Why I gave Sam Harris Five Stars

I gave Sam Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation five stars in my Amazon review.

Having just published my own book, The God Theory, in which I propose a concept of God which is, from my perspective as an astrophysicist, completely consistent with science, in particular the Big Bang and evolution, I thought for sure that I would disagree with a lot in Harris’ book. Instead, I found myself cheering for his clear and compelling demonstrations of religious lunacy and the suffering it is causing.

Harris is absolutely correct in faulting religion for intolerance, violence and hatred, things that are the exact opposite of spirituality. But just as our understanding of nature has evolved, so too should our understanding of God evolve. It is possible to conceptualize a God different from the anthropomorphic one of most religions and that is fully compatible with the Big Bang and evolution. Indeed, it may even be required by Occam’s razor.

A remarkable discovery has emerged in astrophysics over the past two decades and is now essentially undisputed: that certain key physical constants have just the right values to make life possible. Most scientists prefer to explain away this uniqueness, by claiming that a huge, perhaps infinite, number of universes must therefore exist, each with unique properties, each randomly different from the other, with ours only seemingly special because in a universe with different properties we would never have originated.

A rational alternative is that the special properties of our universe reflect an underlying intelligence, one that is fully consistent with the Big Bang and Darwinian evolution. This has nothing to do with “Intelligent Design” of lifeforms. It has to do with the origin of the fundamental laws of nature and a rational purpose behind that. This view is also elegantly expressed in the book God’s Universe by Harvard astronomer and historian of science Owen Gingerich.

At this time both views are equally logical and equally beyond proof. Both views require the preexistence of something: quantum fluctuations cannot arise without the preexistence of quantum laws, so where did they come from? It becomes a matter of personal preference whether one prefers the preexistence (prior to the Big Bang) of quantum laws or inflation fields… or an intelligence. However exceptional human experiences and accounts of mystics throughout the ages do suggest that we live in a purposeful universe with an underlying intelligence.

Moreover such ideas are not limited to mystics. Astrophysicist Sir Arthur Eddington, who verified Einstein’s general relativity in 1919 and who first proposed that stars are powered by thermonuclear processes, also wrote Science and the Unseen World. Astrophysicist Sir James Jeans wrote that the Universe looked more like a great thought than like a great machine. And even comologist Sir Fred Hoyle called the Universe “an obvious fix.”

The absurdities of most religions which Harris rightly exposes as nonsense should be rejected as outmoded and in some cases dangerous to the world. But those absurdities may have nothing whatsoever to do with the possible intelligence behind the Universe. Religion and God do not mix. A very different perspective on who we are and what God might be is implied in Pierre Teilhard De Chardin’s statement: “Surely, we are not human beings having a spiritual experience, but spiritual beings having a human experience.”

Someday I hope, along with Harris, that religion will have outlived its questionable usefulness, but I also suspect that spirituality will become a branch of knowledge alongside astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, etc.

Bernard Haisch