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.
But I do believe that I owe a few inquisitive commenters a few concluding observations. I have written this critique of Harris’ determinism as a die-hard Calvinist, descended from the Scots branch of the Reformation, a branch not noted for its friendliness to Pelagianism, or even to his little brother, Semi. Where do I get off, hooting at Sam Harris for his denial of free will?
First, let me state the Reformation doctrine on this. We have no problem with free will. We do have a problem with incoherent articulations of it, but rejection of autonomy is not the same thing as rejecting the liberty God gave us. The Westminster Confession has a chapter entitled Free Will (WCF9.1-5), and in that chapter celebrates the natural liberty of man. In the chapter on God’s eternal decree, it is affirmed that God controls all things, but this is not seen as excluding free moral responsibility on the part of man. Here it is, emphasis mine.
“God from all eternity, did, by the most wise and holy counsel of His own will, freely, and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass; yet so, as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures; nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established” (WCF 3.1).
The position of the Calvinists is not “man’s a puppet, deal with it.” Neither is it the position of Arminiansm in the opposite ditch, where it is assumed that God’s control of all things is inconsistent with the liberty of “second causes.” Note that the position of Westminster is not that liberty of choice is merely consistent with God’s sovereignty. Rather the point is that God’s sovereignty is that which establishes this liberty.
So we should first get straight in our minds the claim that Calvinists are actually making. God did not just ordain (before all worlds) that I would be sitting here typing away on my laptop. He ordained (and decreed) that I would be doing so freely.
I will use just one illustration that will make the point, and then refer any interested parties to other things I have written on this (part one of Back to Basics, Easy Chairs, Hard Words, and this section of this blog).
God is not an actor within the larger scheme of things. He is not a muscle-bound Jupiter, bullying the littler ones. He is the Author of the whole thing. We never ask how much of Hamlet’s role was contributed by Hamlet, and how much by Shakespeare. That is not a question that can be answered with 70/30 or 50/50 or 90/10. The right answer is 100/100. Hamlet’s actions are all Hamlet’s and they are all Shakespeare’s.
Someone is going to say that this is a bad analogy (kind of like that one about the Potter and the clay, Is. 64:8, oops), because we are three dimensional, real people, not like that Hamlet guy. We are much greater than he is. It never occurs to us that God is much greater than Shakespeare, but it turns out that it is not His glory that we are concerned about in these discussions.
There are other objections to this, of course, and there are answers to those objections. I would go into them, but it turns out that was not foreordained before all worlds. Not only that, but I don’t want to.