Coherence of Belief (EOF5)

Sam Harris' The End of Faith

The End of Faith, Sam Harris' recent book proposing an end to religious faith as an antidote to religious hatreds, is in part an exercise in understanding how, for each of us, all the things we believe in need to cohere. I touched upon the idea in my last post in this series, Basins of Attraction for Human Beliefs, in which I indicated:

... it seems that the various basins of attraction we find ourselves in in different matters of opinion and belief interact. I am in the yes-there's-an-afterlife camp but also in the God-loves-us-all-equally camp ... so it's no wonder that I'm in the find-a-way-not-to-take-
Deuteronomy-literally camp. I can't imagine hating anybody's religion so much I expect not to see them in heaven, right beside my mother and father.

One of the chief differences between Harris' atheistic worldview and my religious one is that the way he finds not to take the biblical injunction "You must stone [the infidel] to death, since he has tried to divert you from Yahweh your God" (Deut. 13:10) literally is not to take it at all. He favors junking all of scripture except perhaps certain portions which serve a legitimate — i.e., rational — spiritual purpose. Deuteronomy, read literally, doesn't do that; it asks us to do terrible things in the name of an arbitrary and bloodthirsty God whose existence cannot even be verified.

Though my worldview differs with Harris' about how we can find truth in the Bible if we read it in a non-literal way, I agree with him about the impossible dream we all share of "guaranteeing that our worldview is perfectly free of contradiction" (p. 57).

Harris is spot on when he shows that there are two forms of coherence that have to intertwine for us if we are to be persons at all — persons being seats of reliable, stable, non-contradictory, self-aware identity:

Beliefs are both logically and semantically related. Each [belief] constrains, and is in turn constrained by, many others. A belief like the Boeing 747 is the world's best airplane logically entails many other beliefs that are both more basic (e.g., airplanes exist) and more derivative (e.g., 747s are better than 757s). [Thus, logical coherence.] The belief that some men are husbands demands that the proposition some women are wives also be endorsed, because the very terms "husband" and "wife" mutually define one another. [Thus, semantic coherence.] In fact, logical and semantic constraints appear to be two sides of the same coin, because our need to understand what words mean in each new context requires that our beliefs be free from contradiction ... (p. 52).

If a person were to believe, for instance, two contradictory things about the place of his or her birth, Harris shows such a lack of coherence would eventually undermine the person's very identity:

Personal identity itself requires such consistency: unless a person's beliefs are highly coherent, he will have as many identities as there are mutually incompatible sets of beliefs careening around his brain (p. 54).

And yet, as Harris shows, there is no such thing as a perfectly consistent set of beliefs in any human brain:

If perfect coherence is to be had, each new belief must be checked against all others, and every combination thereof, for logical contradictions. But here we encounter a minor computational difficulty: the number of necessary comparisons grows exponentially as each new proposition is added to the list. How many beliefs could a perfect brain check for logical contradictions? The answer is surprising. Even if a computer were as large as the known universe, build of components no larger than protons, with switching speeds as fast as the speed of light, all laboring in parallel from the moment of the big bang up to the present, it would still be fighting to add a 300th belief to its list.

Along these lines, I worry about the internal consistency of Harris' own atheistic belief system. In discussing the need for the grammatical sentences which we use to tell ourselves what our beliefs are to cohere semantically and logically, he parses the inner logic of There is an apple and an orange in Jack's lunch box, saying thereupon:

It just so happens that we live in a universe in which, if you put an apple and an orange in Jack's lunch box, you will be able to pull out an apple, an orange, or both (p. 58).

What is this "it just so happens" business? That phrase is one we use when we want to elide any attempt to explain the fact that appears in the subordinate clause following "that." It just so happens that I'm in love, It just so happens that the coin I just tossed came up heads, It just so happens that the species Homo sapiens exists — all these are locutions that sidestep the need to deal with explanations.

But there are (possibly imponderable) reasons for each of these "that" clauses. I'm in love because I've finally found a lady friend who understands me. The coin came up heads because of a particular combination of physical forces acting upon it. Our species is present on Earth because of a historical process of biological evolution over billions of years.

It just so happens that we live in a universe in which, if you put an apple and an orange in Jack's lunch box, you will be able to pull out an apple, an orange, or both is tantamount to saying It just so happens that we live in a logically and semantically coherent universe. It's all well and good if we want to sidestep naming the cause of this (when you think about it) astounding fact in the name of brevity or ease of locution. But when the chips are down, we need to admit that this is exactly what we are doing.

Just as It just so happens that the coin I just tossed came up heads at some point has to be expanded to The coin came up heads because of a particular combination of physical forces acting upon it, It just so happens that we live in a logically and semantically coherent universe has to be expanded to We live in a logically and semantically coherent universe because ... .


Because what? is of course the next question that needs answering. But Harris-the-atheist doesn't follow through with an answer. Instead, he seems to think this is the one question concerning causality that need not be answered at all.

I worry that that's downright incoherent. After all, Harris presumably believes in science and rational inquiry, the tools we generally use to answer all causal questions. When we use these tools, we typically assume all things to have rational causes. We need only look hard enough for them, and we are bound to locate them. It is sort of a post-Enlightenment "Seek and ye shall find" mentality.

But in the Harris worldview, all bets are off when it comes to seeking and finding the cause of cosmic causal coherence per se. That alone can have "It just so happens ... " slapped on the front of it — so we can make semantically coherent statements about it, presumably — and it can be set all by itself on a shelf of inexplicability, never to have its cause determined or named.

Accordingly, it is here and only here that Harris allows semantic and logical coherence, which are generally joined at the hip, to come apart and separate. The causal coherence of the world has no logical explanation, an assertion which he papers over semantically with an "It just so happens ... " locution.


In my religious worldview, I answer the Because what? question this way. There are two classes of existents: caused things and uncaused causes. Often caused things do their own causing, yielding more caused things. In fact, just about everything is a caused thing. The class of uncaused causes contains just one member: the Prime Mover whom Judeo-Christians call the Lord God of Hosts.

Observe the imaginable alternatives. Suppose the class of all uncaused causes is an empty set, and there is no God. Then we are left with the incoherence I just exposed in Harris' atheistic worldview, in which the axiom that semantic coherence unfailingly goes with logical coherence, and vice versa, fails.

Or, suppose the class of all uncaused causes contains multiple, independent entities — say, the Greek or Roman pantheon of gods. If we ignore for the moment the fact that even Classical culture tried to trace the genealogy of its gods back to one single source, we are left with the possibility that the gods could fall out (as they often did) and impose their conflicting wills on the world we are assuming is fundamentally coherent. Multiple gods, conflicting wills, and unfailingly rational worldly coherence simply don't go together all that well, do they?


No, the only way you can successfully explain the twin coherences of the world, semantic and logical, is with reference to the single Unmoved Mover whom we call God.

Perhaps this is why the Christian Bible insists we think of Jesus Christ as the embodiment of the preexistent Logos, a.k.a. the Word of God. Logos suggests, of course, logical coherence, while Word implies semantic coherence. Q.E.D.