April 9, 2007 issue - Rick Warren is as big as a bear, with a
booming voice and easygoing charm. Sam Harris is compact, reserved
and, despite the polemical tone of his books, friendly and mild.
Warren, one of the best-known pastors in the world, started
Saddleback in 1980; now 25,000 people attend the church each Sunday.
Harris is softer-spoken; paragraphs pour out of him, complex and
fact-filled—as befits a Ph.D. student in neuroscience. At NEWSWEEK's
invitation, they met in Warren's office recently and chatted, mostly
amiably, for four hours. Jon Meacham moderated. Excerpts follow. </a>
JON MEACHAM: <em>Rick, since you're the home team, we'll start with Sam.
Sam, is there a God in the sense that most Americans think of him?</em> </div><div align="justify">
SAM HARRIS: There's no evidence for such a God, and it's instructive
to notice that we're all atheists with respect to Zeus and the
thousands of other dead gods whom now nobody worships.
<em>Rick, what is the evidence of the existence of the God of Abraham?</em> </div><div align="justify">
RICK WARREN: I see the fingerprints of God everywhere. I see them in
culture. I see them in law. I see them in literature. I see them in
nature. I see them in my own life. Trying to understand where God
came from is like an ant trying to understand the Internet. Even the
most brilliant scientist would agree that we only know a fraction of
a percent of the knowledge of the universe.
HARRIS: Any scientist must concede that we don't fully understand
the universe. But neither the Bible nor the Qur'an represents our
best understanding of the universe. That is exquisitely clear.
WARREN: To you.
HARRIS: There is so much about us that is not in the Bible. Every
specific science from cosmology to psychology to economics has
surpassed and superseded what the Bible tells us is true about our
world.
<em>Sam, does the Christian you address in your books have to believe
that God wrote the Bible and that it is literally true?</em> </div><div align="justify">
HARRIS: Well, there's clearly a spectrum of confidence in the text.
I mean, there's the "This is literally true, nothing even gets
figuratively interpreted," and then there's the "This is just the
best book we have, written by the smartest people who have ever
lived, and it's still legitimate to organize our lives around it to
the exclusion of other books." Anywhere on that spectrum I have a
problem, because in my mind the Bible and the Qur'an are just books,
written by human beings. There are sections of the Bible that I
think are absolutely brilliant and poetically unrivaled, and there
are sections of the Bible which are the sheerest barbarism, yet
profess to prescribe a divinely mandated morality—where do I start?
Books like Leviticus and Deuteronomy and Exodus and First and Second
Kings and Second Samuel—half of the kings and prophets of Israel
would be taken to The Hague and prosecuted for crimes against
humanity if these events took place in our own time.
<em>[To Warren] Is the Bible inerrant? </em>
WARREN: I believe it's inerrant in what it claims to be. The Bible
does not claim to be a scientific book in many areas.
<em>Do you believe Creation happened in the way Genesis describes it?</em> </div><div align="justify">
WARREN: If you're asking me do I believe in evolution, the answer is
no, I don't. I believe that God, at a moment, created man. I do
believe Genesis is literal, but I do also know metaphorical terms
are used. Did God come down and blow in man's nose? If you believe
in God, you don't have a problem accepting miracles. So if God wants
to do it that way, it's fine with me.
HARRIS: I'm doing my Ph.D. in neuroscience; I'm very close to the
literature on evolutionary biology. And the basic point is that
evolution by natural selection is random genetic mutation over
millions of years in the context of environmental </div><div align="justify">
WARREN: Who's doing the selecting?
HARRIS: The environment. You don't have to invoke an intelligent
designer to explain the complexity we see.
WARREN: Sam makes all kinds of assertions based on his
presuppositions. I'm willing to admit my presuppositions: there are
clues to God. I talk to God every day. He talks to me.
HARRIS: What does that actually mean?
WARREN: One of the great evidences of God is answered prayer. I have
a friend, a Canadian friend, who has an immigration issue. He's an
intern at this church, and so I said, "God, I need you to help me
with this," as I went out for my evening walk. As I was walking I
met a woman. She said, "I'm an immigration attorney; I'd be happy to
take this case." Now, if that happened once in my life I'd
say, "That is a coincidence." If it happened tens of thousands of
times, that is not a coincidence. There must have been times in your
ministry when you've prayed for someone to be delivered from disease
who is not—say, a little girl with cancer. </div><div align="justify">
WARREN: Oh, absolutely.
<em>So, parse that. God gave you an immigration attorney, but God killed
a little girl.</em> </div><div align="justify">
WARREN: Well, I do believe in the goodness of God, and I do believe
that he knows better than I do. God sometimes says yes, God
sometimes says no and God sometimes says wait. I've had to learn the
difference between no and not yet. The issue here really does come
down to surrender. A lot of atheists hide behind rationalism; when
you start probing, you find their reactions are quite emotional. In
fact, I've never met an atheist who wasn't angry.
HARRIS: Let me be the first.
WARREN: I think your books are quite angry.
HARRIS: I would put it at impatient rather than angry. Let me
respond to this notion of answered prayer, because this is a classic
sampling error, to use a statistical phrase. We know that human
beings have a terrible sense of probability. There are many things
we believe that confirm our prejudices about the world, and we
believe this only by noticing the confirmations, and not keeping
track of the disconfirmations. You could prove to the satisfaction
of every scientist that intercessory prayer works if you set up a
simple experiment. Get a billion Christians to pray for a single
amputee. Get them to pray that God regrow that missing limb. This
happens to salamanders every day, presumably without prayer; this is
within the capacity of God. [Warren is laughing.] I find it
interesting that people of faith only tend to pray for conditions
that are self-limiting.
WARREN: That's a misstatement there.
HARRIS: Let's go back to the Bible. The reason you believe that
Jesus is the son of God is because you believe that the Gospel is a
valid account of the miracles of Jesus.
WARREN: It's one of the reasons.
HARRIS: Yeah. It's one of the reasons. Now, there are many
testimonials about miracles, every bit as amazing as the miracles of
Jesus, in other literature of the world's religions. Even
contemporary miracles. There are millions of people who believe that
Sathya Sai Baba, the south Indian guru, was born of a virgin, has
raised the dead and materializes objects. I mean, you can watch some
of his miracles on YouTube. Prepare to be underwhelmed. He's a stage
magician. As a Christian, you can say Sathya Sai Baba's miracle
stories are not interesting, let's not pay attention to them, but if
you set them within the prescientific religious milieu of the first-
century Roman Empire, suddenly miracle stories become especially
compelling.
<em>Sam, what are the secular sources of an acceptable moral code? </em></div><div align="justify">
HARRIS: Well, I don't think that the religious books are the source.
We go to the Bible and we are the judge of what is good. We see the
golden rule as the great distillation of ethical impulses, but the
golden rule is not unique to the Bible or to Jesus; you see it in
many, many cultures—and you see some form of it among nonhuman
primates. I'm not at all a moral relativist. I think it's quite
common among religious people to believe that atheism entails moral
relativism. I think there is an absolute right and wrong. I think
honor killing, for example, is unambiguously wrong—you can use the
word evil. A society that kills women and girls for sexual
indiscretion, even the indiscretion of being raped, is a society
that has killed compassion, that has failed to teach men to value
women and has eradicated empathy. Empathy and compassion are our
most basic moral impulses, and we can even teach the golden rule
without lying to ourselves or our children about the origin of
certain books or the virgin birth of certain people.
<em>Rick, Christianity has conducted itself in an abjectly evil manner
from time to time. How do you square that with the Christian Gospel
of love?</em> </div><div align="justify">
WARREN: I don't feel duty-bound to defend stuff that's done in the
name of God which I don't think God approved or advocated. Have
things been done wrong in the name of Christianity? Yes. Sam makes
the statement in his book that religion is bad for the world, but
far more people have been killed through atheists than through all
the religious wars put together. Thousands died in the Inquisition;
millions died under Mao, and under Stalin and Pol Pot. There is a
home for atheists in the world today—it's called North Korea. I
don't know any atheists who want to go there. I'd much rather live
under Tony Blair, or even George Bush. The bottom line is that
atheists, who accuse Christians of being intolerant, are as
intolerant—
HARRIS: How am I being intolerant? I'm not advocating that we lock
people up for their religious beliefs. You can get locked up in
Western Europe for denying the Holocaust. I think that's a terrible
way of addressing the problem. This really is one of the great
canards of religious discourse, the idea that the greatest crimes of
the 20th century were perpetrated because of atheism. The core
problem for me is divisive dogmatism. There are many kinds of
dogmatism. There's nationalism, there's tribalism, there's racism,
there's chauvinism. And there's religion. Religion is the only
sphere of discourse where dogma is actually a good word, where it is
considered ennobling to believe something strongly based on faith.
WARREN: You don't feel atheists are dogmatic?
HARRIS: No, I don't.
WARREN: I'm sorry, I disagree with you. You're quite dogmatic.
HARRIS: OK, well, I'm happy to have you point out my dogmas, but
first let me deal with Stalin. The killing fields and the gulag were
not the product of people being too reluctant to believe things on
insufficient evidence. They were not the product of people requiring
too much evidence and too much argument in favor of their beliefs.
We have people flying planes in our buildings because they have
theological grievances against the West. I'm noticing Christians
doing terrible things explicitly for religious reasons—for instance,
not fund-ing [embryonic] stem-cell research. The motive is always
paramount for me. No society in human history has ever suffered
because it has become too reasonable. </div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify">WARREN: We're in exact
agreement on that. I just happen to believe that Christianity saved
reason. We would not have the Bill of Rights without Christianity.
HARRIS: That's certainly a disputable claim. The idea that somehow
we are getting our morality out of the Judeo-Christian tradition is
bad history and bad science.
WARREN: Where do you get your morality? If there is no God, if I am
simply complicated ooze, then the truth is, your life doesn't
matter, my life doesn't matter.
HARRIS: That is a total caricature of—
WARREN: No, let me finish. I let you caricature Christianity. If
life is just random chance, then nothing really does matter and
there is no morality—it's survival of the fittest. If survival of
the fittest means me killing you to survive, so be it. For years,
atheists have said there is no God, but they want to live like God
exists. They want to live like their lives have meaning. </div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify">HARRIS: Our
morality, the meaning we find in life, is a lived experience that I
believe has, to use a loaded term, a spiritual component. I believe
it is possible to radically transform our experience of the world
for the better, very much the way someone like Jesus, or someone
like Buddha, witnessed. There is wisdom in our spiritual,
contemplative literature, and I am quite interested in understanding
it. I think that medita-tion and prayer affect us for the better.
The question is, what is reasonable to believe on the basis of those
transformations?
WARREN: You will not admit that it is your experience that makes you
an atheist, not rationality.
HARRIS: What in your experience is making you someone who is not a
Muslim? I presume that you are not losing sleep every night
wondering whether to convert to Islam. And if you're not, it is
because when the Muslims say, "We have a book that's the perfect
word of the creator of the universe, it's the Qur'an, it was
dictated to Muhammad in his cave by the archangel Gabriel," you see
a variety of claims there that aren't backed up by sufficient
evidence. If the evidence were sufficient, you would be compelled to
be Muslim.
WARREN: That's exactly right.
HARRIS: So you and I both stand in a relationship of atheism to
Islam.
WARREN: We both stand in a relationship of faith. You have faith
that there is no God. In 1974, I spent the better part of a year
living in Japan, and I studied all the world religions. All of the
religions basically point toward truth. Buddha made this famous
statement at the end of his life: "I'm still searching for the
truth." Muhammad said, "I am a prophet of the truth." The Veda
says, "Truth is elusive, it's like a butterfly, you've got to search
for it." Then Jesus Christ comes along and says, "I am the truth."
All of a sudden, that forces a decision.
HARRIS: Many, many other prophets and gurus have said that.
WARREN: Here's the difference. Jesus says, "I am the only way to
God. I am the way to the Father." He is either lying or he's not.
Sam, is Rick intellectually dishonest?
HARRIS: I wouldn't put it in such an invidious way, but—
Let's say Rick's not here and we're just hanging out in his office.
HARRIS: It is intellectually dishonest, frankly, to say that you are
sure that Jesus was born of a virgin.
WARREN: I say I accept that by faith. And I think it's
intellectually dishonest for you to say you have proof that it
didn't happen. Here's the difference between you and me. I am open
to the possibility that I am wrong in certain areas, and you are
not.
HARRIS: Oh, I am absolutely open to that.
WARREN: So you are open to the possibility that you might be wrong
about Jesus?
HARRIS: And Zeus. Absolutely.
WARREN: And what are you doing to study that?
HARRIS: I consider it such a low-probability event that I—
WARREN: A low probability? When there are 96 percent believers in
the world? So is everybody else an idiot?
HARRIS: It is quite possible for most people to be wrong—as are most
Americans who think that evolution didn't occur.
WARREN: That's an arrogant statement.
HARRIS: It's an honest statement.
<em>Rick, if you had been born in India or in Iran, would you have
different religious beliefs?</em> </div><div align="justify">
WARREN: There's no doubt where you're born influences your initial
beliefs. Regardless of where you were born, there are some things
you can know about God, even without the Bible. For instance, I look
at the world and I say, "God likes variety." I say, "God likes
beauty." I say, "God likes order," and the more we understand
ecology, the more we understand how sensitive that order is.
HARRIS: Then God also likes smallpox and tuberculosis.
WARREN: I would attribute a lot of the sins in the world to myself.
HARRIS: Are you responsible for smallpox?
WARREN: I am responsible to do something about it. No doubt about
it. I am responsible to do something about the 500 million who get
malaria every year and the 40 million who have AIDS, because I will
be held accountable for my life. And when I say, "God, why don't you
do something about this?" God says, "Well, why don't you? You were
the answer to your own prayer."
HARRIS: I totally agree with Rick: it is our responsibility to help
bridge these inequities, but I think you become even more motivated,
potentially, to help people when you realize there is no good
reason, certainly not a supernatural good reason, for the fact that
I have so much and my neighbor has so little.
<em>Do you think that religiously motivated good works are actually
harmful?</em> </div><div align="justify">
HARRIS: The thing that bothers me about faith-based altruism is that
it is contaminated with religious ideas that have nothing to do with
the relief of human suffering. So you have a Christian minister in
Africa who's doing really good work, helping those who are hungry,
healing the sick. And yet, as part of his job description, he feels
he needs to preach the divinity of Jesus in communities where
literally millions of people have been killed because of
interreligious conflict between Christians and Muslims. It seems to
me that that added piece causes unnecessary suffering. I would much
rather have someone over there who simply wanted to feed the hungry
and heal the sick.
WARREN: You'd much rather have somebody—an atheist—feeding the
hungry than a person who believes in God? All of the great movements
forward in Western civilization were by believers. It was pastors
who led the abolition of slavery. It was pastors who led the woman's
right to vote. It was pastors who led the civil-rights movement. Not
atheists.
HARRIS: You bring up slavery—I think it's quite ironic. Slavery, on
balance, is supported by the Bible, not condemned by it. It's
supported with exquisite precision in the Old Testament, as you
know, and Paul in First Timothy and Ephesians and Colossians
supports it, and Peter—
WARREN: No, he doesn't. He allows it. He doesn't support it.
HARRIS: OK, he allows it. I would argue that we got rid of slavery
not because we read the Bible more closely. We got rid of slavery
despite the profound inadequacies of the Bible. We got rid of
slavery because we realized it was manifestly evil to treat human
beings as farm equipment. As it is.
<em>Rick, what is your role as a pastor in encouraging reformation of
other faiths? </em>
WARREN: All of the great questions of the 21st century will be
religious questions. Will Islam modernize peacefully? What's going
to happen to the influx of Muslims into secular Europe, which has
lost its faith in Christianity and has nothing to counteract this
loss in religious terms? What will replace Marxism in China? In all
likelihood it's going to be Christianity. Will America return to its
historic roots—will there be a Third Great Awakening, or will
America go the way of Europe?
HARRIS: I think the answers, in spiritual and ethical terms, are
going to be nondenominational. We are suffering the collision of
denominations, specifically the collision with Islam. Whatever is
true about us isn't Christian. And it isn't Muslim. Physics isn't
Christian, though it was invented by Christians. Algebra isn't
Muslim, even though it was invented by Muslims. Whenever we get at
the truth, we transcend culture, we transcend our upbringing. The
discourse of science is a good example of where we should hold out
hope for transcending our tribalism.
WARREN: Why isn't atheism more appealing if it's supposedly the most
intellectually honest?
HARRIS: Frankly, it has a terrible PR campaign.
WARREN: [Laughs] It's not a matter of PR.
HARRIS: It is right next to child molester as something you don't
want to be. But that is a product, I would argue, of what religious
people tell one another about atheism.
<em>Sam, the one thing that I find really troubling in your arguments is
that I am guilty, to quote "The End of Faith," of a "ludicrous
obscenity" when I take my children to church. That is strong
language, and it doesn't exactly encourage dialogue.</em> </div><div align="justify">
HARRIS: To some degree the stridence of my writing is an effort to
get people's attention. But I can honestly defend the stridence
because I think our situation is that urgent. I am terrified of what
seems to me to be a bottleneck that civilization is passing through.
On the one hand we have 21st-century disruptive technology
proliferating, and on the other we have first-century superstition.
A civilization is going to either pass through this bottleneck more
or less intact or it won't. And perhaps that fear sounds grandiose,
but civilizations end. On any number of occasions, some generation
has witnessed the ruination of everything they and their ancestors
had built. What especially terrifies me about religious thinking is
the expectation on the part of many that civilization is bound to
end based on prophecy and its ending is going to be glorious.
WARREN: I believe that history split into A.D. and B.C. because of
the Resurrection. And the Resurrection is not only the resurrection
of Jesus Christ, it is the hope of the world: it says there's more
to this life than just here and now. That doesn't mean that I do
less, it means that this life is a test, it's a trust and it's a
temporary assignment. If death is the end, shoot, I'm not going to
waste another minute being altruistic.
HARRIS: How do you account for my altruism?
WARREN: You have common grace. Even in people who don't believe in
God, there is a spark God has put in you that says, "There's got to
be more to life than just make money and die." I think that that
spark does not come from evolution.
<em>Sam wrote that without death, the influence of faith-based religion
would be unthinkable.</em>
WARREN: Because we were made in God's image, we were made to last
forever. That means I'm going to spend more time on that side of
eternity than on this side. If I did not believe that there is a
Judgment, if I believed Hitler would actually get away with
everything he did, that would be a reason for great despair. The
fact is, I do believe there will be a Judgment Day. God is not just
a God of love. He is a God of justice. So death is a factor. On the
other hand, even if there were no such thing as heaven, I would put
my trust in Christ because I have found it a meaningful,
satisfactory, significant way to live.
HARRIS: How is it fair for God to have designed a world which gives
such ambiguous testimony to his existence? How is it fair to have
created a system where belief is the crucial piece, rather than
being a good person? How is it fair to have created a world in which
by mere accident of birth, someone who grew up Muslim can be
confounded by the wrong religion? I don't see how the future of
humanity is in good care with those competing orthodoxies.
<em>Rick, let's be blunt. Is Sam's soul in jeopardy, in your view,
because he has rejected Jesus? </em>
WARREN: The politically incorrect answer is yes.
HARRIS: Is that the honest answer?
WARREN: The truth is, religion is mutually exclusive. The person who
says, "Oh, I just believe them all," is an idiot because the
religions flat-out contradict each other. You cannot believe in
reincarnation and heaven at the same time.
<em>Sam, let's be blunt as well. Has Rick, in your view, wasted much of
his life on behalf of a Gospel that you think is a first-century
superstition?
</em>HARRIS: I wouldn't put it in those stark terms, because I don't have
a rigid view how someone should spend their life so as not to waste
it.
WARREN: What's your politically incorrect answer?
HARRIS: I think you could use your time and attention better than
organizing your life around a belief that the Bible is the inerrant
word of God and the best book we're ever going to have on every
relevant subject.
<em>How would the ideal world work, in the Sam Harris view?</em>
HARRIS: Right now, we have to change the rules to talk about God and
spiritual experience and ethics. And I'm denying that that is so.
You can have your spirituality. You can go into a cave and practice
meditation and transform yourself, and then we can talk about why
that happened and how it could be replicated. We may even want, for
perfectly rational reasons, to say we want a Sabbath in this
country, a genuine Sabbath. Let's realize that there's a power in
contemplating the mystery of the universe, and in reminding yourself
how much you love the people closest to you, and how much more you
could love the people you haven't met yet. There is nothing you have
to believe on insufficient evidence in order to talk about that
possibility.
WARREN: Sam, do you believe human beings have a spirit?
HARRIS: There are many reasons not to believe in a naive conception
of a soul that kind of floats off the brain at death and goes
somewhere else. But I do not know.
WARREN: Can you have spirituality without a spirit?
HARRIS: You can feel yourself to be one with the universe.
WARREN: OK, then why can't you just take the next step? Because
right now you're talking in extremely nonrational terms.
HARRIS: There's nothing irrational about it. You can close your eyes
in meditation and lose the sense of your physical body, totally.
Many people draw from that the metaphysical conclusion that "I'm
just spirit, and I can transcend the body." That's not the only
conclusion you have to draw from that experience, and I don't think
it's the best conclusion.
WARREN: You're more spiritual than you think. You just don't want a
boss. You don't want a God who tells you what to do.
HARRIS: I don't want to pretend to be certain about anything I'm not
certain about.
<em>Rick, last thoughts?</em>
WARREN: I believe in both faith and reason. The more we learn about
God, the more we understand how magnificent this universe is. There
is no contradiction to it. When I look at history, I would disagree
with Sam: Christianity has done far more good than bad. Altruism
comes out of knowing there is more than this life, that there is a
sovereign God, that I am not God. We're both betting. He's betting
his life that he's right. I'm betting my life that Jesus was not a
liar. When we die, if he's right, I've lost nothing. If I'm right,
he's lost everything. I'm not willing to make that gamble.
© 2007 Newsweek, Inc.</a> </div>
