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 …
The Next to Last Rock in the Avalanche
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) …
An Infinite Plane of Green Velvet
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 …
Way Up in the Middle of the Air
In his next chapter, Harris outlines the three philosophical schools of thought on the matter of free will. They are, respectively, the determinist, the libertarian, and the compatibilist schools of thought. The determinist says that we have no free will, deal with it. The libertarian says that we do too have free will, and that …
Flipping Coins in the Control Room
There are two levels at least to the debates over the freedom of the will. The first has to do with the intersection of time and eternity, and is a problem that theists have to deal with. Arminians believe that God knows the future exhaustively, and Calvinists believe that He knows this future exhaustively because …
Sam Harris, Moist Robot
So then, Sam Harris has a new little book out, and for such a small book (66 pages), it promises to be a lot of fun. I say this because the book appears to be filled with epistemological obliviousness, cover to cover. The name of the book is Free Will, released by Free Press (heh) …
Vaclav Havel, Christopher Hitchens, and Kim Jong Il
On the death of Kim Jong Il, one wit tweeted that he liked to think that God had let Havel and Hitchens decide who would be the third one to go. That’s funny, but if ideas have consequences, and they do, then there are a few other considerations. We often say, when someone passes away, …
Logic Without Color or Weight
“Once you grant that the world works this way, anyone who comes bustling up to you with stories about men who came back from the dead is a prima facie nutjob. Simple. But you need to look at your closed-system-universe again and look more closely at the price tag this time. Not only is this …
Too Easily Gobsmacked
“And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also” (Gen. 1:16). Too many of us take this as saying nothing more than that God put a big shiny thing up in the sky for the daytime, and a …
Too Many Hypocrites in the Halls of Reason
This is why I could never become an atheist or part of the skeptic community. Too many factions, divisions, snarls, petty fights, and so on. Worshipping the goddess Reason, they descend into frenzies of irrationality at the slightest provocation. I am tempted to say of them what Chesterton once observed about the enlightened ones at …