“4) Atheists think everything in the universe arose by chance”:
Sam Harris begins this section with a dogmatic statement, “No one knows why the universe came into being.” How does he know this? Perhaps millions of people know, they tell him about it, and he rejects it. But, to be fair, we suppose that he, being an absolutist materialist, is stating that we cannot run a reproducible experiment or otherwise observe the beginning and its cause. Incidentally, some may deny that he is an absolute materialist since he embraces Buddhist meditation but he denies supernatural transcendence and embraces materialistic transcendence. His view is basically that transcendence is a product of the brain). As Richard Dawkins puts it, “If there is something that appears to lie beyond the natural world as it is now imperfectly understood, we hope eventually to understand it and embrace it within the natural.”1
Sam Harris further states, “it is not entirely clear that we can coherently speak about the ‘beginning’ or ‘creation’ of the universe at all, as these ideas invoke the concept of time, and here we are talking about the origin of space-time itself.” Understand that atheists will, at this point, assert one of two extremes: they will either avoid the pre Big Bang scenario at all cost or they will retreat into the atheistic supernatural realm, the multi-verse.
Sam Harris presents a paraphrase of Richard Dawkins that is not less than fascinating since it states, “…we know that the diversity and complexity we see in the living world is not a product of mere chance. Evolution is a combination of chance mutation and natural selection.” Did you catch that? Sam Harris intends on proving that he, Richard Dawkins, and all atheists, do not believe that everything in the universe arose by chance but he paraphrased Richard Dawkins as stating that everything is, “not a product of mere chance. Evolution is a combination of chance mutation and natural selection.” It is not chance but yes chance (and natural selection). Note also that Sam Harris jumped light-years ahead of the issue, he commented on what is already here while not discussing how it got here in the first place. He appears to have missed his own point. Actually, Richard Dawkins’ view is that life began by pure chance (or as he states it, “luck“) and then evolved but not by chance because natural selection selects in a nonrandom manner, even though it has no foresight, no goal to which it is aiming its selections.