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 …
Flashing the Laymen
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 …
One Burnt Cookie
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 …
And Pretend Our Driving is Improving
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) …