An L.A. Times article quotes anti-theist writer Sam Harris as saying that, "Everything of value that people get from religion can be had more honestly, without presuming anything on insufficient evidence. The rest is self-deception, set to music."
Apparently Harris embraces the credo of evidentialism, famously expressed in William Clifford's (1845-1879) syncopated cadences, that "it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence."
The problem for Harris and Clifford is that they both deeply believe this proposition even though they can not cite an iota of evidence in support of its truth. What evidence could possibly be adduced in support of the claim that it is always wrong to believe anything on insufficient evidence? In fact, the evidentialist claim, ironically enough, is an article of faith.
This puts our evidentialist friends in an awkward philosophical pickle: If their credo is false then obviously Harris and Clifford should not believe it since it's not true. But if it is true they still should not believe it because they have no evidence for it. Either way, Harris clearly believes something he should, by his own standard, not believe. This is how we define a very confused man.
Mr. Harris is featured in the current Newsweek in a conversation with Pastor Rick Warren moderated by Jon Meacham. The conversation was supposed to be about the question "Is God Real?" but unfortunately the interlocutors wandered off on digressions into the truth of the Bible and Christianity and other matters even less relevant to the question of God's reality. Even so, Harris' confusion was prominent in this piece when he insisted that:
"I'm not at all a moral relativist...I think there is an absolute right and wrong. I think honor killing is unambiguously wrong...."
Now this is very odd. If there is no transcendent moral authority how can anything be wrong at all much less absolutely wrong? What Harris is doing is simply expressing his personal dislike for "honor killing" (killing a daughter or sister who has brought sexual disrepute upon the family - a practice not uncommon in the Arab world). He's declaring that honor killing displeases him and is offensive to his tastes, but he has no grounds for saying that the practice is "wrong" unless he wants to argue that whatever displeases him is ipso facto morally wrong. This move, however, would require an extraordinary measure of hubris, even for Mr. Harris.
Harris believes honor killings and so on are wrong because they are the negation of human empathy which is a product of evolution, but just because evolution gives rise to some trait like empathy, assuming that it does, is no reason to think that that trait is morally incumbent upon us, and certainly no reason to think it is absolutely so. To reason this way is to try to derive an "ought" from an "is." It is to say that because things are a certain way that therefore they ought to be that way. In logic this error is called the naturalistic or genetic fallacy, and it's really quite surprising to come upon a well educated person in this day and age who still commits it.
RLC