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By Timothy P. Jackson -- August 14, 2009
In a July 27 op-ed in The New York Times, entitled "Science Is in the Details," Sam Harris expresses concern over President Obama's nomination of Francis Collins to be the next director of the National Institutes of Health. Collins, who happens to be a Christian, is the former leader of the Human Genome Project, and Harris begins by noting that "Dr. Collins's credentials are impeccable" and that "he is ... by his own account, living proof that there is no conflict between science and religion." After quoting elements of Collins's views, however, Harris gets to his main thesis: "few things make thinking like a scientist more difficult than religion."
This claim would come as a surprise to the many great researchers and healers who have been religious believers -- from Johannes Kepler to Isaac Newton to George LeMaitre to Jane Goodall and from Florence Nightingale to Clara Barton to Albert Schweitzer to C. Everett Koop. Leaving aside the work of contemporary Christian philosophers and scientists like Alvin Plantinga, Robert Merrihew Adams, Nicholas Wolterstorff, John Hare, Arthur Peacocke, Stanley Jaki, and others, Harris simply does not address (much less adjudicate) the disputes on the nature of scientific progress and rationality among contemporary secular thinkers like Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, Richard Rorty, Jurgen Habermas, Lee Smolin, and others.
Harris seems to think that "neuroscience, psychology, cognitive science, and behavioral economics" are converging on an understanding of human nature. In particular, he writes as though the relation between minds, brains, and evolution is agreed on by "most scientists" who study the subject. This is untrue. Consider, for example, the debate between Harvard's Stephen Jay Gould and Cambridge's Simon Conway Morris on whether the emergence of intelligence is inevitable once life is in place and, more generally, whether there is progress in evolution; or consider, for example, the debate between Oxford's Roger Penrose and MIT's Max Tegmark on whether mind is a function of quantum effects and, more generally, whether consciousness is reducible to brain states. These disagreements are fundamental and far from being resolved.
Harris's editorial is a striking example of what has become a politically correct orthodoxy. He simply assumes that something called "science" is transparent and untroubling, while "religion" is anti-intellectual and threatening. In fact, however, the meaning and method of science and reason themselves are far from uncontested, as are the consequences of the attendant technologies. To be sure, much harm has been, and is being, done in the name of "God" and "religion." (We did not need Harris's The End of Faith to appreciate this.) It isn't only crusading Christians or Islamo-fascists who are narrow-minded and murderous, however. Would that it were so, for then we really could blame religious conviction for all the ills of the world. But, alas, the worm at the heart of humanity goes deeper than that. It touches even scientific rationality, which is clearly the creed that Mr. Harris venerates.
