New Years Reading - The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris

If you are familiar with him and/or his writings you know that his book is related to religion. (Click on the title to go to his web site.)  In this case the neuroscientist approaches beliefs and morals, among other related subjects as subjects to which scientific study may ultimately be applied.  It is interesting but difficult reading (at least for me.)

In his chapter dealing with religion he broaches the issue of scientists who profess deep religious thought but ignore the potential conflicts between that religion (or any) and scientific knowledge.  Here, he takes direct aim at the current director of NIH, Dr. Francis Collins, who was appointed by President Obama.  Though being a physical chemist, a medical geneticist and former head of the Human Genome Project Collins is also a serious Christian believer.  Harris draws upon Collins' book, The Language of God.  He notes that "To read it is to witness nothing less than an intellectual suicide.  It is, however, a suicide that has gone almost entirely unacknowledged:" and he then takes Nature magazine to task for ignoring the "intellectual dishonesty that Collins achieves on nearly every page of The language of God."

In his review of the book, Harris notes that "It is on this basis (fundamental Christian teachings) (previous parenthesis mine) that the current head of the NIH recommends that we believe the following propositions:
1.  Jesus Christ, a carpenter by trade, was born of a virgin, ritually, murdered as a scapegoat for the collective sins of his species, and then resurrected from death after an interval of three days.

2.  He promptly ascended, bodily, to "heaven" - where, for two millennia, he has eavesdropped upon (and, on occasions, even answered) the simultaneous prayers of billions of beleaguered human beings.

3.  Not content to maintain this numinous arrangement indefinitely, this invisible carpenter will one day return to earth to judge humanity for its sexual indiscretions and skeptical doubts, at which time he will grant immortality to anyone who has had the good fortune to be convinced, on Mother's knee, that this baffling litany of miracles is the most important series of truths ever revealed about the cosmos.

4.  Every other member of our species, pas and present, from Cleopatra to Einstein, no matter what his or her terrestrial accomplishments, will be consigned to a far less desirable fate, best left unspecified.

5.  In the meantime, God/Jesus may or may not intervene in our world, as He pleases, curing the occasional end-stage cancer (or not), answering an especially earnest prayer for guidance (or not), consoling the bereaved (or not), through His perfectly wise and loving agency."

Harris concludes with the obvious related question, and many others of a less direct nature - "Is it really wise to entrust the future of biomedical research in the United States to a man who believes that understanding ourselves through science is impossible, while our resurrection from death is inevitable?"