“Human Intelligence Slop”: The Vacuousness of Sam Harris’ God-free Morality

We’ve all encountered AI slop by now. You ask a chatbot something, and it produces a paragraph that reads fluently, hits all the expected beats, and says absolutely nothing. The words go together. They follow familiar patterns. But there’s no one home behind them. No understanding. No meaning. Just statistical prediction dressed in confident prose.

Sam Harris’ The Moral Landscape is the philosophical equivalent.

Harris wants to ground objective morality in “facts about the well-being of conscious creatures.” Science, he argues, can in principle tell us which states of the world are morally better or worse. Suffering is bad. Flourishing is good. The peaks on the moral landscape represent maximal well-being; the valleys represent maximal suffering. We don’t need God to see this. We just need neuroscience, psychology, and clear thinking.

It sounds compelling. The sentences connect. The moral intuitions land. And that’s the problem. Because what Harris has actually done is describe states he prefers, label the description “objective morality,” and move on as though the hard work were finished.

It isn’t. It hasn’t started.

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The is-ought gap isn’t a technicality. David Hume identified it three centuries ago, and no amount of confident assertion has bridged it since. You can catalog every fact about human neurology, map every brain state associated with pleasure and pain, build the most comprehensive empirical picture of conscious experience ever assembled, and you will not have produced a single “ought.” You’ll have produced an extraordinarily detailed “is.”

Harris knows this objection exists. His response, essentially, is to dismiss it. He treats the move from “conscious creatures can suffer” to “we ought to minimize suffering” as so obvious it doesn’t require justification. But that’s the entire question. Why ought we minimize suffering? “Because suffering is bad” restates the claim. It doesn’t ground it.

On what authority does Harris declare well-being objectively good? Not on scientific authority. Science describes. It measures, correlates, predicts. It does not prescribe. You can use an MRI to show which brain regions activate during moral reasoning, but the MRI doesn’t tell you the reasoning is correct. That’s a philosophical claim, and Harris treats it as self-evident precisely because defending it would require resources his worldview doesn’t have.

This is where the analogy to AI-generated text becomes more than rhetorical. A large language model produces fluent output because it has learned statistical patterns in human language. It predicts which token comes next given the tokens that preceded it. The output can be strikingly coherent. It can even be useful. What it cannot be is meaningful in the way human communication is meaningful, because there is no semantic comprehension behind it. There is no agent who understands the words. There’s a process that produces them.

Harris is doing something structurally identical. He has learned the patterns of moral discourse. He knows which moral claims follow plausibly from which other moral claims within the cultural grammar we all share. “Well-being is good” connects naturally to “we should promote well-being,” the same way “the cat sat on the” connects naturally to “mat.” But the connection is associative, not logical. The normative force is borrowed from moral intuitions Harris hasn’t grounded, plugged into a framework that, on its own terms, cannot generate them.

Call it human intelligence slop. Fluent moral language. No actual grounding.

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But Harris’ problem runs deeper than a missing bridge principle. The real issue is the metaphysical picture underneath.

Harris is a strict naturalist. On his view, the universe is a closed causal system. Everything that happens is the result of prior physical states operating according to natural law. There is no supernatural. No transcendent moral lawgiver. No telos woven into the fabric of reality. Just particles, fields, and the laws that govern them, producing increasingly complex arrangements over billions of years until some of those arrangements start talking about ethics.

Follow that picture honestly and see what it costs you.

If strict naturalism is true, then human minds are patterns in electrochemical activity. Your deliberation about what’s right and wrong is neural firing, shaped by genetics and environment, determined (or at minimum, constrained) by prior physical states you didn’t choose and can’t override. You don’t arrive at moral conclusions. Your brain produces them, the same way your liver produces bile. One is no more “true” than the other. Both are outputs of biological machinery doing what physics dictates.

On this view, agency is an illusion. Not a partial truth. Not an approximation. An illusion. Because genuine agency requires that you, the person, can initiate causal chains based on reasons rather than merely undergo neural events caused by prior neural events. It requires top-down causation: the whole (the person) directing the parts (the neurons). But on strict naturalism, there are no genuine wholes. There is no top-down causation. There are particles arranged person-wise, and the particles do what particles do. The “person” is a user-level story we tell about a complex physical system. Useful, perhaps. Real, on naturalism’s own terms? No.

No agency. No teleology. No genuine persons. Just the next electrochemical reaction in a neural network.

Now try to build objective morality on that foundation.

Harris wants “the well-being of conscious creatures” to be objectively good. But “conscious creatures,” on his metaphysics, are convenient fictions. They’re patterns. Processes. Arrangements of matter that will rearrange shortly. The “well-being” of a pattern is like the “health” of a whirlpool. You can describe its stability, its persistence, its relation to surrounding conditions. You cannot say it ought to persist. That would require the whirlpool to matter, and on naturalism, mattering is the one thing the universe doesn’t do.

Harris’ moral landscape, then, is a topographical map of which brain states and social configurations Sam Harris happens to prefer, generated by a nervous system shaped by evolution for reproductive fitness, not moral truth. The peaks aren’t objectively good. They’re the outputs a particular biological machine labels “good.” Another machine, wired differently, might label very different states as peaks. On what grounds does Harris adjudicate? He can’t appeal to well-being, because the content of “well-being” is precisely what’s in dispute. He can’t appeal to science, because science doesn’t generate norms. He can’t appeal to reason, because on his metaphysics, reason is just what the next neural event looks like from the inside.

He has nowhere to stand. The landscape is flat all the way down.

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Some philosophers have tried to resist this collapse without invoking God. Three strategies deserve brief mention.

The first naturalizes teleology. Biological functions, on this view, are real explanatory structures, not mere metaphors. Hearts really are for pumping blood. Minds really are for reasoning. This gives you purpose-talk within a naturalistic framework. But it never gives you normative teleology. A heart’s function is pumping blood, but nothing in evolutionary biology says it should pump blood. The normativity is read in by the observer. Natural selection doesn’t care. Natural selection doesn’t care about anything.

The second posits emergent agent causation. Persons, on this view, have genuine causal powers that arise from but are not reducible to neural activity. This is philosophically interesting but explanatorily empty. “Emergence” names the thing that needs explaining. It doesn’t explain it. We observe that persons act as agents. The question is whether strict naturalism can account for that observation. Saying “it emerges” is like saying “it happens.” True, perhaps. But not an explanation. And if the emergence is itself determined by lower-level physics, you haven’t gotten genuine agency. You’ve gotten the appearance of agency from a system that remains, at bottom, dominos falling.

The third rethinks matter itself. Panpsychism and pan-agentism propose that consciousness or agency go all the way down, that electrons have proto-experience, that agency isn’t trying to emerge from the utterly agency-free because nothing is utterly agency-free. This is the most honest move, because it concedes the core insight: you cannot get mind from the mindless. But it concedes it by attributing mind to electrons, which abandons physicalism, faces the devastating combination problem (how do billions of micro-experiences combine into your unified experience of reading this sentence?), and looks suspiciously like the theistic intuition dressed in a lab coat. If mind is fundamental to reality, you’re closer to “In the beginning was the Logos” than you are to Harris’ neuroscience-will-save-us program.

None of these rescues work. The first gives you function without obligation. The second gives you a label without a mechanism. The third gives you the theistic conclusion while refusing to follow it home.

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Christianity doesn’t face these problems, and the reason is straightforward.

On the Christian account, agency is real because persons are made in the image of a personal God. You aren’t a pattern in electrochemical noise. You’re a creature, created with genuine causal powers, addressed by your Maker as “you.” Top-down causation is real because God, who is ultimate reality, is Himself a personal agent. Agency isn’t an anomaly struggling to emerge from a purposeless substrate. It’s built into the foundation of existence.

Teleology is real because creation is intentional. The universe isn’t an accident that happens to contain beings who talk about purpose. It’s the product of a purposeful Mind. “Well-being” isn’t just a brain state Sam Harris prefers. It’s the condition of creatures living in alignment with the ends for which they were designed. That grounding is what makes moral obligation more than preference. A creature living contrary to its design is genuinely malfunctioning, and you can say so because there is a design to deviate from.

Moral obligation is real because it’s grounded in the character of a necessarily existing personal God. His nature determines what is good. His commands create binding obligations on creatures made in His image. This isn’t arbitrary (God chose it) or redundant (something external to God dictates it). It flows from who God essentially is. The good isn’t imposed on reality from outside. It’s woven into reality’s source.

And unlike the abstract God of generic philosophical theism, Christianity anchors these claims in history. The content of “good” isn’t derived from abstract argument. It’s read off a concrete life: the enemy-love of the cross, the truth-telling that cost everything, the compassion extended to the marginalized, the justice that does not abandon the oppressed. And that life was publicly vindicated by the resurrection, which is either a historical event open to investigation or it isn’t. Christianity puts its cards on the table: “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile” (1 Corinthians 15:17, ESV). Try finding a naturalist willing to name what would falsify their worldview.

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Harris’ project fails not because he’s bad at philosophy (though his dismissal of the is-ought gap is breathtaking), and not because atheists can’t behave morally (of course they can). It fails because his worldview systematically eliminates every resource he needs to make the project work.

He needs agents, but his naturalism gives him neural events. He needs teleology, but his naturalism gives him blind process. He needs persons, but his naturalism gives him particle swarms. He needs normativity, but his naturalism gives him descriptions.

What remains is a book that reads beautifully, argues fluently, and gestures at moral seriousness with genuine passion. But underneath the polished prose, there is no grounding. There is no “ought” anywhere in the system. There are only brain states producing confident moral language, one electrochemical reaction after another, as determined and purposeless as weather.

Human intelligence slop. Fluent. Familiar. Empty.

The moral landscape has no topography without a Moral Lawgiver who sculpted the terrain. Harris is drawing contour lines on a flat plane and asking us to admire the peaks.

We can do better than that. We can follow the evidence to the One who actually grounds the morality we all can’t help but live by.

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James (JD) Longmire is a Northrop Grumman Fellow and ordained minister conducting independent research in philosophy of religion.

Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission.