This is what Sam Harris, high-profile atheist and incendiary critic of religion, would have us believe. He advocates a secular morality based on fact and science, and a spirituality ‘devoid of faith’. His forthright attacks on religion have inspired such fervent criticism that he now travels accompanied by bodyguards and has to keep his home address a secret.                                                                         

Harris, who has trained in both neuroscience and philosophy, rose to fame in 2004 with his book The End of Faith, and is currently promoting his most recent publication The Moral Landscape. He seeks to outline a moral framework based in science, and is on a mission to prevent what he considers to be the ‘postmodern erosion of moral courage and moral clarity’. ‘Unless we have a robust sense of right and wrong,’ he says, ‘humanity will lose its way’. Harris thinks that science, rather than religion, needs to stop this from happening. 

Many reviews have been very positive. Ian McEwan has written that: ‘reason has never had a more passionate advocate’, whilst Richard Dawkins has remarked that ‘nobody wields a sharper bayonet than Sam Harris.’ 

However, one reviewer accused Harris of ‘breathtaking hubris’, and this same reviewer was invited to interrogate Harris in London on 11 April 2011. Giles Fraser, the canon chancellor of St Pauls, is in opposition to Harris’ work, and wrote in his critique of The Moral Landscape (The Guardian) that he was scared by Harris’s ‘complete lack of ambiguity, his absolute clarity of vision, his refusal of humour or self-criticism, his unrelenting seriousness.’ Fraser was guaranteed not to give Harris an easy ride.

The core philosophical content of Harris’ main argument in The Moral Landscape is an attempt to turn the classical Humean distinction between facts and value on its head. Harris refutes this divide and believes that ‘every science must presuppose certain core values’ … this ‘does not render science unscientific.’ He refuses to accept the usual split between science and religion (science for fact and reason, religion for emotions and morals), and seeks to turn the tide and reconcile these seemingly opposed camps.

One of Harris’s most insistent arguments is against moral relativism. He believes that morals cannot have exceptions. He uses the example of the Taliban oppression of women, and refuses to accept ‘customs’: for Harris, the wearing of burqas is ‘forcing half the population to live in cloth bags, and beating or killing them when they try to get out’.  Afghanistan, he adds, is ‘one of the best places in the world to watch women and infants die’. 

Over the course of the evening, Harris and Fraser, along with the chair Jeremy O’Grady, discussed outcomes, intentions, the difference between ‘is’ and ‘ought’ and the central question of how to maximise human happiness, or ‘wellbeing’. Developing Leibniz’s original concept of ‘the best of all possible worlds,’ Harris asked us to consider ‘the worst possible misery for everyone’ and our obligation to minimise suffering.

Fraser, on the other hand, feels that our judgements must contain an element of faith. He argues that Harris’s ‘worst possible misery’ can’t actually be a fact, since we have no possible way of telling how badly anyone is suffering. We don’t have a finite universe we can entirely quantify: we have to leave some things blank. 

The two diverged on many points, but a difference in opinion that Fraser particularly accentuated was what each one would do while faced with the following dilemma, after Robert Nozick’s notion of a ‘utility monster’. Would be ethical for our species to be sacrificed for the vast happiness of some super-beings (creatures who are as superior to humans as humans are to cockroaches)?

And how about this analogy? What if you were standing on a railway bridge and a train was hurtling towards four workmen on the tracks below, and you were the only person who could stop their deaths, but the only way you could do it would be to flick a switch which would cause the train to change tracks, and end up killing just one other worker. What would you do? And what would you do if instead of flicking a switch, the only way which you could stop the train from killing the four men was by pushing a fat man, standing next to you on the bridge, in front of the train?

To find out what Harris thinks he’d do, listen to the conversation on this page or watch the live video on the Intelligence Squared website. Future science/religion events include Opening Pandora’s Box: visions of the future that will transform our world. Sam Harris’ book The Moral Landscape is available now.