His comically snobbish take on who should be allowed to write serious books about religion is a classic case of the Courtier’s Reply fallacy. Look: For my money, Aslan is well qualified to discuss religion. He’s clearly applied himself to the topic in a scholarly fashion – and even if he hadn’t, he’d still be more than welcome to think and agitate and write about the field, letting the strength of his reasoning carry him through the marketplace of ideas. And the same is true for everyone else. Very much including Harris. By Aslan’s clannish, exclusionary standards, the likes of Jerry Coyne (biology) and Richard Dawkins (evolutionary biology) should probably also bow humbly to his and his religiously-educated peers’ superior standing; and we can only imagine how much Aslan would sniff at Christopher Hitchens‘ presumed husk of an academic record (philosophy, politics, and economics). Aslan seems to suffer from a mix of neediness (brought on by insecurity) and outright hubris. It might be a defect of his imagination that he can’t see, or won’t acknowledge, how neuroscience (a branch of biology, after all) might well set a lifelong student of it on a path along subjects like consciousness, evolution, conscience, spirituality, and so on… all of which are completely relevant to religion. But even if Harris were a mere armchair scholar whose day job was carpentry or teaching high-school English, the only thing that would matter is how solid his ideas are, and how appealing his writing. Everything else is vanity and churlishness.
Posted on: Sun, 12 Oct 2014 17:08:08 +0000
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