http://www.townhall.com/columnists/Dine ... ts_atheism
In a follow-up article, Fish deepens his inquiry by looking at the kind of evidence that atheists like Hawkins and Harris present for their “scientific” outlook. Harris, for example, writes that “there will probably come a time when we will achieve a detailed understanding of human happiness and of ethical judgments themselves at the level of the brain.” Fish asks, what is this confidence based on? Not, he notes, on a record of progress. Science today can no more explain ethics or human happiness than it could a thousand years ago.
Still, Harris says that scientific research hasn’t panned out because the research is in the early stage and few of the facts are in. Fish comments, “Of course one conclusion that could be drawn is that the research will not pan out because moral intuitions are not reducible to phyhsical processes. That may be why so few of the facts are in.”
The Lake Trout is wrong. Harris is absolutely right that science might achieve a detailed understanding of happiness and ethical judgements at a brain level. He didn't write that science might unravel the deepest philosophical questions. Anyone who's found benefit from taking anti-depressents (including a large segment of the religious) must believe science understands something about human happiness (if not metaphysical notions like "Eudemia"). The only correction I'd make to Harris is that cognitive science may prove sufficient for understanding higher mental capacities without necessarily reducing to neurons for everything (as quite a number of athiest philosophers are nonreductive physicalists).
Fish draws on examples from John Milton to make the point is that unbelief, no less than belief, is based on a perspective. If you assume that material reality is all there is, then you are only going to look for material explanations, and any explanations that are not material will be rejected out of hand.
This is true for surgeons as well as for priests. In the middle of a complicated surgery, blood could unexpectedly start spurting and the explanation could be "non-material".
Fish’s objection is not so much that this is dogmatism but that it is dogmatism that refuses to recognize itself as such. At least religious people like Milton have long recognized that their core beliefs are derived from faith.
Without a shout out to Tal's thread(s), we could note the problem of induction exists, therefore all is faith. But that doesn't leave believers with anything but "unjustified belief" to claim for themselves (or the absurd alternative that all beliefs are justified). Paul said, "Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." It would seem then, that dogmatically holding to "materialism", rejecting things "not seen" out of hand, is the antithesis of having faith. King Salmon is forgetting the ontological commitments he made one sentence prior for the notion of faith.