“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