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

by Sam Harris

It is imperative that we begin speaking plainly about the absurdity of most of our religious beliefs. I fear, however, that the time has not yet arrived.

while it has never been difficult to meet your maker, in fifty years it will simply be too easy to drag everyone else along to meet him with you.

IT IS OFTEN argued that religious beliefs are somehow distinct from other claims to knowledge about the world. There is no doubt that we treat them differently—particularly

The human brain is a prolific generator of beliefs about the world. In fact, the very humanness of any brain consists largely in its capacity to evaluate new statements of propositional truth in light of innumerable others that it already accepts.

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 behavior.

THE power that belief has over our emotional lives appears to be total. For every emotion that you are capable of feeling, there is surely a belief that could invoke it in a matter of moments.

Certain beliefs place their adherents beyond the reach of every peaceful means of persuasion, while inspiring them to commit acts of extraordinary violence against others. There is, in fact, no talking to some people. If they cannot be captured, and they often cannot, otherwise tolerant people may be justified in killing them in self-defense.

We will continue to spill blood in what is, at bottom, a war of ideas.

It does not require any special knowledge of psychology or neuroscience to observe that human beings are generally reluctant to change their minds.

This explains the value we generally place on evidence: because evidence is simply an account of the causal linkage between states of the world and our beliefs about them.

We can believe a proposition to be true only because something in our experience, or in our reasoning about the world, actually speaks to the truth of the proposition in question.

Nor can I say things like “I believe in God because it makes me feel good.” The fact that I would feel good if there were a God does not give me the slightest reason to believe that one exists.

Let’s say that I want to believe that there is a diamond buried somewhere in my yard that is the size of a refrigerator. It is true that it would feel uncommonly good to believe this. But do I have any reason to believe that there is actually a diamond in my yard that is thousands of times larger than any yet discovered? No.

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.

THE moment we admit that our beliefs are attempts to represent states of the world, we see that they must stand in the right relation to the world to be valid.

As long as religious propositions purport to be about the way the world is—God can actually hear your prayers, If you take his name in vain bad things will happen to you, etc.—they must stand in relation to the world, and to our other beliefs about it.

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.

ALTHOUGH many things can be said in criticism of religious faith, there is no discounting its power. Millions among us, even now, are quite willing to die for our unjustified beliefs, and millions more, it seems, are willing to kill for them.

Those who are destined to suffer terribly throughout their lives, or upon the threshold of death, often find consolation in one unfounded proposition or another. Faith enables many of us to endure life’s difficulties with an equanimity that would be scarcely conceivable in a world lit only by reason.

But the fact that religious beliefs have a great influence on human life says nothing at all about their validity. For the paranoid, pursued by persecutory delusions, terror of the CIA may have great influence, but this does not mean that his phones are tapped.

Let’s see how this works: I feel a certain, rather thrilling “conviction” that Nicole Kidman is in love with me. As we have never met, my feeling is my only evidence of her infatuation. I reason thus: my feelings suggest that Nicole and I must have a special, even metaphysical, connection—otherwise, how could I have this feeling in the first place? I decide to set up camp outside her house to make the necessary introductions; clearly, this sort of faith is a tricky business.

Of course, anyone is free to redefine the term “faith” however he sees fit and thereby bring it into conformity with some rational or mystical ideal. But this is not the “faith” that has animated the faithful for millennia.

the truth is that religious faith is simply unjustified belief in matters of ultimate concern—specifically in propositions that promise some mechanism by which human life can be spared the ravages of time and death.

“Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed” (John 20:29)—and every child is instructed that it is, at the very least, an option, if not a sacred duty, to disregard the facts of this world out of deference to the God who lurks in his mother’s and father’s imaginations.

There is no way around the fact that we crave justification for our core beliefs and believe them only because we think such justification is, at the very least, in the offing.

It is the search for knowledge on the installment plan: believe now, live an untestable hypothesis until your dying day, and you will discover that you were right.

But in any other sphere of life, a belief is a check that everyone insists upon cashing this side of the grave: the engineer says the bridge will hold; the doctor says the infection is resistant to penicillin—these people have defeasible reasons for their claims about the way the world is. The mullah, the priest, and the rabbi do not.

It appears that even the Holocaust did not lead most Jews to doubt the existence of an omnipotent and benevolent God. If having half of your people systematically delivered to the furnace does not count as evidence against the notion that an all-powerful God is looking out for your interests, it seems reasonable to assume that nothing could.

A man’s faith is just a subset of his beliefs about the world: beliefs about matters of ultimate concern that we, as a culture, have told him he need not justify in the present.

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.

People of faith claim nothing less than knowledge of sacred, redeeming, and metaphysical truths: Christ died for your sins; He is the Son of God; All human beings have souls that will be subject to judgment after death. These are specific claims about the way the world is.

The faithful can be expected to behave just like their secular neighbors—which is to say, more or less rationally—in their worldly affairs. When making important decisions, they tend to be as attentive to evidence and to its authentication as any unbeliever.

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.

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.

If it had been known, for instance, that this pestilence was being delivered by merchant ships—that rats were climbing ashore from every hold and that upon each rat were legions of fleas carrying the plague bacillus—would the faithful have thought their energies best spent cutting the tongues out of blasphemers, silencing bells, dressing in bright colors, and making liberal use of enemas?

We have names for people who have many beliefs for which there is no rational justification. When their beliefs are extremely common we call them “religious”; otherwise, they are likely to be called “mad,” “psychotic,” or “delusional.”

Most people of faith are perfectly sane, of course, even those who commit atrocities on account of their beliefs. But what is the difference between a man who believes that God will reward him with seventy-two virgins if he kills a score of Jewish teenagers, and one who believes that creatures from Alpha Centauri are beaming him messages of world peace through his hair dryer?

Clearly, there is sanity in numbers. And yet, it is merely an accident of history that it is considered normal in our society to believe that the Creator of the universe can hear your thoughts, while it is demonstrative of mental illness to believe that he is communicating with you by having the rain tap in Morse code on your bedroom window. And so, while religious people are not generally mad, their core beliefs absolutely are.

In fact, it is difficult to imagine a set of beliefs more suggestive of mental illness than those that lie at the heart of many of our religious traditions. Consider one of the cornerstones of the Catholic faith:

Jesus Christ—who, as it turns out, was born of a virgin, cheated death, and rose bodily into the heavens—can now be eaten in the form of a cracker. A few Latin words spoken over your favorite Burgundy, and you can drink his blood as well. Is there any doubt that a lone subscriber to these beliefs would be considered mad? Rather, is there any doubt that he would be mad?

The danger of religious faith is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy.

Because each new generation of children is taught that religious propositions need not be justified in the way that all others must, civilization is still besieged by the armies of the preposterous. We are, even now, killing ourselves over ancient literature. Wh...

We believe most of what we believe about the world because others have told us to. Reliance upon the authority of experts, and upon the testimony of ordinary people, is the stuff of which worldviews are made.

There are good arguments and bad ones, precise observations and imprecise ones; and each of us has to be the final judge of whether or not it is reasonable to adopt a given belief about the world.

Science is science because it represents our most committed effort to verify that our statements about the world are true (or at least not false).34 We do this by observation and experiment within the context of a theory.

Any account of inheritance that is going to supersede the present assumptions of molecular biology will have to account for the ocean of data that now conforms to these assumptions. What are the chances that we will one day discover that DNA has absolutely nothing to do with inheritance? They are effectively zero.

The point is that his authority would be derived in the only way that such authority ever is—by making claims about the world that can be corroborated by further observation.

Religious unreason should acquire an even greater stigma in our discourse, given that it remains among the principal causes of armed conflict in our world. Before you can get to the end of this paragraph, another person will probably die because of what someone else believes about God.

A close study of these books, and of history, demonstrates that there is no act of cruelty so appalling that it cannot be justified, or even mandated, by recourse to their pages. It is only by the most acrobatic avoidance of passages whose canonicity has never been in doubt that we can escape murdering one another outright for the glory of God.