Hi Marsha, This guy seems to be a big Ayn Rand fan and dismisses mystical experience out of hand. Harris has gotten a lot of flack from atheists for his openness to mysticism.
In a lot of this guy's critiques he seems to miss what Harris is saying. He wants The End of Faith to be a philosophy book, and I can relate to his wanting a more systematic philosophy. Reading the book through the lens of the moq, I think it holds up well. One of his main critiques is one suggested by Platt that reason requires a leap of faith. He says, "A grave weakness of this book is that it neither summarizes nor points its reader to an adequate defense of reason as a means of gaining valid knowledge. Rather, the book seems to either assume that the reader agrees with the validity of reason, that no such validation is necessary, or worst, that no such validation is possible. As a result, the book is vulnerable to the charge that its author is asking us to accept -- on faith -- the validity of reason! As I have already said, the book is quite sloppy philosophically..." Harris doesn't say that reason is how we "gain" knowledge, he just says that our knowledge should stand to reason. In MOQ terms reason is just a synonym for intellectual quality. In evaluating whether faith is a good or bad thing we don't need to define what intellectual quality is or prove the "validity of reason." We only need to say that it is bad to believe things that are of low intellectual quality which in MOQ terms is obvious. When people appeal to faith in religion while they appeal to reason and evidence in every other area of their lives, they are admitting that what they are claiming is of low intellectual quality and then patting themselves on the back for believing it anyway. Regards, Steve Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
