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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Sam Harris

Disbelieving in God without being an atheist

08 Sunday Jul 2018

Posted by Amod Lele in Buddhism, God, M.T.S.R., Metaphysics, Practice

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

Anselm, Ben (commenter), Christopher Hitchens, ibn Rushd, identity, religion, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Speculative Realism, theodicy

In recent years – years since I began writing this blog – I have come to realize that I do not believe in God. This is not a mere agnosticism; I believe that God does not exist. The idea of God once helped us make sense of the physical world in a way that it no longer does; the learned men and women who have studied living organisms have been most successful with a paradigm that has no need for a divine plan. Moreover the suffering of the world gives us active reason to disbelieve in God. It makes the idea of an omnipotent omnibenevolent creator seem almost absurd. There is no particular reason to believe an omnipotent being exists; if he did, he could not be omnibenevolent. He would likely be indifferent at best, evil at worst. Certainly not a being to worship or trust. I have become increasingly sympathetic to the drastic atheism of the Speculative Realist philosophers, who take their metaphors for existence from H.P. Lovecraft.

I have tended to think the non-design-based arguments for God’s existence are not taken seriously enough, and have defended them here in the past. But in the end I do not think they succeed. Continue reading →

The Buddhist problem of value

16 Sunday Oct 2011

Posted by Amod Lele in Early and Theravāda, Foundations of Ethics, God, Karma, Mahāyāna, Self

≈ 21 Comments

Tags

Alasdair MacIntyre, Andrew Skilton, autobiography, Damien Keown, Friedrich Nietzsche, G.E. Moore, John Stuart Mill, Kate Crosby, Paul Williams, Penelope Trunk, Sam Harris, Śāntideva

Today’s post follows up on those from two and three weeks ago, and there’ll be another one next week. I intend the four posts, taken together, to make a statement about the continuing importance of the idea of God: why, in the face of the very real problem of suffering and the scientific ability to easily do without God as an explanation of life’s apparent design, God is still hard to do away with. I mean this on an intellectual and philosophical level, not merely an emotional one; it is not just that we need to bother with God because so many people out have some neurological need for him, but that there yet remain ways in which God helps us to make sense of reality.

I’m going to begin this week not with God, but with Buddhism. Continue reading →

Not all facts are empirical

25 Sunday Apr 2010

Posted by Amod Lele in Epistemology, Foundations of Ethics, German Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Philosophy of Science, Salafi, Social Science

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Immanuel Kant, mathematics, Plato, Sam Harris, Sean Carroll, Taliban

There’s been a fair bit of blogosphere buzz about Sam Harris‘s recent TED talk, entitled “Science can answer moral questions.” I didn’t expect to agree much with Harris, given my usual objections to empiricist scientism and related attempts to exalt “science” against “religion.” And I think there are indeed a number of problems with Harris’s view. And yet there’s quite a lot that Harris gets right – at least as much, I think, as most of his critics.

The most widely read response to Harris (and the one that Harris himself responded to at length) is one by Sean Carroll. I find the Harris-Carroll debate instructive because both seem to miss the most important point; and that, in turn, would seem to be because both fall prey to an unfortunate empiricism.

At the heart of the debate is the supposed dichotomy between “facts” and “values,” or “is” and “ought.” (I would rather say “should” than “ought,” because “ought” sounds increasingly rare and archaic in contemporary North American English, but that’s a quibble.) Harris insists that values are a kind of fact, even objective fact, so that “should” or “ought” statements have a meaning grounded in reality, not entirely relative to or dependent upon the subjects making the claim. “Should” statements, on this view, are a kind of “is” statement. In this, I think, Harris is entirely right.

Where Harris slips up is in missing the elision of “fact” with “empirical fact.” Continue reading →

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