Sam Harris

On 12 September 2001, by his own later account, or perhaps the day after, a recent philosophy graduate of Stanford began writing a book. The attacks of the day before, he said, had woken him up to the danger of leaving religious certainty unchallenged when it was active in the world.¹ That book, The End of Faith (2004), made Sam Harris a public critic of religion. Ten years later he published Waking Up, a guide to what he called spirituality without religion.

This chapter asks how a man who was never religious came to spend his twenties among meditation teachers in India and Nepal, how he became one of the "New Atheists," and whether the turn to meditation was a revision of his unbelief or the thing that had been there all along.

Nothing to rebel against

According to Wikipedia he was born in Los Angeles on 9 April 1967.² His father was an actor, his mother a television writer and producer who created The Golden Girls; they divorced when he was two.³ His mother was Jewish, but neither she nor her parents were religious, and he was never a religious Jew.⁴ At nine or ten he was asked whether he wanted to go to Sunday school like his friends; he said no, and that, he said later, was the end of any bar mitzvah.⁵ His upbringing, he said in 2007, was wholly secular: he was not raised an atheist as opposed to a believer; religion was simply not an issue, and there was nothing to rebel against.⁶ On his timeline there is no faith to mark.

At thirteen his best friend was killed in a bicycle accident, the first death of someone close to him. From then on he read about death, from the psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross to Colin Wilson's books on the occult, and became, he said, a thirteen-year-old interested in psychic phenomena.⁷ The first mark on his timeline is a question, not a doubt.

Seeking

By eighteen, he said, he had a rich intellectual life and was already sceptical, but he was not introspective, and for someone so hard-headed, he said in 2014, the drug Ecstasy had probably been indispensable.⁸ He began to meditate at nineteen.⁹ At college he became interested in religion as such: whether its claims about mystical experience matched experiences he had with psychedelic drugs, which in his early twenties were, he wrote, tools without which he might never have found that there was an inner landscape of mind worth exploring. He later stopped taking them, citing the risks, and said that such experiences prove nothing about the cosmos.¹⁰¹¹ On his first trip to Nepal, at twenty, he took a large dose of LSD on Phewa Lake at Pokhara and had hours of terror.¹¹

He left his English studies at Stanford after two years, and in the eleven years before he returned, supported by his parents, he travelled to India and Nepal and studied with Buddhist and Hindu teachers, among them the Tibetan lama Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche.¹²¹³ He spent, he said in 2007, about two years in all on silent retreats.¹⁴ He studied Western and Eastern religion, but above all the Eastern.¹⁰ He came back to Stanford at thirty and took a degree in philosophy in 2000.¹⁵¹⁶ The timeline marks these years as a time of seeking: spiritual experience sought without a creed.

The End of Faith

He began The End of Faith the day after the attacks of 11 September, or the day after that.¹ What moved him, he told his college magazine in 2005, was that an event caused by its perpetrators' religious convictions had only redoubled the country's commitment to faith-based talk and thinking.¹⁷ The book appeared in August 2004 and won the PEN award for a first work of non-fiction in 2005.¹⁸ The Observer's reviewer found its central argument sound and called it a sensible rallying cry for a more ruthless secularisation, while warning that its anger and sarcasm could alienate the readers who most needed persuading.¹⁹ The timeline puts his declaration here.

Thousands of Christians wrote to him, many to tell him he was wrong not to believe, and in 2006 he answered them with Letter to a Christian Nation.²⁰ That December he defended atheists in an essay on the myths about them, arguing that atheists could value love, rapture and awe without making unjustified claims about reality.²¹ But in 2007 he said the word "atheist" was unnecessary: there is no word for those who do not believe in Zeus, and he would be glad to see this one retired.²² In 2007 he met Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens at Hitchens's flat in Washington, the only conversation the four ever had together; there, a journalist later reported, Harris said that there was a place for the sacred in our lives, and Dawkins looked askance.²³ The four were assailed, Harris wrote, as if they were a single person with four heads.²⁴

The neuroscience of belief

At the University of California, Los Angeles, he studied belief itself. In a 2008 study he and colleagues scanned fourteen adults as they judged statements true, false or undecidable, and found distinct patterns of brain activity for belief, disbelief and uncertainty.²⁵ A second study, published in 2009 under an open licence, scanned fifteen committed Christians and fifteen non-believers, and began:

Given the importance of religion in human life, surprisingly little is known about its basis in the brain.²⁶²⁷

In both groups, the study found, believing a statement rather than disbelieving it produced a greater signal in the same region of the brain, whatever the statement was about.²⁷ Most Americans, the authors wrote, believe not just in a generic God but in highly specific religious propositions, and the failure to subject such beliefs to rational criticism "may be one reason for their survival."²⁸²⁹ He took his doctorate in neuroscience at UCLA, and his dissertation became The Moral Landscape (2010), which argued that moral questions depend on facts about the well-being of conscious creatures and could in principle be answered by science.³⁰³¹ Critics, among them Russell Blackford, objected that the value of well-being was assumed, not established by science; Harris answered that every field of knowledge rests on such assumptions.³² In a later study, of 2016, he and two colleagues looked at what happens in the brain when political beliefs are challenged, and called the inability to change minds through evidence "a problem of great societal importance."³³³⁴

The other side

The objections came from many directions. In November 2007 he debated Rabbi David Wolpe of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, before about five hundred people. Harris argued that the dialogue between science and religion had been an erosion of religious authority in one direction; Wolpe answered that religion is lived and bred in a person, that at its best it produces magnificent human beings, and that science is powerful but narrow.³⁵ The journalist Chris Hedges, a minister's son, called the New Atheists secular fundamentalists whose faith in science and progress was as deluded as that of the Christian right.³⁶ The anthropologist Scott Atran argued, as Harris summarised him, that religious belief was not the main cause of suicide bombing; Harris replied that Atran ignored what the bombers themselves said about their motives.³⁷ Buddhist critics accused him of treating their tradition as a mere cultural accident and putting naive faith in science as the only judge of truth and value.³⁸

The fiercest arguments were about Islam. Critics, among them Noam Chomsky, Glenn Greenwald, Reza Aslan and Hedges, called his writing on Islam bigoted; in October 2014, on Bill Maher's television programme, the actor Ben Affleck called his and Maher's remarks "gross and racist." Harris answered that he criticised ideas, not people, and in 2019 conceded only that one passage of 2006 had lacked caveats.³⁹⁴⁰ Some passages of The End of Faith, on torture and on a hypothetical nuclear first strike, have been read very differently by Harris and his critics; he says they have been quoted out of context.⁴¹⁴²⁴³

Waking Up

Meditation never left his work. In March 2006, in a Buddhist magazine, he argued that the wisdom of the Buddha was trapped inside the religion of Buddhism, and that its methods of ethics and meditation could ground a contemplative science of well-being.⁴⁴ In 2007 he said he parted company with many atheists in being interested in spiritual experience, and in the contemplative literature, which he found riddled with superstition and dogma.³⁵ He said dogma had always turned him off, but that spiritual experience could be pursued in the spirit of science.⁴⁵

In September 2014 he published Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion, which he described as a seeker's memoir, an introduction to the brain, a manual of meditation and a philosophical unravelling of the sense of self. The ordinary sense of a self, it argued, is an illusion, and spirituality largely consists in seeing through it. He had been waiting more than a decade to write it, he said, and his interest in consciousness and spiritual experience came long before his criticism of religion.⁴⁶ He accepted the word "spirituality" for that experience of self-transcendence, though uncomfortably.⁴⁷ A podcast and, in 2018, a meditation app with the same name followed.⁴⁸

On the timeline, this is his revision, but it is a change of emphasis, not a reversal: the contemplative interest that had come first, before any argument with religion, came back to the centre of his public work.

Did his unbelief change shape?

Harris never had a faith to lose. His unbelief was a starting point, and what he went looking for, from the death of a friend at thirteen through years of meditation in Asia, was experience without a creed. The attacks of 2001 turned that private seeking into a public argument against religious certainty, and for a decade the argument was what the world knew of him. Waking Up did not undo it. It made public the half of his life that had come first, and it kept the same rule throughout: no belief without evidence, including belief about the mind.

Christopher Hitchens, another of the four "New Atheists," for whom no contemplative turn came, has his own chapter in this book.