I wish this viewpoint were more common, but judging from the OP’s score, it is still in minority.
Hard to say, my sense is those of us endorsing/sympathizing/tolerant of Will’s position were pretty persuasive in this thread. The OP’s score went up from where it was when I first read the post.
I just picked up Sam Harris’s latest book—the Moral Landscape, which is all about the idea that it is high time science invaded religion’s turf and claimed objective morality as a scientific inquiry.
I’m in complete agreement with Dreaded_Anomaly on this. Harris is excellent on the neurobiology of religion, as an anti-apologist and as a commentator on the status of atheism as a public force. But he is way out of his depths as a moral philosopher. Carroll’s reaction is pretty much dead on. Even by the standards of the ethical realists Harris’s arguments just aren’t any good. As philosophy, they’d be unlikely to meet the standards for publication.
Now, once you accept certain controversial things about morality then much of what Harris says does follow. And from what I’ve seen Harris says some interesting things on that score. But it’s hard to get excited when the thesis the book got publicized with is so flawed.
Hard to say, my sense is those of us endorsing/sympathizing/tolerant of Will’s position were pretty persuasive in this thread. The OP’s score went up from where it was when I first read the post.
I’m in complete agreement with Dreaded_Anomaly on this. Harris is excellent on the neurobiology of religion, as an anti-apologist and as a commentator on the status of atheism as a public force. But he is way out of his depths as a moral philosopher. Carroll’s reaction is pretty much dead on. Even by the standards of the ethical realists Harris’s arguments just aren’t any good. As philosophy, they’d be unlikely to meet the standards for publication.
Now, once you accept certain controversial things about morality then much of what Harris says does follow. And from what I’ve seen Harris says some interesting things on that score. But it’s hard to get excited when the thesis the book got publicized with is so flawed.