"Letter to a Christian Nation': Review, Part 1

Instructions

Sam Harris is a world-renowned author, lecturer and hosts the Making Sense Podcast. Sam Harris is an atheist who lectures on neuroscience, moral philosophy, religion, human violence & medication practice.1 Some people may say who is this guy to give a voice to these above topics? Harris has his degree in philosophy from Stanford University and a PhD in neuroscience from UCLA.2 It is safe to assume that he is very well qualified to speak about the above issues. As mentioned earlier, Harris is an author; one of those books is Letter to a Christian Nation, which was first published in 2006 by Bantam Press. There is one important thing to note about this book is this was a response from hostile letters and emails, that Christians gave him after his published his first book The End of Faith back in 2004. 3 What this shows is that Harris is up for a conversation which, makes him look respectable to the people who want to have a debate with him. When reading this book, Harris does write simply and uses language that everyone reading his book will understand. Harris does make many claims, and valid arguments in his books, he also back himself up with research and studies that have been conducted. This can make one believe that he uses a modern perspective to his works instead of a post or pre-modernity perspective. However, Harris, like many other people, Christians and Atheists alike, only likes to use half-truths. One of these moments in his book is his argument of science and how Christian's dislike science and are against it. Harris says in his book “People have been cherry-picking the Bible for millennia to justify their every impulse, moral and otherwise.”4 He is right; Christians have been doing that and still are. However, without realizing it, he just did the same thing. He used scripture for his benefit but failed to explain the full meaning behind the text. Harris says in his book: The conflict between religion and science is unavoidable. The success of science often comes at the expense of religious dogma; the maintenance of religious dogma always comes at the expense of science5 As much as the above statement has truths in it, what Harris fails to recognize is that science has enhanced religion and religion has enhanced faith. Wasn’t it Nicolaus Copernicus who in the late 1400s and early 1500s created the model that the earth revolved around the sun and not the other way around?6 What we need to recognize is that he was a priest7 at one point in his life, so he understood Christianity and based his theory from biblical scriptures such as Psalm 19:4-6 and Ecclesiastes 1:5 which talks about the sun moving in a circuit or pathway.8 However, many people rejected this idea until the 1700s when science had embraced his theory.9 In other words, a Christian scientist came up with an idea so out there that it was rejected by everyone with only science claiming it to be fact and truth two hundred years later. Science at this point enhanced religion, further making the Holy Scriptures factual and correct, but it shows that religion and the Christian bible was the basis of a fantastic discovery. There is also another tremendous claim that atheists use without realizing historically where their application is grounded in. The request is the Big Bang Theory. Many atheists claim that they believe in the big bang theory but not God. However, this theory originated in the 1920s by Georges Lemaitre, who was a Belgian Roman Catholic Priest as well as a physicist and astronomer.10 This was later enhanced and further explained by Edwin Hubble.11 This shows a great example of how science and religion should and does go well together. What about other scientists? People like Isaac Newton are known to be Christians12 But not all world famous scientists are Christians, but some started as Christians. People such as Charles Darwin13 are examples of this. However, other scientists such as Albert Einstein were not Christians but held to Judeo-Christian values and beliefs.14 As much as people may see that religion and science should not go together, but they do. Most of the giants of science were religious or had those Judeo-Christian values and beliefs. Take Galileo Galilei; he is known as one of the fathers of modern science, to the point where books were written about him with this title.15 Galileo is also a devoted (See Part 2 for more!)