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Rakuen Reviews: The End of Faith
15 years ago
General
Recently I faced a bit of a dilemma. Either I could buy 'Hitch22' or 'The Moral Landscape' or 'The End of Faith' and 'Breaking the Spell'. In the end I took the last option, which both gave me two books and means I have the four horsemen's main religious books.
'The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason' is a book by philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris. The book primarily concerns religion, belief, reason and faith, obvious from the title. Sam stresses the importance of evidence and reason as the basis of our beliefs and how faith leads to violence. If someone does not believe in an afterlife then they will be more concerned about life on Earth than if they truly believe that there is a second life after death. Religious faith will inevitably lead to conflict as long as people truly believe its tenets.
Sam delves into a number of examples of religiously motivated violence. In particular he considers Islam to be a particular threat to the world, including a whole chapter entitled 'The Problem with Islam'. He states that Islam is still a few centuries behind the rest of the world, where Christianity was during the Inquisition, but now has access to modern weaponry. While stating Islam is a particular threat to the world he also makes sure that people don't claim Christianity to be any gentler, just that over time the Christian faith has been forced to concede a number of points to secular science and this has, in a sense, tamed it.
Closer to the end of the book he describes how he sees morality and how he believes we should judge actions, a theme expanded on in 'The Moral Landscape'. He claims that questions about right and wrong are actually questions about happiness and the suffering of sentient creatures. He asserts that moral questions are the same as scientific questions in that there is a true answer, just that we might not know it yet, or ever. In that chapter he dismisses a certain form of moral relativity but never really addresses the sort of relativity to which I subscribe. I would say that no set of moral standards are better than another in a demonstrable way. Depending on what you would achieve the morals that would be appropriate would differ and there is no way to determine an absolute moral value. For this he claims that happiness is the aspect of concern we should be looking at but, while I have no problem with such morals, he does not justify his choice of criteria. I imagine such criticisms have been levelled at his more recent book but I have not been following those discussions all that closely.
In the final chapter he deals with conciousness but I am afraid I cannot comment much there because there was very little that I could follow or understand in its entirety.
On a side note, as interesting as the book can be, it is not easy reading. Some chapters are harder than others but my main problem with the book is its use of end notes. Each chapter has about 4-5 pages of extra notes at the back and often they are particularly interesting paragraphs which forces one to constantly flip back and forth to keep up.
'The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason' is a book by philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris. The book primarily concerns religion, belief, reason and faith, obvious from the title. Sam stresses the importance of evidence and reason as the basis of our beliefs and how faith leads to violence. If someone does not believe in an afterlife then they will be more concerned about life on Earth than if they truly believe that there is a second life after death. Religious faith will inevitably lead to conflict as long as people truly believe its tenets.
Sam delves into a number of examples of religiously motivated violence. In particular he considers Islam to be a particular threat to the world, including a whole chapter entitled 'The Problem with Islam'. He states that Islam is still a few centuries behind the rest of the world, where Christianity was during the Inquisition, but now has access to modern weaponry. While stating Islam is a particular threat to the world he also makes sure that people don't claim Christianity to be any gentler, just that over time the Christian faith has been forced to concede a number of points to secular science and this has, in a sense, tamed it.
Closer to the end of the book he describes how he sees morality and how he believes we should judge actions, a theme expanded on in 'The Moral Landscape'. He claims that questions about right and wrong are actually questions about happiness and the suffering of sentient creatures. He asserts that moral questions are the same as scientific questions in that there is a true answer, just that we might not know it yet, or ever. In that chapter he dismisses a certain form of moral relativity but never really addresses the sort of relativity to which I subscribe. I would say that no set of moral standards are better than another in a demonstrable way. Depending on what you would achieve the morals that would be appropriate would differ and there is no way to determine an absolute moral value. For this he claims that happiness is the aspect of concern we should be looking at but, while I have no problem with such morals, he does not justify his choice of criteria. I imagine such criticisms have been levelled at his more recent book but I have not been following those discussions all that closely.
In the final chapter he deals with conciousness but I am afraid I cannot comment much there because there was very little that I could follow or understand in its entirety.
On a side note, as interesting as the book can be, it is not easy reading. Some chapters are harder than others but my main problem with the book is its use of end notes. Each chapter has about 4-5 pages of extra notes at the back and often they are particularly interesting paragraphs which forces one to constantly flip back and forth to keep up.
