It is good to be skeptical. I see skepticism as a form of moderation whereby one avoids the pitfalls of gullibility and obstinacy or inflexibility. Care is taken in the discovery of facts and truth without a bias one way or another. It is a difficult characteristic to cultivate.
Still, it surprises me to read drivel from people who believe themselves to be thinkers. They are thinkers but crippled by their biases.
I came across another such statement in the magazine Skeptic. It can serve a purpose, but like other human efforts, it takes its thinking so seriously that it embraces the same dogmatism and infallibility that many who do believe in God and/or in his messiah have come to reject.
Take a look at this statement attributed to Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, in a column by James Randi:
“Can I say for certain that the Bible and the Koran show every sign of having been written by ignorant mortals? Yes. And this is the only certainty one needs to dismiss the God of Abraham as a creature of fiction.”
If I was a person of stereotypical rural origin and education, I might say something like this, “That’s mite powerful stuff you all have wrote. Ya done blowed up all my reason for believin’.”
Just like the writers of the Bible and the Koran, and like most real people of rural origin, I am intelligent and reasonably educated and not prone to the kind of gullibility Mr. Harris needs readers to have to consume his statements.
Let’s take a look at Mr. Harris’s statement, breaking it down.
First, he says the writers of the Bible and the Koran are “ignorant mortals.” We know this is a bit of rhetorical fustian that prepares you for Harris’s thunderous affirmative, and we can picture him in our minds, if you will pardon me, Mr. Harris, pounding his pulpit with a clenched fist. But, really, are we going to hold Bible and Koran writers up to ridicule because of their mortality? And is it not a bit of disingenuity that Mr. Harris mentions their mortality, as if this characteristic disqualified them from making a pronouncement about their experience or their people’s experience of God, of the ultimate? Scientists and skeptics alike make such pronouncements: whether God is or isn’t or can’t be known, whether the material universe always existed, how it began, whether it evolves or not, ad nauseam. Should we hold their mortality against them, or shall we consider what it is they have to say?
In what sense were the writers of the Bible and the Koran ignorant? Does Harris mean they had no knowledge of quantum physics? Does he mean they did not know what he has the benefit of knowing now? Does he mean they did not know anything about the subject of their writings? Does he mean they did not know anything at all?
If there is one thing that historians and archaeologists and anthropologists and sociologists have learned, it is that ancient man was anything but ignorant. His architectural and engineering accomplishments stand, in some cases, unmatched to this day. His laws, his poetry, his literature, his politics, his religious and philosophical and scientific thinking were groundbreaking and in many cases immortal. And his faith – yes, his faith, his convictions – he was willing to die for: Jesus, Socrates, Jews, Christians, Egyptians, Persians, Arabs, Hindus, etc. What the compositors of the various scriptures either wrote or recorded with incredible accuracy and faithfulness over centuries is nothing short of astonishing.
Whether ancient man wrote a work of fiction or wrote a work of historical fact in the collection and publication of the Biblical and Koranic stories and aphorisms, those scriptures are amazing as literature and/or history, and they impart a great deal of wisdom. Even if the writers were not correct in all they wrote, to derogate them as “ignorant mortals” reveals a woodenness and dryness of thought. That’s not skepticism.
Thus, the signs the Bible and the Koran show (and I must admit here a diminished familiarity with the Koran, though I have read some) are not that they were written by “ignorant mortals” but by educated, competent scribes given the paramount task of the preservation of a vital experience and a tradition of wisdom, scribes who did so with unparalleled fidelity. Ignorance could not have allowed such an accomplishment.
I am a Judeo-Christian, so I believe in God and in his messiah. I have read other scriptures, such as the Bhagavad-Gita. Though I do not place my faith in them, I do not hurl at them the ad hominem attack that they were written by “ignorant mortals.” They weren’t.
If Mr. Harris has some kind of test to prove that God, through Moses, did not lead the Hebrews out of Egypt, that King David was neither a king nor a slayer of a giant man, that Jesus was not born, did not die, and was not raised from the dead, he should share that with us, because, as far as I can tell, it would be the first time historical events would ever have been treated by the methods of the physical sciences. The answer, of course, is that such testing cannot be done. Historical events are neither verifiable nor falsifiable. They can be testified to by eyewitnesses and they can be experienced second-hand through sound and/or videotape or documents, thus granting a measure of reliability, but they cannot be tested.
That brings me to my final point: Mr. Harris believes the God of Abraham is a fiction because that is his faith. He does not want to call it faith, so he dresses it up with what he thinks is reason and science. He just does not want to believe in a scriptural God. Fine, but he cannot call it anything but faith.
The funny thing is, Christians, for example, believe in a personal resurrection of the body, whether to life or to the second death. So strictly speaking, the resurrection experienced by Jesus is testable; it will be verified or falsified. My guess is that Mr. Harris does not want to wait that long to find out.
