Sam Harris is of the conviction that he can talk about the loss of freedom as though it were the loss of something that left everything else about human nature relatively unchanged — such as when your uncle loses his left leg, well below the knee. You have the same old uncle, just a little less of him.

But losing our freedom is not like this at all. We lose that and we lose our humanity. It not like an apple pie losing a slice, but more like a cube losing its height. We don’t really have three dimensions, but more like one dimension with three attributes — height, breadth and depth. And the thing is, you can’t remove one of them without simultaneously removing the other two. If you had a cube of wood sitting on your desk, and you completely removed its height, the result would not be a very, very flat cube, depth and breadth still intact, shimmering in a transparent way there on your desk.

To acknowledge that he has lost his freedom, Harris needs to realize that he has lost his humanity, along with various other features of humanity. One of those human features is his views about God, his atheism, which is long gone by this point. Consider this comment from his conclusion. You can hear the wind rustling the leaves of the trees all through the cemetery.

“Not only are we not as free as we think we are — we do not feel as free as we think we do. Our sense of our own freedom results from our not paying close attention to what it is like to be us. The moment we pay attention, it is possible to see that free will is nowhere to be found, and our experience is perfectly compatible with this truth. Thoughts and intentions simply arise in the mind. What else could they do?” (p. 64).

Harris is the punch bowl, and his thoughts are bobbing around like so many ice cubes. In fact, they are so thick in there, and are bumping around much that it might be necessary for Harris to write himself a book!
Not only did he fail to make his case on free will, but Harris’ atheism, and rationalism, and scientism, are three shimmery cubes on my desk here. Okay, all done with that.

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The penultimate chapter of Free Will is on politics, and is only a few pages. All it takes is a few pages to snark at conservatives.

“Conservatives, however, often make a religious fetish of individualism” (p. 61)

“Living in America, one gets the distinct sense that if certain conservatives were asked why they weren’t born with club feet or orphaned before the age of five, they would not hesitate to take credit for these accomplishments” (p 62).

All of which goes to show that Harris knows as much about conservatism as he does about free will.

We could go off in that direction, but I will refrain. What I want to chortle about in this instance is the fact that Harris is blaming conservatives for doing simply what the space/time continuum is making them do. If you have a right view of the cosmos, Harris has been arguing, you won’t blame individuals for doing things that are completely outside their control, and then he proceeds immediately to the edifying task of blaming those who don’t think this way.

If atoms in motion are responsible for inner city crime, then atoms in motion are also responsible for the conservatives in red state, fly-over country who object to it. Not only so, for this is a liberating game, atoms in motion are also responsible for Harris objecting to the conservatives objecting to the crime. This would be great fun, but Harris keeps forgetting to apply his dogmas to his dogmas.

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G.K. Chesterton says somewhere, I think in Orthodoxy, that given materialist assumptions, it makes no sense to say to someone, “Go and sin no more,” because that involves choices, but you can put the malefactor into boiling oil because boiling oil is an environment.

In his next chapter on moral responsibiliity, Sam Harris tries to have it both ways. On the one hand, he sticks by his deterministic guns.

“No human being is responsible for his genes or his upbringing, yet we have every reason to believe that these factors determine his character” (p. 54).

But, on the other hand, the bright light of this truth is hard to look at straight on, at least for any length of time.

“For most purposes, it makes sense to ignore the deep causes of desires and intentions — genes, synaptic potentials, etc. — and focus instead on the conventional outlines of the person” (p. 60).

Huh? Why should we ignore the truth about human choices, and focus instead on our illusions about them? Because, Harris says, “it’s the easiest way to organize our thoughts and actions” (p. 60). Well, jeepers. Now he tells us.

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The next chapter that Harris offers is a wee one, asking whether or not the truth he is offering might be bad for us. He doesn’t think so, and offers his own testimony — how “losing the sense of free will has only improved [his] ethics” (p. 45).

There he goes again, writing as though he lost his sense of free will because he somehow discovered the actual state of affairs out there in the world. He does this after spending numerous pages demonstrating why it is, assuming his view of the world, that nobody has any idea of why they do or choose anything — including why they might want to assume his view of the world.

Although his view of things is stark, he is willing for us to pad it a little bit.

“Our interests in life are not always served by viewing people and things as collections of atoms — but this doesn’t negate the truth or utility of physics” (p. 46).

Translated into plain English, this means that free will is an illusion, albeit an illusion we ought to permit ourselves to function with a bunch of the time. If we admit that we are ultimately being steered, we can “steer a more intelligent course” throughout our mechanistic little lives.

If we admit that Dad is actually driving the car, our three-year-old selves can sit on his lap and pretend we are the ones turning the wheel.

I don’t think I should be too severe in these reviews of Sam Harris’ most recent book. When one of the country’s leading atheists, the author of The End of Faith, trumpets the end of atheism, this is actually something that Christians should welcome and celebrate. Right? The fact that he doesn’t (as of yet) know that he has done this thing is a bagatelle, a trifle. The logic is going to catch up with him soon enough.

“But from a deeper perspective (speaking both objectively and subjectively), thoughts simply arise unauthored and yet author our actions” (p. 32).

“Human choice, therefore, is as important as fanciers of free will believe. But the next choice you make will come out of the darkness of prior causes that you, the conscious witness of your experience, did not bring into being” (p. 34).

“I do not choose to choose what I choose. There is a regress here that always ends in darkness. I must take a first step, or a last one, for reasons that are bound to remain inscrutable” (p. 39).

And so it is that atheism as a world and life view lies in shambles. The whole substructure of his argument has gone galley-west. Got it? Our thoughts (including the atheistic ones) arise unauthored. Where did Sam Harris’ choice to become an atheist come from? It came “out of the darkness,” no accounting for it. So stop trying to account for it already! Harris is an atheist for the same reasons that I am a Christian — the cosmos of antecedent and very dark causes is making us.

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The next chapter was a brief one, and so I will try to be brief as well. The upshot is that Harris shows (and I think he does show) that quantum indeterminate events in the brain cannot be a foundation for free will. If everything is determined, then the cosmos is a locomotive on the only tracks that are, and not an all-terrain vehicle. An all-terrain vehicle does not give you free will if the throttle is stuck and there is no driver. Randomization at the bottom does not give us freedom at the top.

I don’t fault Harris for arguing that, given his premises, we have no free will. I fault him for taking with his left hand what he has given with the right. I fault him for arguing against free will with an argument that presupposes it.

“In physical terms, we know that every human action can be reduced to a series of impersonal events” (p. 27).

What that would be like is a trillion billard balls rocketing all over an infinite plane of green velvet. If we look closely enough, some of those billiard balls appear to be writing a series of books. One of those books chides Christian billiard balls for bouncing around in the hidebound and superstitious way they do. Heh. Pardon me for not paying stricter attention.

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