Media Interviews and Appearances: Print
What Martial Arts Have to Do With Atheism
By Graeme Wood
New Atheism should be able to criticise Islam without being accused of Islamophobia
By Andrew Zak Williams
The Moral Animal
By Jonathan Sacks
The Once-Born and the Twice-Born
By Gertrude Himmelfarb
The God of Independent Minds
By Yoram Hazony
Poll shows atheism on the rise in the U.S.
By Kimberly Winston
Have It Your Way
By Daniel Menaker
Reason for living: The good life without God
By Christopher R. Beha
3 reasons young Americans are giving up on God
Islamophobia and Its Discontents
By Laila Lalami
Q&A: Sam Harris
By David Samuels
The Christian right, radical Islamists, and secular leftists agree: this atheist is America’s most dangerous man
Free Will Review
Harris explores the notion that free will is an illusion in this nimble book (which, at 83 pages, can be read in one sitting or a couple of Metro rides), amiably and conversationally jumping from point to point. The book’s length is one of its charms: He never belabors any one topic or idea, sticking around exactly as long as he needs to in order to lay out his argument (and tackle the rebuttals that it will inevitably provoke) and not a page longer.
Learning to Respect Religion
By Nicholas Kristof
Review of Free Will
Harris, armed with the newest research in experimental psychology and neuro-imaging, fires a brief and forceful broadside at the conundrum that has nagged at every major thinker from Plato to Slavoj Zizek.
Is Free Will an Illusion?
Free will has long been a fraught concept among philosophers and theologians. Now neuroscience is entering the fray. For centuries, the idea that we are the authors of our own actions, beliefs, and desires has remained central to our sense of self. We choose whom to love, what thoughts to think, which impulses to resist. Or do we? Neuroscience suggests something else.
Books in Brief: Free Will
Neuroscientist Sam Harris, the author of the bestselling The Moral Landscape (2010), here skewers the concept of free will — that mainstay of law, policy and politics — in fewer than 100 pages.
Atheism in America
By Julian Baggini
Godlessness is the last big taboo in the US, where non-believers face discrimination and isolation
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It’s good to be alive
By Gideon Lewis-Kraus
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The Smart List 2012: 50 people who will change the world
Welcome to the first Wired Smart List. We set out to discover the people who are going to make an impact on our future… So we approached some of the world’s brightest minds—from Melinda Gates to Ai Weiwei—to nominate one fresh, exciting thinker who is influencing them, someone whose ideas or experience they feel are transformative.
The Unbelievers
By Emily Brennan
Is Neuroscience the Death of Free Will?
by Eddy Nahmias
Many neuroscientists are employing a flawed notion of free will.
Four ways 9/11 changed America’s attitude toward religion
By John Blake
Articles of Faith: The Importance of Understanding Religion in a Post-9/11 World
By Amy Sullivan
Some thought leaders and policymakers embraced Samuel Huntington’s idea that the West was engaged in a “clash of civilizations” with Islam. Meanwhile, neo-atheists led by Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens put forward their own theory of a world split between civilized secularists and dangerous religionists.
Inside the List: Reading September 11th
An article last month in The Christian Century explored the role of 9/11 in giving birth to so-called New Atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, who got things going with “The End of Faith” (2004), which spent 33 weeks on the paperback list.
The New Atheism
By James Wood
In the last 10 years or so, the rise of American evangelicalism and the menace of Islamist fundamentalism, along with developments in physics and in theories of evolution and cosmogony, have encouraged a certain style of aggressive, often strident atheistic critique.
The Invisible Big Kahuna
By Andrew Zak Williams
Andrew Zak Williams discusses this week’s New Statesman article in which prominent atheists told him their reasons for non-belief.
Same Old New Atheism: On Sam Harris
By Jackson Lears
[Note: This may be the most idiotic and unbalanced response to my work I have ever come across.—SH]
An Interview with Sam Harris
By Jonathan Derbyshire
Given the amount of interest and comment that my profile of Sam Harris has attracted, I thought it’d be useful to post the complete and unedited transcript of my conversation with him. The interview took place on 11 April, at the headquarters of Random House in London.
The Science of Right and Wrong
by H. Allen Orr
War on weak tea Christians
By Jonathan Derbyshire
Sam Harris, one of the “Four Horsemen” of new atheism, believes that science can never be reconciled with religion, and that it is dangerous even to try.
Is there any place for religious faith in science?
By Emine Saner
Can scientists be religious? Sam Harris argues science and faith are completely incompatible, while Robert Winston would like to be more inclusive. Emine Saner adjudicates
Debating God: Atheist and Evangelical Face Off at Notre Dame
By Nathan Schneider
Sam Harris and William Lane Craig pack the house, talk over each other, leave audience wanting more…
The Moral Landscape
By John Lloyd
“[T]his is an inspiring book, holding out as it does the possibility of a rational understanding of how to construct the good life with the aid of science, free from the accretions of religious superstition and cultural coercion.”
The moral formula: How facts inform our ethics
Can science help us tell right from wrong? Sam Harris certainly thinks so. Julian Baggini sits down with one of the ‘four horsemen of atheism’ to learn how facts can inform our ethics
The Good Book can’t be bettered
By Genevieve Fox
This week, too, the American neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, publishes The Moral Landscape, which argues that religion is not the chief authority on meaning, values and a good life.
Finding faith amid disaster
By Jessica Ravitz
Around the world, people are still struggling to come to terms with the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, which have left more than 8,000 dead, thousands more missing and hundreds of thousand others homeless. In times like these, many people find comfort in their faith. But disasters can also challenge long-held beliefs. The CNN Belief Blog asked some prominent voices with different views on religion how they make sense of such suffering, where they see inspiration amid destruction and how they respond to people who wonder, “How could God let this happen?”
Responses from Rabbi Harold Kushner, Thich Nhat Hanh, Sam Harris, and others.
The Science of Right and Wrong
By Michael Shermer
Ever since the rise of modern science, an almost impregnable wall separating it from religion, morality and human values has been raised to the heights….
The Facts Fetish
By Thomas Nagel
Sam Harris’s first two books, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason and Letter to a Christian Nation, attacked religious faith. His new book, interestingly enough, attacks not faith but a form of skepticism—moral skepticism.
Sam Harris Believes in God
By Lisa Miller
Sam Harris, a member of the tribe known as “the new atheists,” wishes the headline to this story said something else. How about “Sam Harris Believes in Spirituality,” he suggests over lunch. Or “Sam Harris Believes in ‘God,’ ” with scare quotes?
“The Moral Landscape”: Why science should shape morality
By Katherine Don
Sam Harris, the notorious atheist, explains his controversial stance on religion—and his provocative new book.
Atheists Debate How Pushy to Be
By Mark Oppenheimer
Energized by a recent Pew Research Center poll showing that atheists are more educated about religion than religious people, 370 atheists, humanists and other skeptics packed a ballroom at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel last weekend to debate the future of their movement.
Morality: ‘We can send religion to the scrap heap’
By Sam Harris
Sam Harris says that science can show us the best ways for human beings to thrive – and we can then junk religion forever.
Religious skeptics disagree on how aggressively to challenge the devout
By Mitchell Landsberg
‘New atheists’ encourage open confrontation; ‘accommodationists’ prefer a subtler, more tactical approach. At a Council for Secular Humanism conference, tension is evident.
Sam Harris on the science of ethics
By Martin Levin
It’s not as difficult to tell right from wrong as people think, Sam Harris says. The issue is whether those who are wrong will ever admit it. An interview with the author.
Science Knows Best
By Kwame Anthony Appiah
Sam Harris heads the youth wing of the New Atheists. “The End of Faith,” his blistering take-no-prisoners attack on the irrationality of religions, found him many fans and, not surprisingly, a great body of detractors
God, Science and Philanthropy
By Nathan Schneider
Considering the dubious work of the Templeton Foundation…
Author Sam Harris joins plot to have Pope arrested
By Sam Harris
Sam Harris has launched an appeal to fund a legal bid to have the Pope arrested when he visits Britain.
TED 2010: The Price in Human Suffering of Being Open-Minded
By Kim Zetter
A summary of Sam Harris’s talk at TED 2010
Belief in the Brain: Sacred and secular ideas engage identical areas
By Allison Bond
Religious belief may seem to be a unique psychological experience, but a growing body of research shows that thinking about religion is no different from thinking about secular things—at least from the standpoint of the brain. In the first imaging study to compare religious and nonreligious thoughts, evaluating the truth of either type of statement was found to involve the same regions of the brain.
Heaven and Nature
By Ross Douthat
Richard Dawkins has called pantheism “a sexed-up atheism.” (He means that as a compliment.) Sam Harris concluded his polemic “The End of Faith” by rhapsodizing about the mystical experiences available from immersion in “the roiling mystery of the world.”
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