The Problem with Faith by Sam Harris

THE PROBLEM WITH FAITH, Why Religious Moderates Have It Wrong
by Sam Harris

People of faith fall on a continuum: Some draw solace and inspiration from a spiritual tradition yet remain fully committed to tolerance and diversity, while others would burn the earth to cinders if it would put an end to heresy. There are, in other words, religious moderates and religious extremists, and their various passions and projects should not be confused.

That said, 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. But the very ideal of religious tolerance-born of the notion that all human beings should be free to believe whatever they want about God-is one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss.

One problem is that religious moderation does not permit anything very critical to be said about religious literalism. What's more, in trying to hold on to what is still serviceable in orthodox religion, religious moderates close the door to more sophisticated approaches to spirituality, ethics, and the building of strong communities. They seem to believe that what we need is not radical insight and innovation in these areas, but merely a dilution of Iron Age philosophy. Moderates ask that we relax our standards of adherence to ancient superstitions and taboos while otherwise maintaining a belief system that was passed down to us from men and women whose lives were simply ravaged by their basic ignorance about the world. In what other sphere of life is such subservience to tradition acceptable?

Imagine that we could revive a well-educated Christian of the14th century. He would prove to be a total ignoramus, except on matters of faith. His beliefs about geography, astronomy, and medicine would embarrass even a child, but he would know everything there is to know about God. We could explain this in two ways:

Either we perfected our religious understanding a millennium ago-while our knowledge on other fronts was still hopelessly inchoate-or religion, being the mere maintenance of dogma, is one area of discourse that does not admit of progress. The fact is, with each passing year religious dogma conserves less of the data of human experience. By this measure, the entire project of religion seems perfectly backward.

Moderates do not want to kill anyone in the name of God, of course, but they want us to keep using the word God as though we knew what were talking about. And they do not want anything too critical said about people who really believe in the God of their fathers, because tolerance, perhaps above all else, is sacred. To speak plainly and truthfully about the state of the world--to say, for instance, that the Bible and the Quran both contain mountains of life--destroying gibberish-is antithetical to tolerance as moderates currently conceive it. But we can no longer afford the luxury of such political correctness. We must finally recognize the price we are paying to maintain the iconography of ignorance. If religious war is ever to become as unthinkable to us as slavery and cannibalism, we will first have to dispense with the dogma of faith.


Sam Harris is completing a doctorate in neuroscience, studying the neural basis of belief, disbelief, and uncertainty with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRl). Adapted from his book The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (Norton, 2004).