I’m a frequent reader of Andrew Sullivan’s blog, The Daily Dish, which includes commentary on politics, culture, and current events. For those who are unfamiliar with Mr. Sullivan, he is an openly gay Catholic and a self-described “conservative” (although he strays from the Republican Party line quite often, including, quite mysteriously, cheerleading Barack Obama in this year’s presidential election).
For a long time, I knew that Mr. Sullivan engaged in an online religious debate with a prominent atheist named Sam Harris, who wrote the best-selling book, The End of Faith. However, I never bothered to read a transcript of their debate. I’m not sure why. I guess I feared that the atheist, Mr. Harris, would win the debate (and since I’m a “person of faith,” I didn’t want to see that happen).
In any case, a few days ago, I clicked on the debate’s webpage and read the opening arguments from both Mr. Harris and Mr. Sullivan. I was encouraged by Mr. Sullivan’s writing. To quote him, “God is, by definition, reasonable…I do not, in other words, see reason as somehow in conflict with faith.” As anyone who is a familiar with my book, The Mustard Seed, knows, I share Mr. Sullivan’s confidence in the unity of reason and faith, along with the dangers of dismissing either one of them. So Mr. Sullivan was off to a good start, and today I decided to read a transcript of Part One of their online debate (all 38 pages of it). I’ll get around to reading Part Two at a later time.
So what’s my judgment? Well…as I feared, Mr. Harris was very knowledgeable and articulate, while Mr. Sullivan (although not bad, per se) was clearly playing defense the whole time (and not doing a very effective job of it, either).
That’s a shame too, because Sam Harris’ position is actually quite vulnerable. As my book demonstrates, the foundation of atheism is just as flimsy as any of the major religions. Unfortunately, Mr. Sullivan (like most committed Christians) couldn’t think “outside the box” and challenge atheism on rational grounds. Nor could he defend Christianity on rational grounds. When pressed to defend his creed, Sullivan abandoned his confidence that “true faith rests on the truth.” Instead, he advocates the mushy emotionalism of Mark Williams (the passionate Christian from my book, The Mustard Seed). “If I feel that Christianity is true, then it must be true.”
To quote Sullivan:
“I have never doubted the existence of God. Never. My acceptance of God's existence--of a force beyond everything and the source of everything--goes so far back in my consciousness and memory that I can neither recall "finding" this faith nor being taught it…When people ask me how I came to choose this faith, I can only say it chose me. I have no ability to stop believing…I know of no ‘proof’ that could dissuade me of this, since no ‘proof’ ever persuaded me of it.”
Sam Harris immediately sees the useless of this argument.
He reports:
“I now feel like a tennis player, in mid-serve, who notices that his opponent is no longer holding a racket…You have simply declared your faith to be immune to rational challenge. As you didn't come to believe in God by taking any state of the world into account, no possible state of the world could put His existence in doubt. This is the very soul of dogmatism.”
Then Sam Harris starts wielding the knife, dissecting Sullivan’s ludicrous claim that he “never doubted the existence of God.” There is no God “instinct;” only family and community can produce such an “instinct.”
“I'm guessing that your parents told you about God from the moment you appeared in this world. This is generally how people are put in a position to say things like faith ‘chose me.’ Your determination to have your emotional and spiritual needs met within the tradition of Catholicism has kept you from discovering that there is a mode of spiritual and ethical inquiry that is not contingent upon culture in the way that all religions are.”
Later, Sullivan slips us again when defending his Catholic creed…
“In high school and university, I was able to study the history of that faith--the astonishing cultural wealth and spiritual depth of the Catholic church that kept the memory of Jesus alive for millennia. I was then able to move to a different continent and country and walk into a church that was itself part of that universal inheritance. There is no free place on earth where I cannot find a home.”
Again, Harris pounces…
“Another factor [in Christianity’s appeal] is the very experience of belonging that you wrote about so eloquently-the fact that you can go anywhere on earth and find a home….I do not doubt the attraction of having such communal infrastructure, and I admit that there is no secular equivalent (at the moment). But it is important to point out that this perk of religious affiliation says nothing about the truth of any specific religious doctrine.”
“Are you really surprised by the endurance of religion? What ideology is likely to be more durable than one that conforms, at every turn, to our powers of wishful thinking? Hope is easy; knowledge is hard. Science is the one domain in which we human beings make a truly heroic effort to counter our innate biases and wishful thinking.”
Of course, as my book, The Mustard Seed demonstrates, science is full of its own “wishful thinking” (specifically, atheism) but Mr. Sullivan never bothers to raise that point. Instead, he sadly wanders off into one of the most common (but ultimately useless) defenses of religion: its comfort to the suffering (particularly those who are close to death).
“Religion is best understood, at its core, as an experiential response to the simple fact of our own death. Once a human being has asked himself, as Hamlet did, ‘To be or not to be?’ a human being has become religious, whether he likes it or not. Death is a place from whose bourne no traveler returns, right?…You and I will both die. To the question of what becomes of us then, science has a simple answer. We decompose and rot and eventually become dust. But the human mind, because it is human, resists that as the final answer to the question of our destiny. We find it very hard to think of ourselves as not being. That resistance is always there. There is no escaping it…Is this sense of an afterlife an illusion? We cannot know for sure.
Actually, we can be quite confident of the afterlife’s existence. Such evidence can be found through thousands of so-called “near-death experiences” (see Dr. Raymond Moody’s book, Life After Life, and many similar books). But Mr. Sullivan doesn’t raise this point. Why not? I have no idea.
In conclusion…No one doubts that Sullivan is a very intelligent man (an Oxford-and-Harvard-educated political commentator who has written several books on cultural matters, including his most recent work, The Conservative Soul”). And yet, when given a chance to defend his nearly 40 years of Christianity belief over the course of nearly 40 pages, he can’t do it – at least not successfully.
Ultimately, I have to agree with Sullivan’s own conclusion: “I feel an unworthy apologist for Christianity in many ways.”
As for Mr. Harris…he won Round One, but it was a victory by default. While he was a genuinely strong advocate for atheism, he was never really challenged about his beliefs. I am fairly confident (in fact, I am almost certain) that he can be beaten by someone who is willing to challenge him on his intellectual territory (reason), instead of artfully skirting away from it.
Of course, I still have to read Part Two. Maybe Andrew Sullivan will stage a comeback. Or maybe Sam Harris will add another triumph to his literary belt. We shall see…To be continued…
-Todd
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