Archived (((The Problem With Miracles - Sam Harris))) (youtube.com)
submitted ago by antiracistMetal
Posted by: antiracistMetal
Posting time: 7 months ago on
Last edit time: never edited.
Archived on: 8/20/2020 10:00:00 AM
Views: 25
SCP: 0
1 upvotes, 1 downvotes (50% upvoted it)
Archived (((The Problem With Miracles - Sam Harris))) (youtube.com)
submitted ago by antiracistMetal
view the rest of the comments →
[–] chirogonemd 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago (edited ago)
I like Sam Harris, as a personality. I enjoy listening to him. I've always found him overrated in terms of his actual thought. The Moral Landscape was dog shit. In this video he is making some fairly conventional cases, nothing innovative. He relies most strongly on the dating of the NT gospels, and I think that's at least a fairly easy hurdle to overcome (maybe not entirely in your opinion). The first examples of written word are not coterminus with the earliest beliefs. The question that needs to be sussed out for an oral culture is not how quickly they wrote something down, but how soon they evidenced belief. For that, a genre like a narrative epic isn't as useful. Something more like letters or the testimony of historians of the period would be better.
The later dating of the NT gospels suggests, to me, that a constellation of beliefs passing mostly via oral transmission, took a couple of decades to fall into the hands of men trained in writing to codify them. This cannot be understood or analyzed outside of the context that there was massive persecution taking place against the earliest Christians. Think about how difficult it would be to get an anti-Jewish text disseminated properly today, and that's with the advent of the internet, and the so-called enlightened politico-religious tolerance of "modern" civilization. Try it during an age when stealing some bread could get you nailed, literally, to a tree and most of the townspeople wouldn't even find that odd to see on a Tuesday.
That might seem unconvincing, but modern dating for Paul's earliest letters are within 2-5 years of the crucifixion. What is at issue here is what the earliest Christians believed. How early is the first belief situated with respect to the crucifixion? Paul's letters evidence very early belief in the divinity of Christ and the miracles, and he was surprised at the conviction - to me, that by itself suggests something about the rate at which belief/legend formed in that time period. To have been surprised at the ubiquity of belief within a certain sect, two years after the event, suggests that Paul thought this was a preternatural diffusion of similar belief. I'm sure if people had Youtube at that point, the whole matter would have been put before the public and decided on in a couple of days. I say that just to emphasize that these dating objections seem anachronistic - we're retro-projecting modern demands.
The Hebrews inherited a mostly oral tradition, and so for years these stories circulated regionally, with the nuance you'd expect, but mostly maintaining the core narrative. That isn't to say there weren't other traditions mixed in with this, Gnostics for example.
I know this isn't the only argument he makes in the video. He also refers to Sai Baba. But this is the argument he references twice and seems to think it is somehow devastating. It is, for people that don't know jack shit. For the typical westerner with a K-12 and perhaps undergrad education without much in the way of exposure to academic study of religion, this shit always seems terribly convincing. It's fucking heuristic mostly. Man proclaims intelligence and atheism, he looks right, talks right, and he's behind a podium and so charmingly relaxed. The significance is authority.
The people who make more informed opposing arguments are usually academics who you won't find widely published by Simon Schuster in the popular category, or actively campaigning for acclaim via Youtube and podcasts.
There is such a social element to the success of people like Sam. And I like him! That's half of it. I know that @antiracistmetal is going to scoff at this sort of analysis. But the phenomenon seems citrus-juicy to me when it comes to this. The modern atheists are just much slicker marketers. There is a cunning, cut-throat, and canine sort of rhetorical-sensibility. The most educated Christian apologists appear to lack this. But you take into account the nature of Christian belief, and it all becomes just so... fitting. Doesn't it? You take someone like a William Lane Craig. Highly intelligent, but he's still a Christian sheep among wolves. I think Christianity would do a lot better in today's landscape if it had some wolves, but that also seems to be a bit contradictory. Harris, Hitchens, Dawkins - these guys are not nice. But the Christian apologists, no matter how good their arguments, are always so very nice.
This entire dynamic has even been evident in this debate we've been having with @antiracistmetal, to a much smaller extent. The devil understands the temptation to be popular, and the clever sword-swinging of the 'I'm a tortured troubled intellectual' is as convincing in a debate as a square punch is in a street brawl. We love a bad guy. The atheist, someone trying to take down instead of build up, has that allure. Not the one putting his neck out there to be dispositive about the nature of reality, but the one doing the neck chopping. I wish Christians would get a little hungrier for blood.
@PeaceSeeker
[–] antiracistMetal [S] 0 points 3 points 3 points (+3|-0) ago
Antisemite.
@peaceseeker
[–] antiracistMetal [S] 0 points 2 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago
I loved The Moral Landscape.
@peaceseeker
[–] PeaceSeeker 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago (edited ago)
You guys should both read The New Atheist Denial of History by Borden Painter Jr. It's a quite short work but very succinctly exposes, well, the denial of history endemic in all of the new atheists' writings and philosophies. It isn't an attack on atheism; just the shoddy ground upon which the work of the new atheists stands. I would appreciate both of your thoughts on the book.
@chirogonemd
[–] chirogonemd 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago (edited ago)
Why? You were the one who disliked the open-question. You pointed me to Moore's argument. Sam is dancing around it the entire time.
Basically the whole book is Sam saying there is an X that is good, though not God, some social-political state (a material situation) that we can discover that objectively maximizes the frequency of brain states that equate to human flourishing, because they are concomitant with the said material situation. He's assuming what the good is. He makes several appeals to ways that we could, for instance, objectively identify the optimum world cuisine on some physiological criteria about which promoted the highest human health. Here again, he's determining the good. His own values become the objectively best ones.
It's some form of utilitarianism, just more rooted in material states and so the notion that it could be studied empirically makes it super fashionable sounding.
It can't be ignored how consonant this whole idea is with dialectical materialism. Instead of implicitly burying the connection between material status and well-being, he's just making these things explicit by making the move to the brain. This material situation causes this brain state and this is the best possible brain state. Take those bourgeois brain states and spread the wealth! This is a less transcendental form of Marxism waiting to fucking flower. It sounds so reserved and reasonable, but underneath there an answer being given to the question: well, who gets to decide? Well, the non-partisan neuroscientists and psychologists of course.
The same ones telling us today that little boys can be little girls. It's only about brain states! If the brain state is better for this boy when he thinks he's a girl, this is morally superior to put him in a dress!
I'm telling you, Sam's moral philosophy is a neo-Marxism parading as data-driven science.
@PeaceSeeker