Truth Unites - Why Sam Harris’s Moral Vision Still Doesn’t Satisfy

Episode Date: January 5, 2026

Gavin Ortlund explains why Sam Harris’s account of morality still falls short, arguing that our deepest moral intuitions about human dignity, progress, and obligation are historically grounded in, and hard to sustain without, a theistic worldview.Truth Unites (https://truthunites.org) exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is President of Truth Unites, Visiting Professor of Historical Theology at Phoenix Seminary, and Theologian-in-Residence at Immanuel Nashville.SUPPORT:Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunitesFOLLOW:Website: https://truthunites.org/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/truth.unites/X: https://x.com/gavinortlundFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/

Sam Harris and Ross Douthout recently discussed religion, and I want to address three questions that came up about how religion and morality relate to each other. First, has religion contributed to moral progress? Sam Harris talks about how, yes, Christians were involved in things like the abolition of the slave trade, but he says, of course, because everybody was religious at that time. Historically speaking, there was nobody else to do the job. I mean, basically, everyone's been religious. So, yes, religious people were on both sides of every controversy, right? So they were both slaveholders and they were abolitionists, right? And so you can—

Now, Harris is correct that professing Christians were on both sides of the abolitionist debate, but I don't think it follows from that that the role of religion was accidental or removable from that historical process. And I think Sam Harris is thinking like that. That's what he suggests several times in this discussion. The reason I would push back is to say, look at the argument that the abolitionists. were giving. The moral reasoning of the abolitionists was explicitly religious, particularly in invoking this doctrine of creation in the image of God. It is that religious belief that were made in

God's image that supplied the normative premise without which their moral vision that slavery is wrong was no longer obvious. Let's listen to the logic here. I'll give several examples of sort of abolitionist reasoning. We'll start with Gregory of Nisa in the early church. He's confronting slave owners in his audience, quote, What price did you put on rationality? For how many obols did you sell the image of God? For how many coins did you sell this nature formed by God? God said, let us make human beings in our image and likeness.

Genesis 1.26, when we are talking about one who is in the image of God, who has dominion over all the earth, and who has been granted by God authority over everything on the earth, tell me who is the seller and who the buyer. This sermon of Gregory is so inspiring. It's been called the most scathing criticism of slavery in all antiquity. I gave a whole talk just on that one sermon and what we can learn from it linked in the video description. The point for now is to note Gregory's logic. He's saying slavery is wrong because human beings are made in God's image.

The word because is the key in this sentence you can see on screen. This is not an emotional appeal. This is a metaphysical appeal. grounded in a particular view of human nature as envisioned in a particular kind of theistic worldview. And that religious outlook about creation in the image of God eventually became the pillar in abolitionist argumentation in the modern era. I always quote this great quote from Frederick Douglass just because I like it so much. There can be no more a law for the enslavement of man made in the image of God than for the

enslavement of God himself. And Alec Rerey, as I've discussed at greater length in other videos, points out that this kind of religious argumentation was foundational to the whole abolitionist effort. For more on that, you can see my longer video on slavery, or you can watch the dialogue that Trent Horn and I had with Josh Bowen and Kip Davis on this topic, both linked in the video description before below. The point for now is simply this. If today we want to say, well, we can remove the religious belief, but keep the moral vision. We need to to appreciate, that's a historical departure. For the abolitionist movement, the religious belief grounded the moral vision. They said slavery is wrong. That's the moral vision there in red,

because human beings are made in God's image in purple is the religion, is the theology. So there's connective tissue here between the morality and the religion. That's a historical observation. That's how they argued. Now, someone today could build an alternative argument, a different kind of appeal against slavery, but as a matter of history, you can't deny this connection, and it still permeates our world today, sometimes more than we even realize. For example, take one of my favorite sentences ever written, the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence. Whether we notice it or not, this is an irreducibly theological sentence, the verb endowed,

endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. that verb endowed reflects a particular religious conviction that was formed in a particular religious history. Lots of people today assume that we can discard the religion but keep the moral vision. I think Sam Harris would be in this camp. I think, I don't want to say he assumes that. I know he argues for that. And a lot of people think this is just obvious.

You know, it's just self-evident that human beings have rights and value and so forth. And I would just encourage, at the very least, an argument for that. an easy assumption. We need to appreciate this, though however it may obvious it may feel to us, this has not been obvious for most human culture throughout history. Arguably, it only seems obvious today for us because we live in a very specific situation, a very specific historically contingent process has shaped our moral intuitions about this topic. If Sam Harris got in a time machine and went back to 2000 BC. There is no civilization anywhere on planet Earth that would meet his approval, and that's not an insult. That's just a historical observation. His moral vision

is the historical product of religious ideas like a creator endowing us with inalienable rights and championing the moral vision while discarding the religious backdrop might be like climbing up a ladder to the roof of a house and then forgetting the role of the ladder, or spending an inheritance and failing to thank the benefactor. I like how David Bentley Hart puts it. We live in the long twilight of a civilization formed by beliefs that, however obvious or trite they may seem to us, entered ancient society rather like a meteor from a clear sky. If someone doesn't like what I'm saying right now and is going to react against this,

I guess my appeal would simply be, please read ancient history. Just go back and see what the world was like in 3,000 BC. they didn't have these values. So it's a valid point to say, you know, how did they come about? So here we're making a historical point. The question now we want to consider is this. If that moral vision historically originated out of this religious belief, once the religious belief is discarded, can we keep the moral vision?

Once the creator is gone, is there still something else that endows us with these inalienable rights? Okay, second question of this video. Where does our moral knowledge actually come from? I think the non-religious perspective struggles mightily to come up with a framework in which you should have any confidence at all that the reasoning capacities of evolved bipeds on, you know, what's the Douglas Adams line, the random star in a, you know, a sort of dank corner of the Milky Way. Spiral arm. I mean, I miss quoting. It's been a while, right? I don't see why. why that perspective on reality should give you the kind of confidence that you have in this sort of progress. Why shouldn't it be the case that we evolve and develop and end up in completely the wrong place morally and just tell ourselves we're in the right place because, you know, we're chimps who delude themselves? Like, when comes your confidence that we are capable of this

sort of progress? Well, some of this progress has been demonstrated, right? We've seen... So you heard Sam Harris say there, some of this progress has been demonstrated, it, forgive me for not playing on the tape from there going forward, but he gave a longer answer. You can go watch the original video and see his answer, also linked below. But he's going on about various ways that we can observe human beings have made progress in history. And I worry that this really misses the point of Ross's good question, which is how do we know which changes constitute progress? This brings up what philosophers call evolutionary debunking arguments.

which I think constitute a real pressure point for atheist moral reasoning. Simple observation. If our moral beliefs are explained reductively by evolutionary processes, by what helped our ancestors survive, then they were selected not for truth, but for usefulness. So evolution can explain why we have these moral instincts, but not whether we should trust them. So the question is, how does Harris know that his perception of moral progress actually maps on to truth, as opposed to some other perception of moral progress. There's lots of other ways to envision what progress looks like. Consider what are sometimes called Darwinian counterfactuals,

which recognize that an evolved morality is a contingent morality. I've talked about this so much. I'm trying to winnow it down and say it very succinctly. I'll just let Charles Darwin himself make this point. If men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the workerbees, think it as sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters, and no one would think of interfering. This is horrifying to consider. The other Darwinian counterfactuals you get in the literature on this are so disgusting, I won't even mention them, but it's a legitimate worry. Why should we trust that our moral instincts are actually truth-tracking? They've only come

about through this highly contingent process that could have gone differently. So, thus far in the video, we raised a historical point. Now, what I'm making now is an epistemological point about moral knowledge. Both of those points are separate from the deepest concern that I have about atheistic accounts of morality, namely the ontological concern. What is it that makes morality actually binding rather than merely desirable? Why does it have this authoritative dimension to it, such that to reduce well-being isn't just unpleasant, but you actually ought not to do that? Because Harris will appeal to human well-being

as sort of the ground of morality. Granted, you can use that to guide choices, but it doesn't explain why we ought to care about well-being in the first place. And I won't develop that point here because I have other videos like the two thumbnails you can see on the screen linked in the video description before to bear that point out more fully. For now, let's address the final point that Sam raised. Why don't we have more science and math in the Bible? Interestingly, the discussion kind of came to this point at the end. Then you have to say, well, what kind of book would this compassionate, omniscient mathematician have written us if he wanted to guide us? And surely he would have put something in there. That was just one page of mathematics

that would have inspired, even now, you know, 2,000 years later. would have inspired human mathematicians to, to, one, recognize that they live in a universe that was so designed, but, two, continue to deepen their understanding of it. I mean, that would be so easy to have done, right? I mean, David Hilbert could have done it. You want, you want one theoretical physics proof encoded, in code, it doesn't have been encoded. Jesus just, Jesus just has to say it. He's out there preaching, and he's like, by the way, you won't get this for a while, but E equals MC squared. Yes, exactly. That's what you want. Something that no denizen of the first century could have said,

proving the omniscient or supernatural origin of the text. But I think this expectation underappreciates the organic and historical nature of biblical revelation. The purpose of God's revealing himself to us is not to provide intellectual proofs for people later, centuries later. It's to speak to the moral and spiritual questions of the people at that. time, and therefore faulting the Bible for not having advanced math, for example, is kind of like criticizing a hammer because it's not a good wrench. It's not what it's designed to do. Now, you could say, well, yeah, but why isn't divine revelation broader in its purpose and have these more grand intellectual goals and so on and so forth? But I thought Ross had a good response to that in the

final sections of this video. I do not think that Christians or any religious believers are obligated to see their sacred scriptures as the only document that organizes, or the only theory that organizes their worldview. I think it might be the worldview. The only one that's revelation. Right. The revelation in the New Testament is about the kind of, it's about salvation and questions related to that, but it's also about the kind of people that God wants us to be. And I do think you can draw from the fact that it includes moral codes and not the laws of physics that God does care more. that is an indicator. God cares more about what kind of person you are than how fully you

understand the secrets of the cosmos. I think, yeah, that is an implication you do have to draw if you are a Christian. Yes. To me, this makes sense because of the Christian idea of an afterlife. If you're an actual person in the first century, it's more important to know how to connect your soul to God and how to achieve salvation than it is like calculus or something like that because you're going to die. And when you do, the most important, important thing that any human being can know is, will I be connected to the creator when I die? And this, of course, is the basic message that the whole Bible is about, as Ross mentioned. You'd want the most inspiring and onward leading document. If you were really compassionate, right,

and you really wanted people to get it right, you'd say, I mean, so, like, for instance, I mean, this is something you did. So, like, maybe you'd tell a story where, hypothetically, the omniscient mind came down to earth and participated fully in the suffering of his creation and died on a cross and opened eternal life? Like, would that be, would that be inspiring enough? If we're going to, you want more inspiration. Yeah. So, that's not enough. I think this is a fair point that if you're looking for a story that is morally inspiring, could there be any other story that is more inspiring than a God who comes into creation and dies on a cross and takes on sacrifice and suffering himself so that we could be restored to him? If the doctrine of creation and the

image of God dignifies us, how much more does this thought that God himself became a slave? How much more should that motivate compassion and care for those around us?