Person

Sam Harris

American neuroscientist, philosopher, podcaster, and one of the canonical Four Horsemen of New Atheism. Harris's The End of Faith (2004) is the originating book of the New-Atheism movement, published before Dawkins's The God Delusion (2006), Dennett's Breaking the Spell (2006), and Hitchens's God Is Not Great (2007). Among the Four, Harris is the most intellectually serious moral philosopher, the most engaged with consciousness and meditation, and the most polarizing in his Islam-specific criticism. Post-2014 his focus migrated toward contemplative naturalism, consciousness, and political-cultural commentary via his podcast Making Sense (originally Waking Up).

Biographical sketch

Born April 9, 1967, Los Angeles, California; raised in a secular Jewish-Quaker household.
Stanford (BA Philosophy, 2000), undergraduate education interrupted by extensive contemplative-Buddhist-study and meditation retreats (India / Nepal, 1980s-90s).
UCLA (PhD Cognitive Neuroscience, 2009), dissertation on the neuroscience of religious / non-religious belief.
Project Reason (co-founded 2007 with wife Annaka Harris), secular education nonprofit.
Waking Up (app + podcast, 2014-), meditation and consciousness-focused platform.
Making Sense Podcast (2013-present), ranges across politics, ethics, AI, philosophy of mind; one of the highest-subscribership intellectual podcasts.

Major works

The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (W.W. Norton, 2004), the originating New-Atheism book; PEN/Martha Albrand Award (2005); the central thesis is that religious moderation legitimizes religious extremism.
Letter to a Christian Nation (Knopf, 2006), short polemical letter aimed at American evangelical Christianity.
The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (Free Press, 2010), Harris's most ambitious philosophical work; argues that morality is reducible to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures and therefore is a topic for empirical science.
Free Will (Free Press, 2012), short book arguing free will is an illusion; we are determined by prior causes.
Lying (Four Elephants Press, 2013), short essay defending strict moral truthfulness.
Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Simon & Schuster, 2014), recovers contemplative / mystical experience for atheism.
Islam and the Future of Tolerance (with Maajid Nawaz; Harvard, 2015), dialogue on Islamic reform.

Core philosophical positions

1. The end of religious moderation

The central thesis of The End of Faith: religious moderation is epistemically incoherent, moderates accept the same scripture / authority that extremists weaponize, but selectively. The moderation that secular liberals praise as a bulwark against extremism is in fact a position that legitimizes the extremist framework while disowning its conclusions. The only consistent path is full secularism. This claim is structurally analogous to the Atheism is a Belief criticism of bare-lack-of-belief atheism: half-positions are unstable and reduce to one of the consistent extremes.

2. The Moral Landscape

Harris's most contested philosophical claim (The Moral Landscape, 2010): moral facts are facts about the well-being of conscious creatures, and therefore morality is a topic for empirical science. Moral questions have right and wrong answers in the same way medical questions do. The "moral landscape" is the multidimensional space of possible-states-of-conscious-creatures; flourishing-vs-suffering is the dimension we measure on; science can in principle determine the topology.

Christian critique (William Lane Craig, in their April 2011 Notre Dame debate; also see Harm-Reduction Cannot Ground Morality (Defeater)):

Harris assumes that the well-being of conscious creatures is the proper measure of morality, but this assumption is itself a normative claim that science cannot ground.
The is-ought gap remains: facts about well-being do not entail obligations to maximize it.
The argument is at best descriptive (what humans value) not prescriptive (what humans ought to value).
The framework collapses into utilitarianism with all its standard problems (trolley-problem reasoning; minority-suppression worries; meaning-and-dignity questions that the well-being calculus cannot capture).

The Notre Dame debate is widely judged a Craig-win on philosophical substance.

3. Free will as illusion

In Free Will (2012) and subsequent podcasts, Harris defends the position that free will is an illusion. We do not choose our thoughts (the next thought arrives without our authoring it); we do not choose our desires (we want what we want); we do not author the genetic / experiential causes that produced us. Moral responsibility, on Harris's view, is therefore something like a useful social fiction.

Christian critique: the position is internally unstable. Harris urges us to change our minds about free will, but if there is no free will, there is no mind-changing to be done. The position is also incompatible with the moral-realism Harris defends in The Moral Landscape; if we have no free will, the moral evaluation of behavior is incoherent. See You Cant Choose Your Beliefs (Doxastic Involuntarism Objection) for the adjacent doxastic-involuntarism debate.

4. Contemplative naturalism

Harris's Waking Up (2014) and the eponymous app: contemplative experience, meditation, mindfulness, ego-dissolution, mystical states, is a real and valuable dimension of consciousness, but it requires no theological / religious framework. Harris adapts Theravāda-Buddhist and Advaita-Vedanta techniques into a thoroughly naturalist register.

Christian assessment: Harris's contemplative naturalism is closer to the Christian tradition than New-Atheism polemic suggests; the same human capacities for transcendence-experience, ego-quieting, and contemplative awareness that Harris recovers are recognized by Christian mystics. The Christian critique is not that Harris's experiences are unreal but that his naturalist interpretation of them is metaphysically inadequate (see Reformed Epistemology on the sensus divinitatis / contemplative-experience defense).

5. Anti-Islam-specifically

Harris is the most aggressive of the Four Horsemen in his Islam-specific criticism. Argues that Islam (uniquely among the major religions) explicitly endorses violence against unbelievers in its central texts and that the violence is straightforwardly motivated by sincere religious belief, not displaced socio-economic grievance. Repeatedly accused of Islamophobia; the Ben Affleck Real Time with Bill Maher (October 2014) confrontation was a viral moment.

Christian apologetic engagement

William Lane Craig, Notre Dame debate (April 7, 2011): "Is the Foundation of Morality Natural or Supernatural?", widely judged Craig-win. Multiple follow-on engagements on Craig's podcast.
Edward Feser, multiple critical engagements via Last Superstition and blog posts
Robert Spencer, Islam-and-Christianity comparative debates
Jordan Peterson, joint events 2018 (London, Vancouver, Dublin), "Religion, Belief, Reality" tour; not strictly Christian apologetic but moves the conversation toward Christian-cultural categories