Atheism: A Moral and Intellectual Necessity
An Atheist Manifest (excerpt)
arguing against irrational faith and its adherents
by Sam Harris
...Only the atheist recognizes the boundless narcissism and self-deceit of the saved. Only the atheist realizes how morally objectionable it is for survivors of a catastrophe to believe themselves spared by a loving God while this same God drowned infants in their cribs. Because he refuses to cloak the reality of the world’s suffering in a cloying fantasy of eternal life, the atheist feels in his bones just how precious life is--and, indeed, how unfortunate it is that millions of human beings suffer the most harrowing abridgements of their happiness for no good reason at all.
One wonders just how vast and gratuitous a catastrophe would have to be to shake the world’s faith. The Holocaust did not do it. Neither did the genocide in Rwanda, even with machete-wielding priests among the perpetrators. Five hundred million people died of smallpox in the 20th Century, many of them infants. God’s ways are, indeed, inscrutable. It seems that any fact, no matter how infelicitous, can be rendered compatible with religious faith. In matters of faith, we have kicked ourselves loose of the Earth.
Of course, people of faith regularly assure one another that God is not responsible for human suffering. But how else can we understand the claim that God is both omniscient and omnipotent? There is no other way, and it is time for sane human beings to own up to this. This is the age-old problem of theodicy, of course, and we should consider it solved. If God exists, either he can do nothing to stop the most egregious calamities or he does not care to. God, therefore, is either impotent or evil. Pious readers will now execute the following pirouette: God cannot be judged by merely human standards of morality. But, of course, human standards of morality are precisely what the faithful use to establish God’s goodness in the first place. And any God who could concern himself with something as trivial as gay marriage, or the name by which he is addressed in prayer, is not as inscrutable as all that. If he exists, the God of Abraham is not merely unworthy of the immensity of creation; he is unworthy even of man... [more]
I believe that - as individuals we want to do our best, and I believe that of Sam Harris. But, I see elements in the passage cited above that give me pause - those which assert that "only we" posess the truth.
Harris' background frame seems to me to be that of extreme scientific reductionism and yet science itself has moved on.
The work of PEAR ( The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory ), the emergent fields of Quantum Mechanics and Chaos Theory, or that of Ilya Prigogine's self organizing systems all cut against Sam Harris' seemingly deterministic lens mired in a Laplacian reductionism that has been called into question with increasing frequency since perhaps the turn of the last century.
Sam Harris may be the ideological counterpart - in terms of his search for absolute certainty - of those he abhors.
I doubt Mr. Harris intends this or would be comfortable with my assesment, and I wish him well.
I don't think that it's because God is either impotent or evil that He doesn't step in to stop calamities. God gave us free will to decide what we want to do. Unfortunately, not everyone decides to be "good". Some people decided to do horrible things, for example, Hitler ordering the mass-slaughter of the Jews, or the mass-genocide in Rwanda. Could God have stepped in and changed or removed the people responsible, to prevent those catastrophes? Absolutely. Did He? No. Why not? Because that would be going against the rules that He set in place. Take for example a game of Dungeons and Dragons. Your party comes across a dragon that kills everyone. Now, since he's running the show, the game master could have intervened, turned the dragon into a kitten, and then your party would have been spared. He has the power to do that, but why doesn't he? Because that would be going against the rules set up in that adventure. God doesn't want bad things to happen, but He gave us the choice to do good or evil. He gave us the choice to accept his gift of salvation. If we didn't have that choice, what would the significance of accepting it be? Nothing. If you created a robot that was programmed to care for you, to "love" you, would that mean anything? What if you created a thousand robots that all acted at your every whim. They all treated you as king. Would that mean anything? Now, if you reprogrammed them and gave them the choice to follow you or not, don't you think some would and some wouldn't? You would be sad that some don't, and sure, you could change them to follow you, but then they would lose the significance. Their obedience, their "praise", would be meaningless because it is forced.
In a sense, good and bad must both exist for either one to exist. If everything was good, then it wouldn't really be good, it would just be normal. Likewise, if everything was bad, then it wouldn't be bad, it would be normal. Good and bad are measured relative to each other. If you had 5 billion robot slaves that all worshiped you, and none that didn't, would that be good? You might think that "Yes, it is!" because you have a reference to compare it to (robots that hated you). But what if there was no such thing? If all robots love you because that's what they are forced to do, and there was no alternative, would it really mean anything?
God created us with a free will because then it means so much more to Him when we do chose to follow Him. Yes, it sucks when we do bad things, but at the same time, it's wonderful when we do good things.
So, to sum up, I agree. Atheism (and Agnosticism) are a necessity. Without them, we'd all be robots, forced to worship God in meaningless repetition throughout all eternity. With them, we have the choice, and it makes the worship that God gets all that much sweeter to His ears.