The Four Riders

After watching the 2-part video "The Four Horsemen" (announced as Episode One of Discussions with Richard Dawkins as a DVD, all proceeds from sales of which will go to the Ayaan Hirsi Ali Security Trust) I can certainly recommend it to every reader of this blog. The videos are available for download at Dawkins' website, or to watch online at Google Video: Hour One and Hour Two.

My colleagues ~C4Chaos and William Harryman have given their brief comments on this video, Julian Walker endorses Sam Harris, and many atheist blogs have hailed the discussion. While I have enjoyed watching Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, and Harris give their respective views on several important topics, I'm also quite dissapointed (once again) with what they finally had to say in this "first-of-its-kind". Nothing new was expected, I know, but once you see them four together, the limitations of the so-called "new atheist" agenda become somewhat painful to watch. What these 'brights' have to say today has been said already much more eloquently by rationalists, naturalists, and atheists, 100 years or 1,000 years before them. Having been raised an atheist and humanist of 4th generation, I never found their claims particularly progressive in any sense. Instead, I felt they champion explicit scientism.

While differences are obvious, the fact they speak of "us" justifies looking at them together, without confounding or forgetting serious divergences between them. Harris makes Dawkins nervous, Dennett makes Hitchens impatient, while Hitchens scares everyone just a little bit. (I wonder who came up with the Four Horsemen analogy. Why not Four Nazgul? Just kidding.)

Anyway, I like Sam Harris best, even though I've been critical of the way he understands the benefits of meditation, as well as his idea of "killing Buddhism", see .pdf here (Harris: "Wisdom of Buddha is currently trapped within the religion of Buddhism" etc, etc). Basically, Harris should develop the ability to spot and avoid the dreaded level/line fallacy. But then, that would be Sam Harris 2.0, right?

More video: Here's a fun debate between Sam Harris and Rabbi David Wolpe. In a great moment, Harris says, "The antidote to bad science or scientific incompleteness is good science, and more science, not religion." Quickly, Rabbi Wolpe replies, "That's exactly the answer to bad religion, or poor religion, or failed religion." And off they go...

Also, in this article Meera Nanda is critical of the way Harris endorses Eastern practices. Just two quotes:

... Harris declares 'the end of faith' only to celebrate the beginning of a new age of spirituality. That such a prominent rationalist is prepared to reclaim spiritualism in the name of science matters. When spiritualism, or mysticism, claims the status of rational knowledge or science, it ends up transforming what is essentially an ecstatic emotional experience into a knowledge claim about the nature of reality. These issues are not just theoretical. In countries like India, where spiritualism enjoys the blessings of the highest religious authorities, metaphysical beliefs that follow from mystical experiences exert a great deal of social influence. While India has a fairly large and advanced scientific workforce, science has not succeeded in displacing the authority of metaphysical truths from the cultural sphere...

...Harris believes that spiritual experiences are knowledge experiences which can "uncover genuine facts about the world". He buys into the basic idea that what mystics 'see' in their minds actually has an ontological referent in the world outside their minds...

I don't think she understands correctly or precisely what Harris is or isn't endorsing, but that's another question - I still find her article useful to demonstrate how these matters are too complex for a rationalist, humanist, or even relativist platform. So much so, that on such platform you have to end up discarding something very, very essential to the grand human enterprise. Harris has done his best not to discard interiority, and not to discard deeper states of awareness, but he has failed to recognize higher structures, i.e. higher horizons that reconcile and integrate faith and reason in a marriage where everyone has to give up a little to gain so much more. Ken Wilber writes in his foreword to "The Marriage of Sense and Soul" (italics mine):

"... Fools rush in where angels fear to tread; therefore, the integration of science and religion is the theme of this book. If you are an orthodox religious believer, I would only ask that you relax into the argument and see where it takes you; I do not think you will be dismayed. The primary prerequisite I have placed on this discussion is that both science and religion must find the argument acceptable in their own terms. For this marriage to be genuine, it must have the free consent of both spouses. If you are an orthodox scientist, I would only suggest that, as you have a thousand times in the past when you were working on a problem, let curiosity and wonder bubble up, but in this case don't focus it on a specific solution. Simply let wonder fill your being until it takes you out of yourself and into the staggering mystery that is the existence of the world, a mystery that facts alone can never begin to fill. If Spirit does exist, it will lie in that direction, the direction of wonder, a direction that intersects the very heart of science itself. And you will find, in this adventure, that the scientific method will never be left behind in the search for an ultimate ground."

Well, amen.

NOTE: an interesting discussion has developed at my Zaadz blog where this article was cross-posted.