this begins to resemble the archetype of an unfalsifiable argument. When Muslims do attribute their violence or violent attitudes to Islam, Sam insists it should be taken at face value, and as evidence for his claim that religion (in this case Islam) causes this violence. When the reverse happens, and some Muslim attributes their violence to something else (like foreign intervention), we shouldn't take them at face value at all – they must be concealing their true beliefs. Sam counts everything as proving his point. Every possible piece of documentary evidence supports his hypothesis."...one of the problems we have is that many Muslims, for understandable reasons and some for really deplorable reasons, are playing hide the ball with the articles of faith, and are eager to have the conversations of the sort you have had from a very cynical and manipulative perspective." xii
5. The Sweet Saiyans of Making Shit Up.
Either out of laziness or inability to find appropriate evidence, Harris has a consistent tendency to use imagined or fictional examples that serve his arguments and deploy them in place of real examples. In fact, this is such a consistent flaw in his writing that just about every article on Islam he has written has multiple instances of it. I genuinely challenge anyone to find some substantiation for the specific examples he's talking about in the cases I list in this section. I'd be relieved to know that Harris' scholarship isn't as abysmal, or more accurately, nonexistent, as it seems.
To start things off, in his recent dialogue with Maajid Nawaz, Sam claims:
Who holds these beliefs? Sam is claiming that there is an actual group of people who say these words, and regularly sacrifice themselves and their children "without a qualm". Does Sam have documentary evidence of these individuals? Of who believes and "can honestly chant" those words? Any half-decent scholar would go out and find an uncontroversial example of exactly the scenario they are describing instead of vaguely gesturing. Maybe someone does think and say this stuff. But as far as I can tell, these chants exist within Sam's mind only."The belief that a life of eternal pleasure awaits martyrs after death explains why certain people can honestly chant, "We love death more than the infidels love life." Again, you and I both know that these people aren't bluffing. They truly believe in martyrdom—as evidenced by the fact that they regularly sacrifice their lives, or watch their children do so, without a qualm." (Harris & Nawaz 2015).
Another prime example comes from one of Sam's disagreements with Scott Atran over the "72 virgins" motive for carrying out terrorism. Sam asserts that, contra Atran's findings, many terrorists are motivated by precisely that spiritual reward:
That's literally the extent of Sam's response to Atran argument-wise. Not a single counter-example. Not a word of dispute over the qualitative data Atran has collected in the field (which wouldn't be a tough argument to make). He simply asserts that these cases exist, without showing that they do. Harris' approach here cultivates the appearance, or the presentation of, being rational without actually being rational."The first thing to point out is that such cases do exist, "errant" or not." xiii
Scott Atran's claim, based on evidence compiled by interviewing Islamic terrorists in the field, is deftly parried by Harris' assertion from (his own) authority that Atran's evidence is just wrong. Oh! Alright. Harris continues:
Sam Harris somehow knows what the "widespread Muslim belief" about martyrs is. He invents evidence out of thin air."What Atran ignores in his interpretation is the widespread Muslim belief that martyrs go straight to Paradise and secure a place for their nearest and dearest there. In light of such religious ideas, solidarity within a community takes on another dimension. And phrases like "God will love you just the same" have a meaning that is worth unpacking. What is God's love good for? It is good for escaping the fires of hell and reaping an eternity of happiness after death." xiv
Again, something we just need to take on faith from Sam. How does he know what millions, or billions of Muslims privately believe? What is the basis for this "truth"? At this point I am not even making the case that Sam is wrong. That would suggest there was a serious argument to answer in this text. I have to conclude that Sam's standards of scholarship are so bad that even though evidence for his claims might exist, he is too lazy or too stupid, or both, to find it and do the necessary exposition required to make an real argument."The terrible truth is that millions (probably hundreds of millions, if not billions) of religious people read scripture as though it were an infallible guide to understanding reality and how to live within it." xv
More insidiously Sam leverages this same technique as a blanket defence of everything his seemingly favoured people, the Israelis, do to the Palestinians. Despite the similarly violent behaviours of the two groups, he attributes utterly opposite motives. Israelis, by Sam's own admission, kill and injure thousands of Palestinians by shooting, bombing, burning, torture and mass imprisonment, to say nothing of the indirect violence of surveillance, forced privation and restriction of movement inflicted over long periods. Palestinians shoot and blow up Israelis and inflict regular misery by launching bombs and rockets at cities and towns inhabited by Israeli settlers. This is what Sam has to say about that situation:
Somehow, we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Israelis don't want to hurt Palestinians, just like we have every reason to believe that the Palestinians would kill every Israeli if possible. Sam's rock-solid evidence is based on suppositions about other people's beliefs based on... nothing. Even when rewriting the transcript to respond to critics and including notes, he did not deign to bulk up these claims at all."But we know that this isn't the general intent of Israel. We know the Israelis do not want to kill non-combatants, because they could kill as many as they want, and they're not doing it."
"There is every reason to believe that the Palestinians would kill all the Jews in Israel if they could...But Palestinian terrorism (and Muslim anti-Semitism) is what has made peaceful coexistence thus far impossible." xvi
To present a contrary view regarding the Israeli benevolence towards Palestinians that is based on some actual evidence, let us bear in mind that in 2014 the Israeli Defence Force indiscriminately fired upwards of 30,00 heavy artillery shells into Gaza, one of (if not the) most densely populated places in the world. [xvii, xix, xx] Droves of ordinary Israelis turned up on the heights overlooking Gaza to picnic and enjoy watching the death and maiming of Palestinian people during the IDF's incursion into Gaza (bearing in mind that 20 children were killed during this attack to the distant applause of those Israelis). [xviii] This does not strike me as the behaviour people who wish no harm on the Palestinians, and only kill them out of hateful necessity.
Despite this, Sam asserts, we should be utterly confident that the Israelis are morally superior to Palestinians here because if they wanted the Palestinians dead, they could kill them all. Meanwhile the Palestinians (he knows, somehow, with total confidence) would kill every Israeli if they could. The problem here is again the base assertion of either side's true motives that Sam somehow knows, despite having totally invented this "evidence".
Let's examine that argument through a different historical lens:
Hooray for the Nazis! If we run Sam's argument in other situations, we find that any more powerful force or nation is necessarily in the moral right, so long as they don't kill every single member of their subjugated enemy. Both parties in my example are engaged in violence but the Nazis are morally worse (I hope you agree), and the French are morally justified in their violence for broader historical reasons that require a bit of context. We don't need to read back through French history to locate the germ of their violent ideology in order to figure out why French people were killing Nazis whenever possible.The occupying Nazis are morally superior to the French because if they wanted the French dead, they could kill them all. Meanwhile the French would kill every Nazi occupier if they could.
I would imagine that Sam would similarly like to consider violence conducted by the French as part of their resistance against the Nazis to be morally justified due to the actions of their occupiers. But Sam is simply deploying women's intuition to ascribe different moral motives to both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is an argument made in totally bad faith to protect the one example that he seems to think stands outside usual considerations of right and wrong.
But now Sam turns from offering a bad argument based on false claims about the contents of other people's minds and facts he doesn't know, into full-blown making-shit-up mode:
These claims in particular are made not only without a shred of evidence to support them, but the claim that Palestinians use human shields is not supported by any actual evidence. [xxii] Nor is there concrete evidence that Hamas uses children or anyone else as human shields. On the other hand, there is abundant and concrete evidence (to which Israel publicly admits) of at least 1200 incidents of Israeli soldiers using Palestinians as human shields, including children. They wouldn't be the first occupiers to do so – the practice was widespread amongst British soldiers in Northern Ireland in the 80s. There is also evidence that the Israelis *continue* to use human shields. [xxiii]"The truth is that everything you need to know about the moral imbalance between Israel and her enemies can be understood on the topic of human shields. Who uses human shields? Well, Hamas certainly does. They shoot their rockets from residential neighborhoods, from beside schools, and hospitals, and mosques. Muslims in other recent conflicts, in Iraq and elsewhere, have also used human shields. They have laid their rifles on the shoulders of their own children and shot from behind their bodies." xxi
Of course, it seems like Sam's intuitions about people's beliefs have an evidential force greater than that of actual evidence. Though I do end up agreeing with Sam that "everything you need to know about the moral imbalance between Israel and her enemies can be understood on the topic of human shields"... but arriving at a very different conclusion.
6. A Brief Review of the Fax.
Let's return to the original premise being targeted in this section:
This is the linchpin of the conclusion that Islam causes terrorism. But when testing religious beliefs as a cause using the notion of a difference-maker, it doesn't seem like a good candidate for a cause of violence (in this case, suicide bombing). Besides that, Harris consistently provides zero evidence to back this causal claim, instead simply presenting unsupported claims as fact. When challenged, his subsequent attempts to shore up his position include dismissing all counterexamples as No True Scotsmen and weaving his counter-examples out of whole cloth.These particular acts of violence are caused by the religious beliefs held by religious believers.
7. The Science & Philosophy of Religious Belief
Common-sense would tell us that the case of Marcus Ross is either impossible, or some kind of particularly twisted and intellectually schizoid individual. How can someone simultaneously believe that the world is fewer than 10,000 years old, and also at least 65 million years old? The religious "belief" and the factual belief directly clash in a way that would seem to brook no coexistence: it's one or the other. Either dinosaurs lived alongside cavemen, or they didn't."In 2007, a young earth creationist named Marcus Ross, received his PhD in Geoscience at the University of Rhode Island, having written about the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago, despite ‘‘believing'' that the earth is younger than 10,000 years old. Importantly, his Baptist credences did not govern the scientific hypotheses in his dissertation, otherwise he could not have finished." (Van Leeuwen 2014, pg. 21).
But "common sense" isn't always the be all. Religious beliefs, like Marcus Ross' belief that the Earth is only 10,000 years old, often involve this kind of apparent cognitive dissonance. Yet there doesn't always seem to be much inner conflict. Ross successfully completed his PhD, so we can assume his ability to perform his research is a scholarly and rational manner was not being ruined by his concurrent religious belief that geoscience is wrong about the age of the world. It seems that at least in this case, facts and religion pass each other by like ships at night. In fact, a growing body of scientific and philosophical literature has emerged painting a picture that makes Marcus Ross look pretty typical.
Van Leeuwen (2014) makes the even stronger claim that religious beliefs do not function as beliefs in the traditional sense. When we talk about religious belief, the assumption is that we are taking about belief in the sense used in analytical philosophy of mind. That is, propositional content informing behaviour (although it seems this view of belief isn't endorsed unreservedly by contemporary philosophers).
What Van Leeuwen argues is that, on the basis of the extensive research on religious belief and behaviour, we must conclude that religious belief is not really belief in the sense given above. He uses the term 'religious credence' instead and places it in the category of the kinds of "belief" that fail to operate like canonical belief (imaginings, play etc.).
The first part of his argument is the claim that religious credence only guides behaviour within certain limited ritual contexts. A standard belief should not operate this way – for instance my knowledge that water quenches thirst should hold under all circumstances, and I won't suddenly act as though it doesn't. Yet he claims that religious beliefs are hardly rigidly applied, but rather are only applied selectively within narrow situations. If this is the case, it puts pressure on our second premise:"Many philosophers and cognitive scientists have a habit of using the word "belief" as though it refers to one simple sort of cognitive attitude. And when we talk about differences in "beliefs," we tend to focus on differences in contents, without considering the possibility that we are lumping distinct attitudes under this one word. But, I will argue, if we examine the matter carefully, we will soon find empirical reasons to think this habit is a source of confusion. Just as the word "jade" refers to two different substances from the standpoint of modern chemistry, "belief," we will see, refers to at least two different kinds of attitude from the standpoint of a well-developed, empirically informed theory of cognitive attitudes." (Van Leeuwen 2014 pg. 1)
Since religious teachings wouldn't count as the sort of general behaviour-guiding beliefs Van Leeuwen describes above, it follows based on his findings that they would also fail to encourage violence in the world at large. Van Leeuwen surveys the evidence:These religious texts and religious beliefs encourage particular acts of violence.
In short, while religious credence holds that the dead live on as spirits that can observe the living, this belief (and its effects on behaviour) appears to switch on and off depending on context. Within the ritual context, the religious credence dictates behaviour – outside that context, it no longer does. Van Leeuwen summarises the apparent contradiction:"Return to Astuti and Harris (2008)...In their first study, they supplied some of the Vezo with a religious-ritual narrative and asked about the physical and psychological properties of deceased ancestors. Could they see? Could they think? And so on. They asked others the same questions about a corpse described in a naturalistic way. Astuti and Harris found subjects were more likely to attribute psychological properties to the deceased in the ritual narrative setting than in the naturalistic setting. Furthermore, this study is a sequel to Harris & Giménez (2005), which demonstrates the same toggling effect among Spanish children. Recall that Astuti and Harris write, ‘‘In other contexts, death is represented as total annihilation..." (Van Leeuwen 2014)
The second way that religious credence differs from factual belief is its malleability. Religious credence is modifiable if circumstances require it:"RELIGIOUS CREDENCE: the ancestor can see.
FACTUAL BELIEF: the ancestor is a lifeless corpse." (Van Leeuwen 2014, pg. 18).
In light of the above, and to support it further, we should also note the Catholic church's declaration in 2007 that the existence of Limbo has been abolished – a change to belief made on the basis of the distastefulness of thinking that babies don't go to heaven:"...Boyer (2001) gives examples that suggest people elaborate inventively on religious "beliefs" they hold. He mentions how the details of Greek exotiká (demons or devil incarnations) change over time (82); how local Indian practitioners of Hinduism invent deities not described in official Hindu texts (282–3); and how Kwaio religious specialists make things up on the fly about the ancestors they revere, "improvising all sorts of new details about these agents" (302). Examples can be multiplied. With other "beliefs," however, people are far less inventive. I believe, in a mundane way, there are almonds in my cupboard and not cashews; nor do I invent "beliefs" that the almonds are roasted or that there are cashews, though I may imagine such things. So some "beliefs" generate other "beliefs" of their kind by creative processes; others do not." (Van Leeuwen 2014, pg. 2).
Based not on the religious texts, but on a desire to interpret the text a certain way, the church can radically alter their view of the afterlife. If religious credence is malleable then it casts doubt on the NAT case that religious texts or long-standing beliefs can be held responsible for violence. For instance, if we attribute religion as the cause of their violent behaviour, this is not solid evidence that religion and its texts are responsible. Here I am targeting our first premise:"The conclusion of this study is that there are theological and liturgical reasons to hope that infants who die without baptism may be saved and brought into eternal happiness even if there is not an explicit teaching on this question found in revelation..." xxiv
Sam himself (surprisingly) agrees that religious credence is malleable:Religious beliefs are conveyed to believers by religious texts
So Sam does, in fact, think that religious beliefs can be malleable, and also agrees that they can have little to no influence on behaviour, since people or groups can simply reinterpret their faith to suit their needs. Jews could decide that God supports violence and settlement in Palestine, even though their texts could suggest something different. Muslims may imagine a God that demands decency and compassion in good times, but one that demands violence in worse circumstances – the difference-maker is the material need rather than the content of the text or belief. But when a virtually identical claim about the content of religious beliefs in general (and thus in a manner damning to his argument) is made by Scott Atran, Harris is livid:"I've debated rabbis who, when I have assumed that they believe in a God that can hear our prayers, they stop me mid-sentence and say, "Why would you think that I believe in a God who can hear prayers?" So there are rabbis—conservative rabbis—who believe in a God so elastic as to exclude every concrete claim about Him—and therefore, nearly every concrete demand upon human behavior. And there are millions of Jews, literally millions among the few million who exist, for whom Judaism is very important, and yet they are atheists. " xxv
The difference is night and day, and also brazenly inconsistent. Sam Harris can publicly endorse the view that religious belief can be malleable and do little to inform behaviour – but on the condition that this only applies to Jews for some reason. Why only Jews? Why not Muslims or Hindus? Consider that Van Leeuwen's paper, and the scientific research he draws on, argues convincingly that this is a widespread feature cross-culturally and spanning various religions. But when the identical conclusion is reached by scientists like Scott Atran and philosophers like Van Leeuwen it is treated with contempt by Sam, because it extends this (on the basis of actual research and philosophical argument, not just base assertion) to religion in general, not just Jews."As to matters of real substance, Atran makes insupportable claims about religion as though they were self-evident: like "religious beliefs are not false in the usual sense of failing to meet truth conditions"; they are, rather, like "poetic metaphors" which are "literally senseless. " How many devout Christians or Muslims would recognize their own faith in this neutered creed? What is "literally senseless" about the claim that human beings were created in their present forms by God (and that evolution is, therefore, a fiction)? What is "literally senseless" about the proposition that an eternity in a fiery hell awaits nonbelievers after death?" xxvi
Many of Harris' fans are swayed by the idea that he is not only an excellent philosopher who rarely strays from extremely high standards of rational discourse, but that he also represents a broader movement towards his followers becoming more "rational" themselves. I hope aside from the main content of this essay, that I have also shown this couldn't be further from the truth.
Sam Harris is an expert at conveying an urbane irreverence, ruthlessly sweeping away all non-monetisable inefficiency yet never failing to dorkily blurt out impassioned disclosures of the grand ideals underpinning it all in ephemeral intimate moments. His intellectual antics appeal to suburban slobs with BBAs who want to be like that someday. He can convey the impression of a no-nonsense visionary and freethinker through confidence of tone, but behind it is nothing concrete, i.e. in terms of thoughts and arguments (let alone philosophy).
8. What is the Difference-Maker?
Earlier I discussed the idea of religion as a difference-maker to violence, in particular suicide bombing, and the inadequacy of religion (specifically Islam) as a potential cause of violence. If not Islam, then what is a plausible difference-maker for suicide bombing? Is there some variable which consistently manipulates the presence of suicide bombing (given a set of appropriate background conditions)? Some attempts have been made to find one. Let's return to Robert Pape's exhaustive study of every suicide attack in the last 30 years:
If suicide bombing is simply motivated by and directed against the presence of infidels (as Harris consistently argues), then how can we explain that attacks are not conducted at random (as this hypothesis would imply) but against strategically useful targets? Pape's account includes details that seem to accurately describe and predict suicide bombing better than the vague claim that suicide bombing is caused by Islam. Though not complete by any means, it is an infinitely more serious and robust work."What 95 percent of all suicide attacks have in common, since 1980, is not religion, but a specific strategic motivation to respond to a military intervention, often specifically a military occupation, of territory that the terrorists view as their homeland or prize greatly. From Lebanon and the West Bank in the 80s and 90s, to Iraq and Afghanistan, and up through the Paris suicide attacks we've just experienced in the last days, military intervention—and specifically when the military intervention is occupying territory—that's what prompts suicide terrorism more than anything else." xxvii
9. NATs Lack a Coherent Thesis.
Having pried open some of the numerous weak points in their arguments, I want to suggest that the entire project of NATism isn't just flawed – it is headless, lacking a real direction. The broader case I want to make here is that the NAT school of thought lacks a serious thesis about religion and violence, relying on un- or counter- naturalistic and outdated assumptions. For a supposedly serious philosophical and social project, there is no explicit and clearly-stated argument. Literally. And here I'm including all of the major NAT writers (even Dennett, the philosophically competent one).
While sloppy presentation and an unclear thesis might just be the signs of well-meaning amateurs at work, NATism uses up any potential off-sides by consistently ignoring and denying scholarly work that undermines its vague premises.
For instance, as Van Leeuwen said in the earlier quote, there is a default set of assumptions about belief and behaviour being peddled here, but not openly acknowledged. The deepest undergirding assumption propping up NATism is a persistent (but not very naturalistic or scientific) assertion that "belief" is more than just a folk psychological concept, but a real bona fide explanation, in the raw, for people's behaviour. Assuming that people's behaviour must be guided by contentful beliefs means that an internal mental state like "infidels should be killed" programs the religious to be murderous. They evaluate their perceptions on the basis of these straightforward propositions – hence the explanation for complex world events resolves itself in childish, context-free analyses of these "beliefs" and their concurrent hypothetical mental states.
But as Van Leeuwen showed (and as critics of him like Levy (2017) agree) the story there is not so simple. Whether we update our ontology of beliefs to include new subcategories with different properties (like Van Leeuwen), modify our understanding of beliefs (like Levy) or, like many in the contemporary philosophy of mind, cognitive science and psychology simply abandon the notion in favour of more naturalistic understandings of human behaviour, this kind of received view about beliefs and behaviour requires drastic adjustment. It is certainly not a rock-solid basis for understanding the behaviour of billions of people, since it is at best a crude and coarse-grained application of a fairly abstract and not particularly empirically valid concept, and at worst a prop for pseudo-intellectual burlesque.
Meanwhile NATism's "horsemen" take the briefest of glances at 20th century analytic philosophy and run with it without looking back. Worse still, NATism openly rejects scholarship on these topics in order to preserve its core assumptions. As Scott Atran points out:
What appear to its advocates as self-evident truths – the Bible and the Quran make people believe things, these beliefs make them crazy and violent – actually rely on an indefensible set of assumptions that are way out of date with any serious discussion of mind, behaviour, and people's motives for their actions."Harris's views on religion ignore the considerable progress in cognitive studies on the subject over the last two decades, which show that core religious beliefs do not have fixed propositional content" xxviii
Fans of NAT dogma might say that this simple story about religious violence is just the most rational, the most logical. It's rational, common sense, obvious, that the case for religious beliefs as the cause of violence is correct. This tendency, which seems to be endemic amongst the loose movement of "rationalists", conflates willful, guided intuition with reason. My claim feels right – therefore it must be a universal truth, a piece of uncontroversially correct common sense, and anyone who disagrees is either evil or in error. This not only characterises NAT sentiment generally, but also Harris specifically, who characterises one of those who questions his argument (Reza Aslan) like so:
Aslan is not just misguided for disagreeing with Sam's intuitions; his work is an intentional and sinister "deception", a series of lies designed to shut down discussion and protect... terrorists, I guess."I have always considered Aslan a comical figure...On the topic of Islam, however, Aslan has begun to seem more sinister. He cannot possibly believe what he says, because nearly everything he says is a lie or a half-truth calibrated to mislead a liberal audience. If he claims something isn't in the Koran, it probably is. I don't know what his agenda is, beyond riding a jet stream of white guilt from interview to interview, but he is manipulating liberal biases for the purpose of shutting down conversation on important topics. Given what he surely knows about the contents of the Koran and the hadith, the state of public opinion in the Muslim world, the suffering of women and other disempowered groups, and the real-world effects of deeply held religious beliefs, I find his deception on these issues unconscionable." xxix
On psychology researcher Scott Atran:
Disagreement with Harris is either the result of being a lunatic, or a liar. Like Harris' critics in the media, who question his position on Islam:"... it is impossible to know whether one is in the presence of mental illness or a terminal case of intellectual dishonesty. Atran's belief —apparently shared by many people—is so at odds with what can be reasonably understood from the statements and actions of jihadists that it admits of no response." xxx
Sam's intuitions about Islam are so obviously true, so intuitive (for him), so rational, that anyone who disagrees is surely being deceptive – they must be lying. Feel free to think about the world like this – but this isn't serious thinking. It is a self-stunting programme of dogmatic and reactionary thought."Salon has become a cesspool of lies and moral confusion." xxxi
"What most discussions of "Muslim extremism" miss, and what is obfuscated at every turn by commentators like Glenn Greenwald, Reza Aslan, Karen Armstrong—and even Nicholas Kristof and Ben Affleck—is the power of specific religious ideas such as martyrdom, apostasy, blasphemy, prophecy, and honor." xxxii
If Harris' work and writing is anything to go by, then NATism lacks a contemporary, credible thesis. Women's intuition only goes so far. Serious effort would need to be directed towards solid premises that aren't easily undermined. So far, no such effort seems to be forthcoming, and intuitions about religion and belief are the best NATs have got. Meanwhile, scholars in science and philosophy continue to make real progress – or as Sam Harris sees it, "lies" and "half-truths".
10. Conclusion
Ahhh who cares! I get it, you get it, even the fent-riddled boomers get it. Since I had fun with this one, the next Serious Conversation will be another copypasta from the Codex Jupivivicus.
References:
Levy, N. (2017). Religious Beliefs are Factual Beliefs: Content Does Not Correlate With Context Sensitivity. Cognition, 161, pg. 109-116.
Pape, R. (2005). Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism. New York: Random House.
Thornton, S. (1997). Karl Popper, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Van Leeuwen, N. (2014). Religious Credence is Not Factual Belief. Cognition, 133, pg. 698-715.
i. _samharris.org/bombing-our-illusions/
ii. _samharris.org/bombing-our-illusions/
iii. _www-personal.umich.edu/~satran/Ford%2006/Wk%205-3%20Religion%20Harris.pdf
iv. _samharris.org/bombing-our-illusions/
v. _samharris.org/beyond-belief-the-debate-continues/
vi. _samharris.org/bombing-our-illusions/
vii. _www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzWwjmFs51o
viii. _samharris.org/bombing-our-illusions-ii/
ix. _samharris.org/bombing-our-illusions/
x. _samharris.org/beyond-belief-the-debate-continues/
xi. _www.thenation.com/article/what-i-discovered-from-interviewing-isis-prisoners/
xii. _www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuuKItF_xJo
xiii. _samharris.org/beyond-belief-the-debate-continues/
xiv. _www.edge.org/discourse/bb.html#harris
xv. _www.edge.org/discourse/bb.html#harris
xvi. _samharris.org/podcasts/why-dont-i-criticize-israel/
xvii. _www.haaretz.com/.premium-idf-artillery-may-have-caused-numerous-civilian-fatalities-1.5259561
xviii. _www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/20/israelis-cheer-gaza-bombing
xix. _www.nytimes.com/2014/07/15/world/middleeast/israelis-watch-bombs-drop-on-gaza-from-front-row-seats.html
xx. _www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XqzGpVnuLs
xxi. _samharris.org/podcasts/why-dont-i-criticize-israel/
xxii. _www.thenation.com/article/five-israeli-talking-points-gaza-debunked/
xxiii. _www.haaretz.com/.premium-israel-tortured-palestinian-children-1.5283333
xxiv. _www.reuters.com/article/us-pope-limbo/catholic-church-buries-limbo-after-centuries-idUSL2028721620070420
xxv. _samharris.org/podcasts/why-dont-i-criticize-israel/
xxvi. _samharris.org/beyond-belief-the-debate-continues/
xxvii. _www.thenation.com/article/heres-what-a-man-who-studied-every-suicide-attack-in-the-world-says-about-isiss-motives/
xxviii. _evolution-institute.org/here-he-goes-again-sam-harriss-falsehoods/
xxix. _samharris.org/can-liberalism-be-saved-from-itself/
xxx. _samharris.org/islam-and-the-misuses-of-ecstasy/
xxxi. _samharris.org/sam-harris-the-salon-interview/
xxxii. _www.thedailybeast.com/we-need-to-talk-about-islams-jihadism-problem