Joe Heschmeyer explores Sam Harris’s logical fallacies and dogmatic atheism.

Transcription:

Joe:

Welcome back to Shamus Popery. I’m Joe. Hes Meyer. If you’re not familiar with the channel, big think on YouTube. They’ve got 7.43 million subscribers and they explore big important topics and I am happy that their YouTube channel is doing this and not just playing obnoxious children’s music or comedy skits. One of the recent videos from last week already has as of the time of recording 550,000 views. I’m sure by the time you watch this, it’ll have even more than that and it’s called Sam Harris, the Great Problem of Our Time. Now I know what you’re thinking. That’s pretty harsh. He’s not the greatest problem. Surely there are bigger problems than Sam Harris, but don’t worry, it turns out the colon there means Sam Harris is describing the great problem of our time, not that he isn’t. In any case, the problem Sam Harris describes actually has a lot of merit.

I think he’s right on the money in certain things that he says. Namely this number one belief is incredibly important, not just religious belief, any belief about the world because belief is a motivator for action. And we live in a world in which we increasingly, even though we have this age that allegedly was going to draw us all together, has created echo chambers and safe spaces and ideological bubbles and ways in which the way we view the world has become increasingly self-segregated so that you can go your entire life without really having your points of view challenged. That creates certain problems for collective action, for just how we understand the world and it creates things like the spectra of violence. All of this, and I largely agree on this thesis, but Sam Harris wouldn’t be Sam Harris if he didn’t take the opportunity to make completely unnecessary potshots against religion.

But along the way, I think he reveals something that I want to speak to it for two reasons. One, because he’s just said this to hundreds of thousands of people, and two, because I think he is the avatar of a popular kind of low hanging, sort of atheist worldview that views just science, facts, logic, reason on the one hand, and then religion, faith, dogma, blind belief on the other, and they have this very simple bifurcated view of reality and that view of reality is itself unwittingly a pretty naive dogma. But I’m going to let Sam Harris lay out his case and then we’re going to do a little deep dive in a couple of his books and try to show why he’s talking about ideas that he’s not really grappling very well with and he’s taken a pretty intellectually lazy approach to this. But to get there, let’s start with letting the man speak for himself. So for context here, he’s talking about very much the thesis that I just described, that belief is this driver of reality. And the problem is we each have these stories that we tell, these set of beliefs we have about the world, and those may or may not reflect reality itself.

CLIP:

And if you’re rational, those reasons can be explained. If your beliefs are not falsifiable, if there’s no scenario that could convince you that your most cherished opinions are in error, well then that’s proof that you didn’t get them by being in contact with reality.

Joe:

Now, I think if you stop and think about that claim seriously for a moment you’ll realize it sounds really good, but it’s not obviously true. So you can imagine a belief so fundamental, something like two plus two is four that you cannot imagine any amount of evidence that would convince you it’s falsity because it’s been verified. You understand the logical relationship to the ideas, and so it’s not a speculative probabilistic sort of claim in any measurable sort of way. So what experiment is going to prove to you that two plus two isn’t for? And if you can’t come up with that, does that mean that your belief that two and two is four isn’t based on knowledge of reality? On the contrary, maybe your belief is that rock solid because it has been so abundantly proofed or as is in the case of mathematics as we’re going to see because it’s not the kind of thing that’s testable by empirical processes in quite the same way.

We’ll get to that for now. I just want to highlight that Sam is playing from his greatest hits album very much like this is part of his thesis in the End of Faith where he contrasts faith with reason and maybe a little prematurely announces that faith is reaching its end. In that book, which I want to say is about 20 years old now, and I’m someone who read it when it was pretty new off the presses, so I’m dating myself as well as the book here. In that book, he makes the argument that on the one hand, faithful people do care about verification evidence. This is evidence that proves you’re right. And the danger is if you only want evidence that proves you’re right, that you can fall under what’s called confirmation bias. You just want opinions that agree with yours and then you filter out ones that disagree and we’re all prone to that.

We’re all prone to looking at the evidence that reinforces our view of reality and rejecting the stuff that doesn’t. That’s true regardless of your position on religion, this is part of just psychological hard wiring and something we have to actively work against because it can be this limiting filter in terms of our experience of authentic reality. But in Harris’s view, he views this as kind of a hypocrisy on the part of religious people. He says, if a little supportive evidence emerges, however the faithful proof as attentive to data as the damned, this demonstrates that faith is nothing more than a willingness to await the evidence, be it the day of judgment or some other downpour of corroboration. It is a search for knowledge on the installment plan. Believe now live an untestable hypothesis until your dying day and you will discover that you were right.

Now the first thing I’d say is that’s got an aura of truth, but it’s certainly not a completely fair presentation of religion. By that I mean as a religious person, I’ll acknowledge some of the claims being made from a Christian perspective about for instance, the afterlife are things that we cannot presently verify in any sort of beyond a reasonable doubt sort of way. I can’t tell you, and even to take a biblical example, St Paul’s description of heaven is I has not seen here is not heard, but God is ready for those who love him. So we aren’t claiming here is the here and now demonstration of what all these future events are going to be like, but religion is not actually alone in that, whether it’s the economist predicting where the economy’s going to go, the weather forecast, you’re describing what next week’s weather’s going to be or the scientists talking about the heat death of the universe and X number of billions of years, people regularly use the evidence that they have now to make predictive claims about the future.

That’s not inherently an irrational enterprise. That’s not just knowledge on an installment plan or if you want to call it that, then you’d have to say that all of our knowledge comes to us on an installment plan. None of us just have the entire world of knowledge beamed into our brains now, and anyone serious about the scientific process as we’re going to see, has to accept the fact that the way that the empirical sciences work is by constantly seeking falsification. So there is this constant belief that, okay, you can believe the state of the science right now, but you also have to know that it’s not something to hold on too tightly to because elements of it are being constantly questioned. And so details might change in our understanding. So as I say at the beginning, but Harris is going to go on to suggest that no, actually this is something weird about religion.

I don’t think it is, but he’s going to argue in any other sphere of life, a belief is a check that everyone insists upon cashing this side of the grave. The engineer says the bridge will hold. The doctor says the infection is resistant to penicillin. These people have defeasible reasons for their claims about the way the world is. Okay. The first thing I’d say is this is demonstrably untrue. When someone talks about universal heat death or when a historian predicts happened to the United States of America a hundred years from now, say, or an economist talks about what’s going to happen in the decades to come, they are in many cases making predictive claims about the state of things after they die.

So he’s just factually wrong on the claim that this is unique to religion. Now, if by this side of the grave, he doesn’t mean temporally, but metaphysically meaning all of us make claims or all of us who make claims about the future, make claims about things that could happen after the time of our death. But if it’s things that happen to us after the time of our death and involve the state of our soul, then yeah, obviously a religious and philosophical claims are going to be ones that relate to those matters. But that’s not a particularly interesting claim. If the field of say economics doesn’t deal with heaven, that doesn’t tell us anything about the rationality or irrationality of heaven. It just means it’s a different subject matter. So it seems to be this idea that, oh, religion’s like a Ponzi scheme or something. You’re paying into it now with this hope of getting a payout later, but that payout may never come.

And all I would say is that’s kind of true of any claim about the future. You can make that objection to use his own example, the engineer who says the bridge will hold, may be responsible for building the bridge may get paid and may or may not be there if and when the bridge is ever stress tested. That doesn’t disprove anything about the quality of the engineering. But Harris’ claim is that the mole of the priest and the rabbi are quite unlike the doctor or the engineer, and he claims this, nothing could change about this world or about the world of their experience that would demonstrate the falsity of many of their core beliefs. This proves that these beliefs are not born of any examination of the world or of the world of their experience. They are in Karl popper’s sense.

So there’s two things to note first here. Again, he’s just making a claim that is factually untrue. You can look at rates of conversion and clearly religious people do in fact change their mind about religious claims. Those changes are presumably coming from an encounter with some kind of evidence, something like a majority of slightly over 50% of adult protestants have switched from at least one denomination to another, if not wholesale from one religion to another. You have people coming into and going out of Christianity. Those moves, even if you only think the moves in the direction you like are evidentiary in their basis. I think that’s a silly kind of dogmatic belief itself that people are responding to the evidence and experience that they’re receiving in a way that makes sense to them. And we have to say that even for people who are making what, maybe both Sam Harris and I would regard as wrong decisions, but to say that nobody ever changes their views based on the evidence is absurdly false.

But nevertheless, here’s the argument in a nutshell. Number one, faith is bad. It’s not rooted in evidence. Number two, no amount of evidence will cause a religious person to change his or her mind. And number three, religious beliefs are non falsifiable in the sense meant by Carl Popper. And so I cannot help but light up a little bit because hearing Sam Harris in big think he doesn’t mention popper, but clearly using falsification as the standard to determine true from false beliefs and beliefs that are in harmony with experience of reality and ones that are just detached from reality. It kind of makes my heart maybe not glow, but it at least gives me a little bit of an amusement because Carl Popper was in no small part warning against people like Sam Harris. And so to see that you have to actually read Carl Popper because he’s one of those figures who gets really widely misrepresented.

So I’m going to let the man speak for himself, but the book in question is his 1959 book. The Logic of Scientific Discovery and Popper is trying to solve a question, what makes science different from other modes of knowledge and other modes of exploring the world? Because science isn’t a lot of things. Science isn’t pseudoscience, science isn’t metaphysics. Science also isn’t mathematics or logic. What is it that makes science distinct? And Popper is a philosopher of science. So this question matters a lot to him. And prior to his time, a lot of the answer to that had been certain fields like math and logic largely worked deductively. You start with these universal laws and from that you draw particular conclusions. And so the argument went well, the sciences work the opposite direction. They work what’s called inductively, they make individual observations, and from that they universalize to general rules.

But that argument had been coming under a lot of fire from philosophers who pointed out that you can’t drive reliable universal rules from particular instances. And so this was calling in question the whole question of whether we were getting anything reliable about the world from science. So it’s a big deal as you might imagine. So Popper famously talks about falsification as opposed to verification. And there’s a famous example involving black swans. He’s associated with a little bit of context. The Romans, I believe it was juvenile, there was an axiom that something was as rare as a black swan, which meant that it didn’t happen because in Europe all swans are white. And so they had this universal rule to be a swan is to be a white bird. And then crazy enough, one of the many creatures in Australia, one of the seemingly few that doesn’t actively try to kill you, they found black swans.

And so this expression became kind of ironic that a black swan was something that goes against kind of the expected predicted way that you view the world. And so if you want to put this in a scientific kind of way of thinking about it, if scientists said, okay, all swans are white, they could find as popper points out, any number of confirming examples of this, all of the swans that are out there, what is the ultimate test case is finding even one black swan? Because finding 2 million white swans doesn’t prove all swans are white. True finding one black swan does prove it false. So that’s why falsification works differently than verification because with falsification, you only need one example with verification. There’s not really any limit to the number of examples you would need unless you were able to somehow show that you had every swan that ever existed.

So you’d need seemingly an infinite number of examples. So how does that apply here? Popper puts it like this. He explains that his role is to distinguish the empirical sciences on the one hand and math and logic and metaphysics on the other, and he calls this a problem of demarcation. Now, the first thing to note there is popper is not saying one way is logical and rational, and the other way is irrational. He’s not knocking math logic metaphysics. He thinks there’s just different ways that we rationally understand the universe and he wants to know what is it unique or specific about the empirical sciences that we would say demarcates it. And he acknowledges in the course of the book that this is a matter of agreement or convention. He’s drawing a line because we have to say when we’re talking about sciences, what do we mean by this?

And at the time in the 1950s that he’s writing, this is a live question because Marxist, for instance, claimed to have a scientific understanding of the world, and yet Popper who was an ex Marxist, argued, well, there was no way of disproving Marxist’s theory when his claims about class warfare don’t come true. Then there’s just the explanation. Well, that’s because of false consciousness, and so no set of events falsified. And so why are we calling that science? It seems like we’re doing whether that’s true or false, whether the Marxists are right or not. What they’re doing seems to be fundamentally different from say, a scientist in the lab. And so he acknowledges what he’s trying to do here is just clean up the vocab, right? What is it that makes the empirical sciences different, unique, special, identifiable, and we could draw the line somewhere else.

It’s a matter to some extent of an agreement or convention, but we can largely say the sciences are organized around some kind of purpose, although even there you have to go beyond rational argument. He says to say, what is the purpose of science? He doesn’t think you can rationally answer that. Certainly you can’t answer that in a scientific sort of way at the level of what makes science special or unique. He argues that it’s not going to be verification for the reason that I explained a second ago that there is no limit to the number of verifying instances that you would need.

The fact that maybe every Swedish person you’ve met is extremely friendly does not mean you can draw a universal law that all Swedes are friendly. What would have to happen is you’d have to have one case disproving that for your whole theory to be scuttled. But then he says, from a logical point of view, it’s not clear that we’re justified in arriving at universal statements from singular ones no matter how numerous, okay, so maybe you’ve met five nice Swedish people. What if you met 500? What if you met 5,000? Is there a limit? And he’s going to say it’s not clear logically how you would ever be able to derive at that conclusion. If there’s even one Swedish person or potential Swedish person out there who’s maybe really not nice, can you make that kind of universal law? So that gets of course directly to the white swans because that’s exactly what we had there.

But then there’s something at a deeper level that Hopper does that I think is really cool because he gets into what’s sometimes called the theory laden nature of observation. Like, okay, so that’s the problem with saying a universal law. All swans are white. What if you say this one is white? Well, his argument isn’t that you can’t say that you clearly can. His argument is that even here, you’re not just relying on sense data, you’re not just relying on experience because to do that, yes, you are directly seeing whiteness, but it’s hard to say you’re directly seeing swan. So even to be able to say, this swan here is white, you’re drawing on some worldview, some conceptual vision of reality that involves this category of creatures called swans. And I think that’s an important thing. Now that might seem so trivial, you say, what’s the big deal?

Lemme give you a different example. Marco Polo, when he arrives in what’s now Indonesia claims to have discovered a unicorn and that they were quite different, much uglier than he’d read about in European books. Now today, we think he probably discovered the rhinoceros or met a rhinoceros, but because he had this frame for unicorn and did not have a frame for rhinoceros, he interpreted his sins data in a certain way. So likewise, when we say all swans are white or all swans are black or swans are neither all white or all black, we’re not just drawing off of what our eyes see, but also what we know in these other ways, this set of beliefs we have about the universe, a set of beliefs that might be true or false, that’s an important point that he’s making that people like Sam Harris imagine that if we would all just look at the data, we’d all come to the same conclusions about the world.

And the problem is this, we have to have good conversation and persuasion and look at the same clean data together. And popper’s point is that is not true as he puts it. There is no sharp dividing line between empirical language and theoretical language. We are theorizing all the time, even when we make the most trivial singular statement just to say that swan over there is S White is making a claim about reality that goes beyond what you’re getting just with your senses. You’re making a theoretical sort of claim. Now, that might sound very nerdy, but let’s make it very concrete. How might or how would Carl Popper respond to Sam Harris? Now remember, he’s writing in 1959. This is now 2024. I don’t know when it is when you’re watching.

How would he answer this? Well, it turns out we don’t have to speculate because he directly answered the people making Harris’s argument before he was, Sam Harris is a popularizer of a lot of old bad ideas and popper called out these old bad ideas. In this case, the old bad ideas of what’s called naturalistic positivism. Here’s how Poper explains it. Remember the context is this. So-called problem of demarcation. What is it that makes science different from other ways of knowing the world? And he says, positiv is usually interpret the problem of demarcation in a naturalistic way. They interpret it as if it were a problem of natural science. Remember popper’s argument is this is a matter of convention. We drew the line here, we could have drawn it elsewhere. We consider astronomy as silence. We don’t consider astrology because we drew that line, but there’s no natural science that proves astronomy and not astrology as this one gets to be and this one doesn’t.

And if that’s too controversial of a point, consider something like string theory, the claims it’s making about reality rooted largely in mathematics. Does that get to count as science? Is it physics? Is it math? Is it just a non-scientific theory about the world? Those kinds of questions which are hotly debated if you’re familiar, for instance with the book not even wrong, the argument is string theory doesn’t get to count as a science because it’s not falsifiable. So notice there’s a line drawing going on there. So Popper says, yeah, the Sam Harris is of his day. They don’t understand that that’s the nature of the problem. They think this is just like another science problem to sort out. It’s just a problem of the natural sciences, and instead of taking it as their task to propose a suitable convention, they believe they have to discover a difference exist in the nature of things, as it were, between empirical science on the one hand and metaphysics on the other.

They’re constantly trying to prove that metaphysics by very nature is nothing but nonsensical twaddle, soft sophistry and illusion as Hume says, which we should commit to the flames. So notice here, Hume is this major figure in the history of philosophy and one that seems to have left a major mark on Sam Harris’s view of the world, and he had no patience for metaphysics, and Popper is calling this out that this is a pretty common kind of response on these naturalist positivists, the positive. He says, excuse me, the positivist dislikes the idea that there should be meaningful problems outside the field of positive empirical science problems be dealt with by a genuine philosophical theory. He dislikes the idea that there should be a genuine theory of knowledge, an epistemology or a methodology. In other words, there’s a type ... Read more on Catholic.com