Today's Walk - Listening to Sam Harris

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I'm glad that I decided to review my podcast subscriptions; already I've found 

quite a few interesting ones. Just today I listened to my first FORA.tv Audio of the 

Week podcast (which was  a lengthy one in 1h 20 minutes, which was OK for me, 

since that's the time it takes for me to finish my walk). I was totally absorbed 

with the talk by Sam Harris, at Berkeley Art and Letters, in November 2010, 

which was the subject of the podcast. Here's the talk description, and some 

blurbs for the book:

Sam Harris

Atheist author and cultural critic Sam Harris discusses his book, The Moral 

Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values. This program was 

recorded in collaboration with Berkeley Arts and Letters, on November 13, 2010.

In this highly anticipated, explosive new book, the author of The End of Faith and 

Letter to a Christian Nation calls for an end to religion's monopoly on morality 

and human values. In The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human 

Values, Sam Harris tears down the wall between scientific facts and human 

values to dismantle the most common justification for religious faith -- that a 

moral system cannot be based on science.

The End of Faith ignited a worldwide debate about the validity of religion. In its 

aftermath, Harris discovered that most people, from secular scientists to religious 

fundamentalists, agree on one point: Science has nothing to say on the subject of 

human values. Even among religious fundamentalists, the defence one most 

often hears for belief in God is not that there is compelling evidence that God 

exists, but that faith in Him provides the only guidance for living a good life. 

Controversies about human values are controversies about which science has 

officially had no opinion. Until now.

Bringing a fresh, secular perspective to age-old questions of right and wrong, and 

good and evil, Harris shows that we know enough about the human brain and its 

relationship to events in the world to say that there are right and wrong answers 

to the most pressing questions of human life. Because such answers exist, 

cultural relativism is simply false [sic] -- and comes at increasing cost to 

humanity. And just as there is no such thing as Christian physics or Muslim 

Algebra, there can be no Christian or Muslim morality. Using his expertise in 

philosophy and neuroscience, along with his experience on the front lines of our 

"culture wars," Sam Harris delivers a game-changing argument about the future 

of science and about the real basis of human cooperation. - Berkeley Arts and 

Letters

Sam Harris is an American non-fiction author, and CEO of Project Reason. He 

received a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA, and is a graduate in philosophy 

from Stanford University. He has studied both Eastern and Western religious 

traditions, along with a variety of contemplative disciplines, for twenty years. He 

is a proponent of scientific skepticism and is the author of The End of Faith 

(2004), which won the 2005 PEN/Martha Albrand Award, Letter to a Christian 

Nation (2006), a rejoinder to criticism of his bits book, and The Moral Landscape 

(2010).

Sam Harris breathes intellectual fire into an ancient debate. Reading this thrilling, 

audacious book, you feel the ground shifting beneath your feet. Reason has 

never had a more passionate advocate.

— Ian McEwan, author of Atonement, winner of the Man Booker Prize for 

Amsterdam.

A lively, provocative, and timely new look at one of the deepest problems in the 

world of ideas. Harris makes a powerful case for a morality that is based on 

human flourishing and thoroughly enmeshed with science and rationality. It is a 

tremendously appealing vision, and one that no thinking person can afford to 

ignore.

— Steven Pinker,  Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, author of How 

the Mind Works and The Blank Slate.

I was one of those who had unthinkingly bought into the hectoring myth that 

science can say nothing about morals. The Moral Landscape has changed all that 

for me. Moral philosophers, too, will find their world exhilaratingly turned upside 

down, as they discover a need to learn some neuroscience. As for religion, and 

the preposterous idea that we need God to be good, nobody wields a sharper 

bayonet than Sam Harris.

— Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene, The God Delusion, and The 

Greatest Show On Earth

Reading Sam Harris is like drinking water from a cool stream on a hot day.  He 

has the rare ability to frame arguments that are not only stimulating, they are 

downright nourishing, even if you don’t always agree with him!  In this new book 

he argues from a philosophical and a neurobiological perspective that science can 

and should determine morality.  As was the case with Harris’ previous books, 

readers are bound to come away with previously firm convictions about the world 

challenged, and a vital new awareness about the nature and value of science and 

reason in our lives.

— Lawrence M. Krauss, theoretical physicist, Director of the Origins Project at 

Arizona State University, author of The Physics of Star Trek and Quantum Man: 

Richard Feynman’s Life in Science.