Harris Morality Without God, Science Essay

Caring about any of these things may or may not be right or wrong, but it strikes me that if appealing to an unstated vision of "science" to justify the decision is the future of ethics, then both ethics and scientific inquiry are in dire straits.

Clearly, Harris wants "knowledge to count" -- that is, to have practical meaning for human lives -- but he confesses that in order to do so, "some facts must be excluded." Yet how can a scientific worldview exclude a fact? What are the criteria for doing so? Was an excluded datum ever a "fact" to begin with? Even under the time constraints of a TED presentation, this somewhat radical co-option of scientific credibility needed to be examined more closely, but Harris appears to have been uninterested in doing so.

It is likely that the points-of-view that he would like to exclude are those that take religion seriously. But beyond emotionally charged examples, Harris offers little truly compelling logical support for how excluding religion necessarily gets us any closer to recovering a grounded moral universe in the absence of God. In fact, while I personally suspect it is unlikely that the Taliban "have a point-of-view on physics that is worth considering" this suspicion is not empirically or experimentally grounded. If anything it is arguably far more troubling to contemplate a Taliban that both hates us and incorporates sophisticated knowledge of chemistry, physics, and engineering.

Ultimately, portraying theistically informed worldviews as being "obviously" opposed to science is as simplistic as the conventional fundamentalist characterization of science as being obviously opposed to God. Reifying the split between theism and science (or, for Harris, "life" itself) not only fails to get us anywhere truly new, but also cheapens the unique and truly useful aspects of the scientific (or in Kantian terms, reasonable) worldview. This may play well in the comfortable seats at TED -- after all, those people out there who take this stuff seriously are evidently far from cozy "Connecticut" -- but perhaps the tragedy of life on earth is that we don't all live in Connecticut. On the other hand, this diversity of opinion may be one of the glories of the human experience instead, because this is where the moral and scientific truths of our being are debated, tested,…