Today I want to share with you two recently published letters that caught my attention.  The first one is from Michael Shermer, founder of The Skeptics Society and editor of Skeptic magazine, who wrote an open letter to Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens in his most recent Scientific American column. The second is from Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation (and one of the four addressed by Shermer), who wrote an open letter to the editor of Science in which he urges scientists to unite against the threat of religion.

It is easy to assume that, together, these letters represent the two sides of the coin. However, it seems to me, they are more like the same side of two different coins. Both Shermer and Harris argue in favor of science and reason. Their concerns and perspectives are quite different but not necessarily opposite.

Shermer is preoccupied with ideological considerations such as freedom of thought and belief. He argues that hostile and condescending attitudes are not the way to convince religious people and can harm the advance of science.

Harris has a more “realpolitik” position. He is concerned with practical matters and the actual effects of religion in society (like the Catholic Church preaching the sinfulness of condom use in villages devastated by AIDS). He does not want to convince religious people about the wonders of science. He wants to unite those with a similar mindset to fight against them. And, presumably, he wants to do that not by restricting the freedom of thought of religious groups, but by trying to limit their political power.

So, once you realize they are arguing about different things, it’s clear that both, Shermer and Harris, are right... And that both, Shermer and Harris, are wrong.

 

Rational Atheism

An open letter to Messrs. Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens

By Michael Shermer

Since the turn of the millennium, a new militancy has arisen among religious skeptics in response to three threats to science and freedom: (1) attacks against evolution education and stem cell research; (2) breaks in the barrier separating church and state leading to political preferences for some faiths over others; and (3) fundamentalist terrorism here and abroad. Among many metrics available to track this skeptical movement is the ascension of four books to the august heights of the New York Times best-seller list—Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation (Knopf, 2006), Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell (Viking, 2006), Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great (Hachette Book Group, 2007) and Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion (Houghton Mifflin, 2006)—that together, in Dawkins’s always poignant prose, “raise consciousness to the fact that to be an atheist is a realistic aspiration, and a brave and splendid one. You can be an atheist who is happy, balanced, moral and intellectually fulfilled.” Amen, brother.

Whenever religious beliefs conflict with scientific facts or violate principles of political liberty, we must respond with appropriate aplomb. Nevertheless, we should be cautious about irrational exuberance. I suggest that we raise our consciousness one tier higher for the following reasons.

Full article...

Scientists should unite against threat from religion

by Sam Harris

Sir

It was genuinely alarming to encounter Ziauddin Sardar's whitewash of Islam in the pages of your journal ('Beyond the troubled relationship'). Here, as elsewhere, Nature's coverage of religion has been unfailingly tactful — to the point of obscurantism.

In his Commentary, Sardar seems to accept, at face value, the claim that Islam constitutes an "intrinsically rational world view". Perhaps there are occasions where public intellectuals must proclaim the teachings of Islam to be perfectly in harmony with scientific naturalism. But let us not do so, just yet, in the world's foremost scientific journal.

Under the basic teachings of Islam, the Koran cannot be challenged or contradicted, being the perfect word of the creator of the Universe. To speak of the compatibility of science and Islam in 2007 is rather like speaking of the compatibility of science and Christianity in the year 1633, just as Galileo was being forced, under threat of death, to recant his understanding of the Earth's motion.

An Editorial announcing the publication of Francis Collins's book, The Language of God ('Building bridges') represents another instance of high-minded squeamishness in addressing the incompatibility of faith and reason. Nature praises Collins, a devout Christian, for engaging "with people of faith to explore how science — both in its mode of thought and its results — is consistent with their religious beliefs”.

Full article...

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