Response to a letter to a Christian Nation 1

Posted on Wednesday, October 25th, 2006 at 1:09 pm

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Sam Harris, author of the work The End of Faith has written a follow up book called Letter to a Christian Nation.  In this book Harris responds to those Christians who have written to him telling him how wrong he was to write the end of faith.  Let’s be clear about a couple of things, first, I am sure that there are plenty of well meaning people out there who want to write to the national atheist and give him what for by citing Bible verses.  This is simply not an effective method of discourse.  It fails to take Harris seriously and fails to take his work seriously.

We should all believe that if Christianity is true, then it will stand up to the arguments of anyone.  If it is not true, then we should want to know about it so that we can be intellectually virtuous.  I want the next few blogs (maybe a week or so) to be taken up by reading and carefully responding to the work of Harris.  I hope to be kind and gracious in my response and I have alerted Mr. Harris through his site that I will be writing about his book.  I am sure that he gets many, many letters like mine, so I don’t expect him to show up with any comments, but I will write as if I expect him to read the blog.  Let us all treat those with whom we disagree in the same way. 

Today I will comment only upon the “Note to the Reader” at the start of Harris’s book.  He tells us about the number of pieces of hate mail that he has gotten from Christians.  I have no trouble believing this, though I wish it were untrue.  I get my share of hate e-mail for small doctrinal differences or some strange view that I discuss over the radio.  It does seem that Christians can be the most hostile of groups.

Harris narrows down his definition of Christian on p. viii by insisting that he addresses a Christian in a narrow sense of the term.  This narrow sense includes two things: a belief that the Bible is the inspired word of God and a belief that only those who accept the divinity of Jesus Christ will experience salvation after death.  Since the second follows the first, I find myself in this narrow group and thus one of the people whom Mr. Harris hopes will read his book.  A few lines down Harris betrays his lack of theological training by grouping Jehovah’s Witnesses in with Catholics, Evangelicals Baptists, and Pentecostals.  Of course anyone who is familiar with the Jehovah’s Witness movement will know that it is not belief if Jesus Christ (at least not belief in the same sense as the rest of these groups) that causes one to experience salvation.

On the next page (ix) Harris begins to call the Christian right extremists and then places the burden upon the the liberals and moderates to move away from the Christian conservatives by saying “while liberals and moderates do not fly planes into buildings . . .” of course neither do Christian conservatives.  While Harris claims that Christianity is “divisive, injurious, and retrograde” we will have to wait for the arguments that follow that very strong language.

Harris then moves on to one of the favorite targets of the secular movement, intelligent design.  One only needs to look at a few back issues of The Skeptical Enquirer or Skeptic magazine to see that this movement has come under great attack in the last couple of years.  Harris makes a huge error in logic, however when he jumps from the fifty percent who believe that there was some kind of creation or creator to the conclusion that “more than half of our neighbors believe that the entire cosmos was created six thousand years ago.” (p. x) Obviously there are many (including myself) who would believe in creation, yet would hold to an earth that is older than six thousand years.  This kind of error seems as if it should have been caught before the book went to press.

Harris ends this section by telling us that the US is now a “dim-witted giant” and has a combination of power and “great stupidity.” The use of this kind of language will serve only to inflame an already hostile audience.  I propose rational conversation without the use of such loaded language.

Enough for the few pages of the note to the reader.  In the next day or so I will let you in on what Mr. Harris has to say in the actual letter.  Until then, don’t be afraid to go out an buy a copy of the book yourself.  Read it, think about it, are the arguments unbeatable?  I don’t think so.  I’ll tell you more about why I don’t think so next time.