Nobody's perfect, and it doesn't matter

On Wednesday's videos of the day post, one comment objected to Sam Harris not on the basis of any actual content of the video posted, but because of his alleged belief in "determinism" (the idea that choice is an illusion and all events, including human thoughts and actions, are predestined and unchangeable).  Now, I don't believe anyone literally believes in determinism in that sense -- aside from the fact that quantum physics has rendered it untenable, no one actually behaves or thinks the way he would if he truly believed that he and all other humans were mere automata with no actual choice about their actions.  Morality itself would be meaningless if one accepted determinism.  Harris may have expressed a belief in some form of determinism for all I know (I'm not as familiar with his thinking as I am with that of Dawkins or Hitchens), but his expressed views on subjects like morality and religion presuppose a world in which humans can meaningfully make choices and judgments.

But -- and this is my point -- even if Harris does believe in determinism in whatever sense, it doesn't matter.

Some people are quick to dismiss the achievements of our thinkers and fighters on the basis of one or two peripheral errors.  The problem is, nobody's perfect.  Hitchens, for example, supported the Iraq invasion, and I was once upbraided by a commenter for posting a video of his because of this, as if being wrong on that single point somehow negated his immense contributions to the struggle against religion.  Bill Maher is known to flirt with anti-vaccine quackery.  Even geniuses are not immune.  Einstein rejected certain aspects of quantum theory which have since been experimentally confirmed.  Isaac Newton wasted his brilliant intellect trying to interpret Biblical prophecies.  But not many people would be so foolish as to bring that up in an effort to discredit calculus.

The case is even clearer when it comes to inadequacies in contemporary knowledge.  It would be absurd to fault Aristotle for accepting a geocentric model of the solar system, for example.  He lived at a time when humans had not yet developed the instruments and knowledge of physical laws necessary to prove the heliocentric model.  Similarly, despite recent advances in brain science, our own time's understanding of how consciousness, thought, and associated mental phenomena actually work is sketchy at best.  Jumping to the conclusion that free will must be an illusion, because our current knowledge cannot account for it, is an understandable error.

Some of our modern heroes such as Dawkins and Randi are, as far as I know, free of any taint of loopy ideas -- but even if I found out that they harbored a soft spot for something like reincarnation or bigfoot (unlikely, I hasten to add), it wouldn't diminish my respect for their contributions at all.  The magnitude of those contributions reduces minor human failings to irrelevance.