Sam Harris v. Francis Collins

    So far in our review of Sam Harris' book The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, we have seen Dr. Harris attempt to build an objective standard of morality on the basis of science. In the end what he had to offer was a kind of undated version of the utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill, but he gave us very few specifically scientific reasons for his conclusions.
    We also saw him wrestle with the problem of fee will v. determinism, and was not entirely successful here either. He began by denying the idea of free will, but then tried to argue that it is still possible to think rationally. We have motives for what we think – motives that are in our emotions, but we are still rational beings.
    In light of this Dr. Harris' treatment of Francis Collins is nothing less than deplorable. Dr. Collins is the Director of the National Institutes of Health, an evangelical Christian, and the author of the book The Language of God (Free Press, 2006). Dr. Harris says that "to read it [i.e., Collins' book] is to witness nothing less than intellectual suicide" (Harris, p. 160). In The Language of God Dr. Collins recounts, among other things, his religious conversion. He had been reading C.S. Lewis when he was struck by a passage in which Lewis said that given the claims that Jesus had made for Himself, either the claims were true or else Jesus was either a fraud or a lunatic. It is not possible to accept Him as a "great moral teacher" and yet think that He was wrong about who He said He was.
    Collins had felt the force of the argument, but the decisive moment came when he was hiking in the Cascade Mountains, and "the majesty and beauty of God's creation overwhelmed my resistance. As I rounded a corner and saw a beautiful and unexpected frozen waterfall, hundreds of feet high, I knew the search was over. The next morning I knelt in the dewy grass as the sun rose and surrendered to Jesus Christ" (quoted in Harris, p. 163).     
    And what is Dr. Harris' reaction to this account? "This is self-deception at full gallop. It is simply astounding that this passage was written by a scientist with the intent of demonstrating the compatibility of faith and reason" (Ibid.).
    Self-deception at a full gallop? Wait a minute here. What exactly happened to Francis Collins?
    According to Dr. Collins' own account of his conversion, the book of Lewis' that he had been reading was Mere Christianity. Dr. Collins says that he was especially impressed by a section entitled "Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe" (Collins, p. 22). Dr. Collins says ". . . I realized that all of my own constructs against the plausibility of faith were those of a schoolboy . . . Lewis seemed to know all of my objections, sometimes even before I had quite formulated them. He invariably addressed them within a page or two. When I learned subsequently that Lewis himself had been an atheist, who had set out to disprove faith on the basis of logical argument, I recognized how he could be so insightful about my path. It had been his path as well." (Ibid., p.21).
    Dr. Collins, however, did not convert right away. He continued to struggle. Why? "My desire to draw close to God was blocked by my own pride and sinfulness, which in turn was an inevitable consequence of my own selfish desire to be in control. Faithfulness to God required a kind of death to self-will, in order to be reborn as a new creation" (Ibid., p. 222).
    In other words, Dr. Collins' rational self thought that Lewis' arguments made sense. Dr. Harris himself gives the reasons that Dr. Collins cites as the basis for his faith: "the Big Bang, the fine-tuning of Nature's constants, the emergence of complex life, and the effectiveness of mathematics, as well as our moral intuitions" (Harris, pp. 165-166). In other words, while struck by a subjective experience, Dr. Collins still had a rational basis for belief. What the experience did was to break down his resistance to the truth. This is very far from being "an intellectual suicide."
    Dr. Harris says that there are "alternate (and far more plausible) accounts of these phenomena" (the ones cited by Collins in Harris, p. 166). We might wonder what "alternate" and "far more plausible" account there can be for such things as the effectiveness of mathematics, but he does not elaborate. We suspect that it comes down to a matter of perception. Dr. Collins' experience in the Cascade Mountains enabled him to see things in a new light. And what he was seeing was very real and not at all imaginary. It is doubtful that the "alternate" explanations, if they do in fact exist, are "far more plausible."
    What is especially unfortunate about Dr. Harris' strictures on Dr. Collins' conversion experience is that what Dr. Collins described is, for the most part, what Dr. Harris had just said in the preceding chapter of his book is the way all people think, presumably Dr. Harris himself included! We all have motives for what we think, but that does not prevent us from thinking rationally. Dr. Collins described what had happened to him on an emotional level. He also gave us his rational reasons for faith. Why cannot Dr. Harris see what Dr. Collins sees? The answer: his motives are different.
    Frankly, in light of what Dr. Harris had said about motives and beliefs in the earlier chapters of his book, we cannot see how he can condemn Dr. Collins for having the very same thought processes that Dr. Harris himself had described.