Sam Harris appears on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

Written by Tom Beasley in News at October 5, 2010

Last night, Sam Harris made an appearance on The Daily Show. He was mainly there to pitch his new book The Moral Landscape. Harris describes his new book as a way for science to look at moral questions, ultimately asserting that it is a myth that science and morality are distinct, separate, and incapable of unification. Harris is well known for his other works, perhaps most famously, Letter to a Christian Nation.

It is good to see more atheists on his show because Jon Stewart has been notoriously over sympathetic to religious claims in the past. One example of this is when Marilynne Robinson appeared on his show and he made the statement: “I’ve always been fascinated that the more you delve into science, the more it appears to rely on faith.”

The scientific community typically refutes the idea that morality comes from science. This is especially because religious people often (especially Creationists) say that morality does come from science, and that it is evil. The claim is that, for example, Darwinism leads to social Darwinism, which leads to eugenics, which leads to an elite mutant class that eats Christians. Instead, Harris takes the view that science should stop claiming that we do not or cannot receive morals from science, but rather that science can provide a more objective standard for morality. Harris, in his interview, and certainly in his book, elaborates further on some of the ways science could go about determining a common morality. You can watch the entire interview here.