OK, so I just finished reading Part 2 of the Andrew Sullivan-Sam Harris debate on religion (it was only 13 pages). There wasn’t anything earth-shattering in those 13 pages, so I’ll restate my initial judgment: that Sam Harris, the advocate of atheism, won the debate.
However, I want to make a couple of things clear…First, while I think that Sam Harris “won” the debate, I’m confident that Andrew Sullivan is closer to the “Truth.” There is no question that, when compared to Mr. Harris, Mr. Sullivan’s views are much closer to my own philosophy (which is explained in my book, The Mustard Seed, and can also be found on this blog; see the post dated December 2nd).
Sullivan argues that life is a “balance” between “reason and faith”, whereas Harris sees no room for faith at all. Clearly, I will stand with those, like Sullivan, who cast a skeptical glance at bold fundamentalist claims – whether those claims are Christian, Islamic, atheist, or any other creed.
If I have been too tough on Mr. Sullivan, I have to confess: it’s because I WANT him to win, and I think he SHOULD win. I am very personally invested in his victory. Not to sound strange, but I feel like a parent watching his child play a game of soccer; even if my kid is the best player on the field, if he isn’t playing up to his abilities, I feel the need to criticize him.
Of course, I know that Sullivan did the best job he could. But far too often, he used his emotional experiences to defend Christianity, when reason alone would’ve been much a more useful tactic (and never – not once in over 50 pages – did he use reason to attack atheism).
In any case, I would like to praise Sullivan for two statements. The first is an except from his book The Conservative Soul:
"The reason I call myself a Christian is not because I manage to subscribe, at any given moment, to all the truths that the hierarchy of my church insists I believe in, let alone because I am a good person or a "good Catholic." I call myself a Christian because I believe that, in a way I cannot fully understand, the force behind everything decided to prove itself benign by becoming us, and being with us. And as soon as people grasped what had happened, what was happening, the world changed forever. The Gospels - all of them, including some that were rejected by the early Church - are mere sketches of a life actually lived, and an experience that can never be reduced to words or texts or doctrines...
"In this nonfundamentalist understanding of faith, practice is more important then theory, love more important than law, and mystery is seen as an insight into truth rather than an obstacle. It is the great lie of our time that all religious faith has to be fundamentalist to be valid. There is another way. For Christians, that other way is about a man, Jesus, whose individuality and humanity cannot be abstracted. And it is about a commemoration of that man, as he asked us to commemorate him.”
I think this is a beautiful defense of Christianity as it can be (and should be) practiced: a humble, positive, loving creed that is tolerant of other faiths (and is open to reforming its own tenets if circumstances change). As a true practitioner of that brand of Christianity, Andrew Sullivan is worthy of our deep respect.
I also enjoyed this Sullivan line:
“Convinced that the choice is solely between fundamentalism and atheism, the vast majority of believers will then be trapped perforce in the fundamentalist camp. Given the ubiquity of faith, given the absence of any civilization in human history that has been free of it, given the evolutionary and biological inclination toward faith, given the respect that a man even as rational as Einstein paid to the ‘veneration’ of the force beyond all of us, your project is absurdly utopian. And like many utopians, you may, I fear, be making hell on earth more likely.”
I think Sullivan is absolutely right. The competition between “reason and faith” (which has being going for millennia) has recently become a sharp polarization between “fundamentalism and atheism” (and that polarization continues to deepen). This is not healthy for people on a personal level, and it’s just as harmful for society as a whole. One of my main motivations for writing The Mustard Seed was to heal that breach between “faith and reason,” and, if possible, unify them. The potential unification of reason and faith (which Andrew Sullivan supports, and Sam Harris earns a living opposing) is, in some ways, the preeminent civilizational issue of our time.
-Todd
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