Left to right: Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris (thanks to Doug Jarvis for the link)
Call me a masochist, but I couldn't resist watching this discussion from back in 2007. It starts out funny as they fall all over themselves in a great big orgy of self-congratulatory rhetoric. As it goes on it gets more interesting and ends up downright scary.
As my friend B. Smiley pointed out, these guys' main enemies are people who approach religion as if it were science — drawing empirical, causal connections between doctrine and lived experience. The ironic corollary is that these guys treat science as if it were a religious practice demanding converts, faith and followers. The outcome is a really unpleasant ideology. From about 44:58 of part 2, all the way to the end, Harris starts pushing an anti-Islamist agenda. He asks for ideas on how to engineer significant change, practical steps beyond just criticism. Hitchens (who is looking a little tipsy by the end) replies that the forces of theocracy are going to destroy civilization. He continues, "I think it's us, plus the 82nd Airborne and the 101st, who are the real fighters for secularism at the moment. [...] It is only because of the willingness of the United States to combat theocracy that we have any fighting chance at all." Ooops...and, we're out of time. Yikes!
My dismay at this conversation follows on the heels of me listening to a Sam Harris Ted Lecture from February 2010. During the Q&A, Harris says "I don't think we need an NSF [National Science Foundation] grant to be able to understand that compulsory veiling is a bad idea. But at a certain point we're going to be able to scan the brains of everyone involved and actually interrogate them. Do people love their daughters just as much in these [Muslim] systems? I think there are clearly right answers to that." Double yikes. Eugenics anyone?
Not only would this be an ethically disastrous use of MRI technology, Harris's suggestion also demonstrates a poor understanding of the science behind brain scans. MRI scanners make good research and diagnostic tools — they allow neuroscientists to correlate mental and emotional states with localised brain activity — but they are not mind-reading machines. At least, not if you're doing careful science. Unfortunately, Harris is promoting the kind of slipshod science that can quite easily happen when the powerful members of a society make the ideological decision that some humans are empirically better than others (what Stephen Jay Gould would call "The Mismeasure of Man") and it stinks.