Tag Archives: morality

According to Sam Harris, “All we need is science”

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It sounds like the cue for a song, but it is actually another atheist trying to demonstrate that morality can be derived from science. Read the whole thing here (my emphasis):

How could we ever say, as a matter of scientific fact, that one way of life is better, or more moral, than another? Whose definition of “better” or “moral” would we use? While many scientists now study the evolution of morality, the purpose of their research is to describe how human beings think and behave. No one expects science to tell us how we ought to think and behave. Controversies about human values are controversies about which science officially has no opinion.

However, questions about values are really questions about the well-being of conscious creatures. Values, therefore, translate into facts that can be scientifically understood….

The highlighted section above is itself a value statement that cannot be derived from science; it assumes that the well-being of conscious creatures is “better” than their non well-being. Everything that follows from Sam Harris is grounded on this value, a value that is not based on science: Sam Harris’s claim that his values can be deduced from science is false. Even worse, his foundation is thoroughly antithetical to scientific method, since a concious creature’s longing for well-being is the ultimate expression of subjectivity – at least a theist’s attempt at finding meaning for the word “better” is one which assumes an objective moral reality that was created by a Person who exists independently of “concious creatures”.

Atheist morality: shallowness redefined

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Atheist, Sam Harris has written a book explaining how science, not religion, should be the basis for morality.

From here:

His long-awaited new book, “The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values,” deals head-on with issues that many atheistic thinkers have been skirting for years. If religion is so bad, where should humans look for a moral authority? The answer, for Harris, is science. Harris defines morality as anything related to the “well-being of conscious creatures.” Since many scientific findings have implications for how to maximize well-being, Harris believes scientists should be authorities on moral issues. As Harris sees it, scientists not only have every right to make moral arguments, but should be the authorities of the moral realm.

Harris has put forward a crassly tautological argument for basing morality on science.

It’s all very well for him to define morality as “anything related to the “well-being of conscious creatures”, but where does that come from if not from a sense of “ought” which science cannot explain?

Harris, in starting from the assumption that when our conscience – natural law – tells us that we ought to care about the well-being of our fellow man, has already presupposed a ready-formed morality that was not derived scientifically – a moral law expounded by that which he so despises: religion. In Christianity’s case: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”.

Christianity, if true, is entitled to tell us that we should care about the well-being of concious creatures (Matt 7:12); science, true or not, isn’t.