The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason

by Sam Harris

Your beliefs define your vision of the world; they dictate your behavior; they determine your emotional responses to other human beings.

the central tenet of every religious tradition is that all others are mere repositories of error or, at best, dangerously incomplete. Intolerance is thus intrinsic to every creed.

religious beliefs are simply beyond the scope of rational discourse.

religious moderates are themselves the bearers of a terrible dogma: they imagine that the path to peace will be paved once each of us has learned to respect the unjustified beliefs of others. I hope to show that the very ideal of religious tolerance—born of the notion that every human being should be free to believe whatever he wants about God—is one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss.

The idea that any one of our religions represents the infallible word of the One True God requires an encyclopedic ignorance of history, mythology, and art even to be entertained—as the beliefs, rituals, and iconography of each of our religions attest to centuries of cross-pollination among them.

If our polls are to be trusted, nearly 230 million Americans believe that a book showing neither unity of style nor internal consistency was authored by an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent deity.

A survey of Hindus, Muslims, and Jews around the world would surely yield similar results, revealing that we, as a species, have grown almost perfectly intoxicated by our myths. How is it that, in this one area of our lives, we have convinced ourselves that our beliefs about the world can float entirely free of reason and evidence?

most Christians and Jews do not read the Bible in its entirety and consequently have no idea just how vigorously the God of Abraham wants heresy expunged. One look at the book of Deuteronomy reveals that he has something very specific in mind should your son or daughter return from yoga class advocating the worship of Krishna: If your brother, the son of your father or of your mother, or your son or daughter, or the spouse whom you embrace, or your most intimate friend, tries to secretly seduce you, saying, “Let us go and serve other gods,” unknown to you or your ancestors before you, gods of the peoples surrounding you, whether near you or far away,

anywhere throughout the world, you must not consent, you must not listen to him; you must show him no pity, you must not spare him or conceal his guilt. No, you must kill him, your hand must strike the first blow in putting him to death and the hands of the rest of the people following. You must stone him to death, since he has tried to divert you from Yahweh your God…. (Deuteronomy 13:7–11)

Deuteronomy 13:1—“Whatever I am now commanding you, you must keep and observe, adding nothing to it, taking nothing away.”)

Tell a devout Christian that his wife is cheating on him, or that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible, and he is likely to require as much evidence as anyone else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it. Tell him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him with fire for eternity if he fails to accept its every incredible claim about the universe, and he seems to require no evidence

whatsoever.

Religious faith represents so uncompromising a misuse of the power of our minds that it forms a kind of perverse, cultural singularity—a vanishing point beyond which rational discourse proves impossible.

How can any person presume to know that this is the way the universe works? Because it says so in our holy books. How do we know that our holy books are free from error? Because the books themselves say so. Epistemological black holes of this sort are fast draining the light from our world.

If we live rightly—not necessarily ethically, but within the framework of certain ancient beliefs and stereotyped behaviors—we will get everything we want after we die. When our bodies finally fail us, we just shed our corporeal ballast and travel to a land where we are reunited with everyone we loved while alive.

If one didn’t know better, one would think that man, in his fear

of losing all that he loves, had created heaven, along with its gatekeeper God, in his own image.

explore the heights of our subjectivity with an open mind, while shedding the provincialism and dogmatism of our religious traditions in favor of free and rigorous inquiry.

(1) our religious traditions attest to a range of spiritual experiences that are real and significant and entirely worthy of our investigation, both personally and scientifically; (2) many of the beliefs that have grown up around these experiences now threaten to destroy us.

spirituality can be—indeed, must be—deeply rational,

As a man believes, so he will act. Believe that you are the member of a chosen people, awash in the salacious

exports of an evil culture that is turning your children away from God, believe that you will be rewarded with an eternity of unimaginable delights by dealing death to these infidels—and flying a plane into a building is scarcely more than a matter of being asked to do it. It follows, then, that certain beliefs are intrinsically dangerous. We

It is time we admitted,

that there is no evidence that any of our books was authored by the Creator of the universe. The Bible, it seems certain, was the work of sand-strewn men and women who thought the earth was flat and for whom a wheelbarrow would have been a breathtaking example of

emerging technology. To rely on such a document as the basis for our worldview—however heroic the efforts of redactors—is to repudiate two thousand years of civilizing insights that the human mind has only just begun to inscribe...

Even spirituality and ethics meet this criterion of universality because human beings, whatever their background, seem to converge on similar

spiritual experiences and ethical insights when given the same methods of inquiry. Such is not the case with the “truths” of religion, however. Nothing that a Christian and a Muslim can say to each other will render their beliefs mutually vulnerable to discourse, because the very tenets of their faith have immunized them against the power of conversation. Believing strongly, without evidence, they have kicked themselves loose of the world. It is therefore in the very nature of faith to serve as an impediment to further inquiry.

It is time we recognized that the only thing that permits human beings to collaborate with one another in

a truly open-ended way is their willingness to have their beliefs modified by new facts. Only openness to evidence and argument will secure a common world for us. Nothing guarantees that reasonable people will agree about everything, of course, but the unreasonable are certain to be divided by their dogmas. This spirit of mutual inquiry is the very antithesis of religious faith.

“Freedom of belief” (in anything but the legal sense) is a myth. We will see that we are no more free to believe whatever we want about God than we are free to adopt unjustified beliefs about

science or history, or free to mean whatever we want when using words like “poison” or “north” or “zero.” Anyone who would lay claim to such entitlements should not be surprised when the rest of us stop listening to him.

all higher-order cognitive states (of which beliefs are an example) are in some way an outgrowth of our capacity for action. In adaptive terms, belief has been extraordinarily useful. It is, after all, by believing various propositions about the world that we predict events and consider the likely consequences of our actions. Beliefs are principles of action: whatever they may be at the level of the brain, they are processes by which our understanding (and misunderstanding) of the world is

represented and made available to guide our

At present, we have no understanding of what it means, at the level of the brain, to say that a person believes or disbelieves a given proposition—and yet it is upon this difference that all subsequent cognitive and behavioral commitments turn.

To believe that God exists is to believe that I stand in some relation to his existence such that his existence is itself the reason for my belief. There must be some causal connection, or an appearance thereof, between the fact in question and my acceptance of it. In this way, we can see that religious beliefs, to be beliefs about the way the world is, must be as evidentiary in spirit as any other.

It should be clear that if a person believes in God because he has had certain spiritual experiences, or because the Bible makes so much sense, or because he trusts the

authority of the church, he is playing the same game of justification that we all play when claiming to know the most ordinary facts. This is probably a conclusion that many religious believers will want to resist; but resistance is not only futile but incoherent.

As long as a person maintains that his beliefs represent an actual state of the world (visible or invisible; spiritual or mundane), he must believe that his beliefs are a consequence of the way the world is. This, by definition, leaves him vulnerable to new evidence. Indeed, if there were no conceivable change in the world that could get a person to question his religious beliefs, this would prove that his beliefs were not predicated upon his taking any state of the world into account.

Hebrews 11:1 defines faith as “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Read in the right way, this passage seems to render faith entirely self-justifying: perhaps the very fact that one believes in something which has not yet come to pass (“things hoped for”) or for which one has no evidence (“things not seen”) constitutes evidence for its actuality (“assurance”).

The faith that I am calling into question is precisely the gesture that Tillich himself decried as “an act of knowledge that has a low degree of evidence.”

religious faith is simply unjustified belief in matters of ultimate

the product of a culture that has elevated belief, in the absence of evidence, to the highest place in the hierarchy of human virtues.

realm—“Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed” (John 20:29)—and

This is the very same faith that will not stoop to reason when it has no good reasons to believe. If a little supportive evidence emerges, however, the faithful prove as attentive to data as the damned. This demonstrates that faith is nothing more than a willingness to await the evidence—be

The men who committed the atrocities of September 11 were certainly not “cowards,” as they were repeatedly described in the Western media, nor were they lunatics in any ordinary sense. They were men of faith—perfect faith, as it turns out—and this, it must finally be acknowledged, is a terrible thing to be.

the fact that unjustified beliefs can have a consoling influence on the human mind is no argument in their favor.

The faithful have never been indifferent to the truth; and yet, the principle of faith leaves them unequipped to distinguish truth from falsity in matters that most concern them.

WHERE faith really pays its dividends, however, is in the conviction that the future will be better than the past, or at least not worse.

The allure of most religious doctrines is nothing more sublime or inscrutable than this: things will turn out well in the end. Faith is offered as a means by which the truth of this proposition can be savored in the present and secured in the future. It is, I think, indisputable that the actual existence of such a mechanism, the fact that uttering a few words and eating a cracker is an effective means of redemption, the certainty that God is watching, listening, and waiting to bestow his blessings upon one and all—in short, the literal correspondence of doctrine with reality itself—is of sole importance to the faithful.

literal reading of the Old Testament not only permits but requires heretics to be put to death.