Sam Harris and the End of Atheism

Sam Harris and the End of Atheism

Author: Stan Guthrie
August 26, 2022

Sam Harris has been described as one of the “Four Horsemen of Atheism”—along with Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett. Harris, author of the influential book The End of Faith, has gone toe-to-toe with prominent Christian heavyweights such as William Lane Craig and Rick Warren. Five of his books attempting to debunk Christianity and theism have been on The New York Times Best Seller list.

In short, when Sam Harris talks, people listen. Unfortunately for the outspoken prophet of the New Atheism, too many people were listening to an interview he gave earlier this week. “I’m not going to make magical claims about flying saviors who are literally coming down,” Harris said, gesticulating. “Where is heaven, exactly, given that we have multiple telescopes up there beaming back tens of billions of years of information?”

Apparently, this holder of a PhD in cognitive neuroscience from UCLA and a bachelor’s in philosophy from Stanford thinks that he’s scored another debating point. But David Decosimo, a theologian at Boston University, isn’t impressed, tweeting, “Harris thinks he’s debunking Christianity (& all religions w/ an idea of heaven), in virtue of the fact that telescopes have not spotted heaven. Yes. He’s actually that incredibly mistaken & confused. He thinks people believe heaven is some place in outer space.”

Not only is Harris embarrassingly wrong about the religious beliefs of billions of his fellow human beings—none of whom, apparently, has he attempted to learn from—he isn’t even up to date on the science. For years theoretical physicists have suggested that extra dimensions—perhaps six or more—exist outside of and beyond our universe, and that we may never be able to see them. If extra, unseen dimensions are possible for scientists, then is the idea of a heavenly dimension beyond our physical existence really so outlandish?

Harris’s smug stance reminds me of a ridiculously confident assertion of Soviet cosmonauts several decades ago. Upon returning from a mission orbiting the earth, they claimed that they had not been able to find God, even after a diligent search. Everyone knows they were speaking the atheist party line. I suspect Harris’s statement will receive the same credence.

Of course, the opposition to God by Harris and the other New Atheists isn’t really grounded in science. After all, it was the Christian worldview that laid the foundation for today’s science in the first place, and many of the early scientists were Christians. They believed in an orderly universe that could be investigated because they believed in a God of order who created man to rule over His creation. Take God out of the equation and you are left with chaos.

Despite his great learning, Harris’s distaste for religion is bathed in an arrogant belief that he is smarter than just about everyone else. “As an atheist,” he says, “I am angry that we live in a society in which the plain truth cannot be spoken without offending 90 percent of the population.”

Again, Harris appears to be ignorant of the fact that he would not live in a society where people are seen as valuable and with the freedom and responsibility to speak their minds, were it not for the influence of Christianity. Historian and author Tom Holland reluctantly came to this conclusion. “Today,” Holland writes, “even as belief in God fades across the West, the countries that were once collectively known as Christendom continue to bear the stamp of the two-millennia-old revolution that Christianity represents.”

Take away the Christian faith, and its assertion of the inherent dignity and worth of human beings created in the image of God, and Sam Harris the New Atheist would not exist. As God’s Word affirms, “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds; there is none who does good.”

At some level, Harris, who attempts to use reason to convince people of the “plain truth of atheism,” must realize that his reductive materialism doesn’t work, for it provides no basis for trusting anything he thinks or says. He asks, “How can we be ‘free’ as conscious agents if everything that we consciously intend is caused by events in our brain that we do not intend and of which we are entirely unaware. We can’t.”

His atheism at an end, Sam Harris can’t see heaven. And, tragically, he has no reason to see anything else.


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