I have highlighted a number of passages throughout his newest book: here I will try to capture the gist of the book by quoting some of the hightlighted passages. Note, however, that this may not capture the whole essence of his argument, nor provide complete justification for his thesis - all of which is available in the complete text itself. (And I take full responsibility for all typos, misspellings and other glitches in the following text; the book reads correctly in all instances.)
His book takes to task the (general) assumption that all ideas of morality are God-based (or God-given, if you prefer). His thesis, then, is the reverse of this: i.e., that ideas of morality can be reached through scientific methods, leaving any and all concepts of "God" out of the equation.
" .... our inability to answer a question says nothing about whether the question itself has an answer."
" ....morality should be considered an undeveloped branch of science."
" ... in any domain of knowledge, we are free to say that certain opinions do not count. In fact, we must say this for knowledge or expertise to count at all."
"My claim is that there are right and wrong answers to moral questions, just as there are right and wrong answers to questions of physics, and such answers may one day fall within reach of maturing sciences of mind."
" .... science can help us find a path leading away from the lowest depths of misery and toward the heights of happiness for the greatest number of people." [Of course, he's speaking of all nations; the 6.7 billion of us on the planet.]
"Science simply represents our best effot to understand what is going on in this universe, and the boundary between it and the rest of rational thought cannot always be drawn. .... to think scientifically - ideas about cause and effect, respect for evidence and logical conherence, a dash of curiosity and intellectual honesty, the inclination to make falsifiable predictions, etc. - ...."
"Clearly, we can make true or false claims about human (and animal) subjectivity, and we can often evaluate these claims without having access to the facts in quesiton. This is a perfectly reasonable, scientific, and often necessary thing to do."
" .... truth has nothing, in principle, to do with consensus: one person can be right, and everyone else can be wrong."
"How have we convinced ourselves that, on the most important questions in human life, all views must count equally? Consider the Catholic Church: ... the Vatican is an organization that excommunicates women for attempting to become priests but does not excommunicate male priests for raping children." [emphasis added.]
"The moment we admit that we know anything about human well-being scientifically, we must admit that certain individuals or cultures can be absolutely wrong about it. Moral relativism is clearly an attempt to pay intellectual reparations for the crimes of Western colonialism, ethnocentrism, and racism. .... the most basic facts about human flourishing must transcend culture, just as most other facts do."
" .... the fact that millions of people use the term "morality" as a synonym for religious dogmatism, racism, sexism, or other failures of insight and compassion should not oblige us to merely accept their terminology until the end of time."
" .... there is a difference between answers in practice and answers in principle."
" .... it seems profoundly unlikely that our universe has been designed to reward individual primates for killing one another while believing in the divine origin of a specific book. Because most religions conceive of morality as a matter of being obedient to the word of God, .... their precepts often have nothing do with maximizing well-being in this world. Religious believers can, therefore, assert the immorality of contraception, masturbation, homosexuality, etc., without ever feeling obliged to argue that these practices actually cause suffering. They can also pursue aims that are flagrantly immoral, in that they needlessly perpetuate human misery, while believing that these actions are morally obligatory."
" .... certain moral questions could be difficult or impossible to answer in practice; they do not suggest that morality depends upon something other than the consequences of our actions and intentions." [My footnote: in this section, as in a later section as well, he discusses the difficulties presented by "The Trolley Problem" as first expressed and explored by philosopher Philippa Rose Foot, who died October 3, 2010, on her 90th birthday.]
"My reasons for dismissing revealed religion as a source of moral guidance: (1) there are many revealed religions ... (that) ... offer mutually incompatible doctrines; (2) the scriptures of many religions .... countenance patently unethical practices like slavery; (3) the [mental] faculty we use to validate religious precepts, judging the Golden Rule to be wise and the murder of apostates to be foolish, is something we bring to scripture; it does not, therefore, come from scripture; (4) the reasons for believing that any of the world's religions were "revealed" to our ancestors (rather than merely invented by men and women who did not have the benefit of a twenty-first-century education) are either risible [ludicrous] or nonexistent - and the idea that each of these mutually contradictory doctrines is inerrant remains a logical impossibility. Here we can take refuge in Bertrand Russell's famous remark that even if we could be certain that one of the world's religions was perfectly true, given the sheer number of conflicting faiths on offer, every believer should expect damnation purely as a matter of probability."
"What we can do is try, within practical limits, to follow a path that seems likely to maximize both our own well-being and the well-being of others. This is what it means to live wisely and ethically."
" .... human beings tend to make moral decisions on the basis of emotion, justify these decisions with post hoc reasoning, and stick to their guns even when their reasoning demonstrably fails."
"Just as people are often less than rational when claiming to be rational, they can be less than moral when claiming to be moral."
"The truth seems inescapable: I, as the subject of my experience, cannot know what I will next think or do until a thought or intention arises; and thoughts and intentions are caused by physical events and mental stirrings of which I am not aware. Many scientists and philosophers realized long ago that free will could not be squared with our growing understanding of the physical world. Am I free to change my mind? Of course not. It can only change me."
"Our sense of free will arises from a failure to appreciate this fact: we do not know what we will intend to do until the intention itself arises. To see this is to realize that you are not the author of your thoughts and actions in the way that people generally suppose. .... most voluntary behavior comes about without explicit planning."
" .... all human beings currently alive appear to have descended from a single population of hunter-gatherers that lived in Africa around 50,000 BCE. Homo neanderthalensis laid claim to Europe and the Middle East, and Homo erectus occupied Asia."
"The seventeenth-century philosopher [Baruch] Spinoza thought that merely understanding a statement entails the tacit acceptance of its being true, while disbelief requires a subsequent process of rejection."
" .... those who are more knowledgeable about a subject tend to be acutely aware of the greater expertise of others. This creates a rather unlovely asymmetry in public discourse - one that is generally on display whenever scientists debate religious apologists. For instance, when a scientist speaks with appropriate circumspection about controversies in his fieid, or about the limits of his own understanding, his [religious] opponent will often make wildly unjustified assertions about just which religious doctrines can be inserted into the space provided. Thus, one often finds people with no scientific training speaking with apparent certainty about the theological implications of quantum mechanics, cosmology, or molecular biology."
" .... political conservatism ... [was found] to be correlated with dogmatism, inflexibility, death anxiety, need for closure, and anticorrelated with openness to experience, cognitive complexity, self-seteem, and social stability. .... a belief system known to be especially beholden to dogmatism, inflexibility, death anxiety and a need for closure will be less principled, less warranted, and less responsive to reason and evidence than it would otherwise be."
" .... if a person's primary motivation in holdilng a belief is to hew to a positive state of mind - to mitigate feelings of anxiety, embarrassment, or guilt, for instance - this is precisely what we mean by phrases like "wishful thinking" and "self-deception." Such a person will, of necessity, be less responsive to valid chains of evidence and argument that run counter to the beliefs he is seeking to maintain. .... the validity of a belief cannot merely depend on the conviction felt by its adhereents; it rests on the chains of evidence and argument that link it to reality."
"As it turns out, dopamine receptor genes may play a role in religious belief as well. People who have inhereited the most active form of the D4 receptor are more likely to believe in miracles and to be skeptical of science; the least active forms correlate with "rational materialism."
"Despite the explicit separation of church and state provided for by the U.S. Constitution, the level of religious belief in the United States (and the concomitant significance of religion in American life and political discourse) rivals that of many theocracies." [emphasis added.]
"The poor tend to be more religious than the rich .... And on almost every measure of societal health, the least religious countries are better off than the most religious. ....religious commitment in the United States is highly correlated with racism. .... as societies become more prosperous, stable, and democratic, they tend to become more secular. .... religious commitment "is superficial enough to be readily abandoned when conditions improve to the required degree." "
" .... several clinical conditions involving the neurotransmitter dopamine - mania, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and schizophrenia - are regularly associated with hperreligiosity. Clearly, religion is largely a matter of what people teach their children to believe about the nature of reality."
"With respect to our current scientific understanding of the mind, the major religions remain wedded to doctrines that are growing less plausible by the day. As is often the case with religious apology, it is a case of heads, faith wins; tails, reason loses."
"What if mice show greater distress at the suffering of familiar mice than unfamiliar ones? (They do.) What if monkeys will starve themselves to prevent their cage mates from receiving painful shocks? (They will.) What if chimps have a demonstrable sense of fairness when receiving food rewards? (They have.) What if dogs do too? (Ditto.) Wouldn't these be precisely the sorts of findings one would expect if our morality were the product of evolution? .... religious dogmatism presents an obstacle to scientific reasoning."
"The assumption that the mind is the product of the brain is integral to almost everything neuroscientists do." [emphasis added.]
"Imagine how terrifying it would be if great numbers of smart people became convinced that all efforts to prevent a global financial catastrophe must be either equally valid or equally nonsensical in principle. And yet this is precisely where we stand on the most important questions [about morality] in human life. For nearly a century, the moral relativism of science has given faith-based religion - that great engine of ignorance and bigotry - a nearly uncontested claim to being the only universal framework for moral wisdom."
** End of my synopsis of his book. I hope all readers will take the opportunity to attend Dr. Harris's lecture in Seattle tomorrow, October 20th. **
Nice! You did a nice job with your "gist" of the book, but I still want to read it...
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