A reader sends along a TED talk by atheist and neuroscientist Sam Harris, offering the case that science can tell us right from wrong, implicitly making religious traditions superfluous at best. The reader asks for a reaction — given the caveat, as he puts it, that “there is nothing new under the sun.” True. Harris is far from the first to articulately argue for this scientistic view.

The talk was recorded in 2010 but I’m not aware that he has reversed his position. My reaction? Harris is extremely articulate, charismatic in a way, speaking without a script (the TED style) in perfect sentences, perfect paragraphs.

Beyond this, for all the guy’s smarts, there’s something stunted about his presentation. He begins:

I’m going to speak today about the relationship between science and human values. Now, it’s generally understood that questions of morality — questions of good and evil and right and wrong — are questions about which science officially has no opinion. It’s thought that science can help us get what we value, but it can never tell us what we ought to value. And, consequently, most people — I think most people probably here — think that science will never answer the most important questions in human life: questions like, “What is worth living for?” “What is worth dying for?” “What constitutes a good life?”

So, I’m going to argue that this is an illusion — that the separation between science and human values is an illusion — and actually quite a dangerous one at this point in human history. Now, it’s often said that science cannot give us a foundation for morality and human values, because science deals with facts, and facts and values seem to belong to different spheres. It’s often thought that there’s no description of the way the world is that can tell us how the world ought to be. But I think this is quite clearly untrue. Values are a certain kind of fact. They are facts about the well-being of conscious creatures.

His point is simple. Morality is about empathy, caring for other people’s and our own feelings, maximizing happiness and minimizing pain. Neuroimaging increasingly has the power to say what makes us happy, what makes us flourish as human beings. Therefore all that’s needed is to map flourishing against behavior. He doesn’t deny that’s a complex task and perhaps beyond current technology. However, the patterns of behavior that, if implemented, would lead to the most generalized happiness, are what’s moral.

There are several things left out here. First, under Harris’s picture of reality, I’m not sure what it is that creates the “ought.” If I can maximize my “flourishing” at your expense, please tell me why I should not do so, if there’s no standard of what’s right that transcends you and me? Clearly, that’s a matter beyond science’s reach. Our culture, for all its confusion about ultimate questions of faith and meaning, still lives, parasitically, off the remains of past moral cultures that drew their sustenance from religious tradition. That includes atheists, and some, unlike Harris, are sufficiently self-aware to realize this and honest enough to admit it.

Second — and this is a persistent, telling aspect of atheist apologetics — most of what he appears to know of religions is the most extreme, brutal, cartoon fundamentalisms. His best illustrations come from Islam. Other atheists lean heavily on the Westboro Baptist Church. He shows a photo of women lined up in ranks wearing full-body burkas. He is emotionally overcome at one point, appearing to choke up and needing to regain his composure, at the thought of a father whose daughter is raped and who then feels the need, out of shame, to murder her.

These are indeed horrors, but they are very far outside the experience, I would guess, of all the seemingly well-heeled, Western members of the audience seen in attendance at the filming of his TED talk. What would atheist spokesmen do without Islamism to fall back on again and again, or without the freakish Westboro cult with its 40 members?

There is something absurd about a presentation like Harris’s that refuses to recognize the experience of most of the religious people he passes in the street each day or knows from his own life and upbringing.

Finally, regarding his suggestion that things like brain scans can establish “a foundation for morality and human values,” the na�vety is striking. Judaism and Christianity are realistic about the brokenness of human beings — congenitally splintered between an impulse to good and an impulse to its opposite. The two faiths use different terminology in describing this feature of existence but it amounts to the same thing.

That is why we have repentance and forgiveness. Traditional liturgy as I know it gives frequent opportunities and promptings for these — three times daily in Jewish prayer — and rightly so. They are urgently needed gifts.

Sweeping aside the accumulated wisdom of millennia, which has survived a process of culling that could be called natural selection, atheists like Harris think science can start all over again in learning what’s best for us, and figure it all out with neuroimaging. What a joke. For the people in his audience, as for all the people I know, the problem is not honor killing by shamed fathers of rape victims but the thousand small cruelties, jealousies, betrayals, self-indulgences, self-deceptions, lies, evasions, temptations, rationalizations to which we are all subject. A human being is plagued by weakness — “for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth” — and amid a twisted, corrosive culture that affects all of us, this is going to be addressed by…brain scans?

Did I say “all of us”? Perhaps that’s my mistake. I wonder if some atheists, the ones that with their confidence and eloquence rise to the top as atheist evangelists, have a part missing. Sam Harris’s performances, in speech or writing, are tightly disciplined, giving the impression of a precision logic, coiled to strike. But from the way he presents his subject here, you would get no inkling of the need for community, caring, consolation, guidance, ritual, mystery, eternity that faith seeks to give to countless of his fellow human beings. Clear out the old ways that fulfilled those needs, or tried to do so, and we’re left with what…technology? Perhaps the Internet will take the place of churches and synagogues, everyone isolated and hunched over his or her favorite device. Is that it?

For all that it’s challenging now to be one’s best self, as it ever was, we’re supposed to believe the situation will be improved when our chief guide and inspiration is a neuroscience textbook. Harris speaks of empathy, but it’s hard to resist the suspicion that some feature of a normal, complex personality never grew in with our most persuasive atheists, so that they fail, fundamentally, to understand what other people are really like.

Image: Sam Harris, by Steve Jurvetson, [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.