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Articles by Sam Harris
Losing Our Spines to Save Our Necks
In a thrillingly ironic turn of events, a shorter version of this essay was originally commissioned by the opinion page of the Washington Post and then rejected because it was deemed too critical of Islam.
Losing Our Spines to Save Our Necks
What Barack Obama Could Not (and Should Not) Say
Like every candidate, Obama must appeal to millions of voters who believe that without religion, most of us would spend our days raping and killing our neighbors and stealing their pornography.
What Barack Obama Could Not (and Should Not) Say
The Edge Annual Question—2008
WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT? WHY?
Science is based on evidence. What happens when the data change? How have scientific findings or arguments changed your mind?”
Mother Nature is Not Our Friend
Functional Neuroimaging of Belief, Disbelief, and Uncertainty
Sam Harris
Sameer A. Sheth, MD, PhD
Mark S. Cohen, PhD
Objective: The difference between believing and disbelieving a proposition is one of the most potent regulators of human behavior and emotion. When we accept a statement as true, it becomes the basis for further thought and action; rejected as false, it remains a string of words. The purpose of this study was to differentiate belief, disbelief, and uncertainty at the level of the brain.
Methods: We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the brains of 14 adults while they judged written statements to be “true” (belief), “false” (disbelief), or “undecidable” (uncertainty). To characterize belief, disbelief, and uncertainty in a content-independent manner, we included statements from a wide range of categories: autobiographical, mathematical, geographical, religious, ethical, semantic, and factual.
Results: The states of belief, disbelief, and uncertainty differentially activated distinct regions of the prefrontal and parietal cortices, as well as the basal ganglia.
Interpretation: Belief and disbelief differ from uncertainty in that both provide information that can subsequently inform behavior and emotion. The mechanism underlying this difference appears to involve the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and the caudate. While many areas of higher cognition are likely involved in assessing the truth-value of linguistic propositions, the final acceptance of a statement as “true,” or its rejection as “false,” seems to rely on more primitive, hedonic processing in the medial prefrontal cortex and the anterior insula. Truth may be beauty, and beauty truth, in more than a metaphorical sense, and false propositions might actually disgust us.
Read the editorial by Oliver Sacks and Joy Hirsch (PDF)
Response to Paul C. Davies
November 28, 2007
I have long thought that someone should perpetrate a Sokal-style hoax on the New York Times opinion page…
Response to Theodore Dalrymple
First, let me confess that I have long enjoyed Theodore Dalrymple’s writing. This only became an inconvenience yesterday, in fact, when I learned that Dalrymple had subjected my first book, The End of Faith, to especially malicious treatment in the pages of this magazine.
The Future of the American Idea
November 2007
As The Atlantic celebrates its 150th anniversary, scholars, novelists, politicians, artists, and others look ahead to the future of the American idea
Ayaan Hirsi Ali: abandoned to fanatics
By Sam Harris and Salman Rushdie
October 9, 2007
As you read this, Ayaan Hirsi Ali sits in a safe house with armed men guarding her door…
Response to My Fellow “Atheists”
October 8, 2007
As several prominent atheists have now criticized the speech I gave at the Atheist Alliance conference in DC—without, apparently, understanding it—I thought I would take a moment to clarify the point I was making about the use of the term “atheist.”
The Problem with Atheism
We should not call ourselves “atheists.” We should not call ourselves “secularists.” We should not call ourselves “humanists,” or “secular humanists,” or “naturalists,” or “skeptics,” or “anti-theists,” or “rationalists,” or “freethinkers,” or “brights.” We should not call ourselves anything. We should go under the radar—for the rest of our lives. And while there, we should be decent, responsible people who destroy bad ideas wherever we find them.
Washington Post / Newsweek Website
The Problem with Atheism
Religion as a Black Market for Irrationality
Faith enables a person to fool himself into thinking that he is maintaining his standards of reasonableness, while forsaking them… As is well known, such cognitive gymnastics can be greatly facilitated by the presence of others, similarly engaged. Sometimes, it takes a village to lie to oneself.
Washington Post / Newsweek Website
Religion as a Black Market for Irrationality
Response to Jonathan Haidt
September 12, 2007
[R]eligion remains the only mode of discourse that encourages grown men and women to pretend to know things they manifestly do not (and cannot) know. If ever there were an attitude at odds with science, this is it. And the faithful are encouraged to keep shouldering this unwieldy burden of falsehood and self-deception by everyone they meet—by their coreligionists, of course, and by people of differing faith, and now, with startling frequency, by scientists who claim to have no faith…
The Sacrifice of Reason
Mother Teresa’s response to her own bewilderment and hypocrisy (her term) reveals just how like quicksand religious faith can be…
Washington Post / Newsweek Website
The Sacrifice of Reason
Scientists should unite against threat from religion
It was genuinely alarming to encounter Ziauddin Sardar’s whitewash of Islam in the pages of your journal (’Beyond the troubled relationship’ Nature 448, 131-133; 2007). Here, as elsewhere, Nature’s coverage of religion has been unfailingly tactful--to the point of obscurantism…
Nature 448, 864 (23 August 2007)
In Defense of Witchcraft
Imagine that the year is 1507, and life is difficult. Crops fail, good people suffer instantaneous and horrifying turns of bad luck, and even the children of royalty regularly die before they have taken their first steps. As it turns out, everyone understands the cause of these calamities: it is witchcraft.
The Empty Wager
The coverage of my recent debate in the pages of Newsweek began and ended with Jon Meacham and Rick Warren each making respectful reference to Pascal’s wager…
Washington Post / Newsweek Website
The Empty Wager
God’s Dupes
March 15, 2007
PETE STARK, a California Democrat, appears to be the first congressman in U.S. history to acknowledge that he doesn’t believe in God. In a country in which 83% of the population thinks that the Bible is the literal or “inspired” word of the creator of the universe, this took political courage.
God’s Hostages
For millennia the world’s great prophets and theologians have applied their collective genius to the riddle of womanhood. The result has been polygamy, sati, honor killing, punitive rape, genital mutilation, forced marriages, a cultic obsession with virginity, compulsory veiling, the persecution of unwed mothers, and other forms of physical and psychological abuse so kaleidoscopic in variety as to scarcely admit of concise description.
Washington Post / Newsweek Website
God’s Hostages
Beyond the Believers
...While at Salk, I witnessed scientists giving voice to some of the most unctuous religious apologies I have ever heard. It is one thing to be told that the pope is a great champion of reason and that his opposition to embryonic stem cell research has nothing to do with religious dogmatism; it is quite another to be told this by a Stanford physician who sits on the President’s Council on Bioethics…
Selfless Consciousness Without Faith
...The experience lasted just a few moments, but returned, again and again, as I gazed out over the land where Jesus is believed to walked, gathered his apostles, and worked many of his miracles. If I were a Christian, I would undoubtedly interpret this experience in Christian terms. I might believe that I had glimpsed the oneness of God, or felt the descent of the Holy Spirit…
Washington Post / Newsweek Website
Consciousness Without Faith
The Edge Annual Question—2007
As an activity, as a state of mind, science is fundamentally optimistic. Science figures out how things work and thus can make them work better. Much of the news is either good news or news that can be made good, thanks to ever deepening knowledge and ever more efficient and powerful tools and techniques. Science, on its frontiers, poses more and ever better questions, ever better put. The nearly 160 responses to this year’s Edge Question span topics such as string theory, intelligence, population growth, cancer, climate and much much more. Contributing their optimistic visions are a who’s who of interesting and important world-class thinkers.
What are you optimistic about? Why?
God’s Enemies Are More Honest Than His Friends
...As to whether atheists and believers can have “a productive conversation,” I am quite sure that the answer is “yes.” But I am uncertain whether this conversation can bear fruit quickly enough to keep civilization from becoming fully engorged by Iron Age stupidity and horror…
Washington Post / Newsweek Website
God’s Enemies Are More Honest Than His Friends
10 myths—and 10 Truths—About Atheism
December 24, 2006
SEVERAL POLLS indicate that the term “atheism” has acquired such an extraordinary stigma in the United States that being an atheist is now a perfect impediment to a career in politics (in a way that being black, Muslim or homosexual is not). According to a recent Newsweek poll, only 37% of Americans would vote for an otherwise qualified atheist for president…
Reply to B. Alan Wallace
...Wallace’s reaction to my book is symptomatic of the very political correctness and intellectual apathy to which Letter to a Christian Nation is itself a response. While my book undoubtedly has many flaws, Wallace appears to be precisely the sort of reader who cannot find them.
Reply to Nicholas D. Kristof
To the Editor:
Re “A Modest Proposal for a Truce on Religion,” by Nicholas D. Kristof (column, Dec. 3):
Contrary to Mr. Kristof’s opinion, it isn’t “intolerant” or “fundamentalist” to point out that there is no good reason to believe that one of our books was dictated by an omniscient deity.
Beyond Belief: The Debate Continues
Scott Atran rebukes Richard Dawkins, Steven Weinberg and me for the various ways we each criticized religion at a recent conference at the Salk Institute. While Atran responded to us in person at this meeting, and has elaborated his views at considerable length here, he has yet to say anything of relevance to the case we built against religious faith…
[HARRIS’ NOTE: Almost without exception, whenever Atran attributes a position to me, he has distorted it, often beyond recognition. Many of these false charges go unrebutted in our exchange, as it was just too tedious to keep taking his words out of my mouth. I did not reply to his second essay posted on Edge, as it was a mad tangle of irrelevancy and pseudo-argument. Under no circumstances should anyone trust Scott Atran’s representation of my views in this essay, or in any other context.]
Faith Won’t Heal a Divided World
Most Christians believe that Jesus was the Son of God and, therefore, divine; Muslims, however, believe that Jesus was not divine and that anyone who thinks otherwise will suffer the torments of hell (Koran 5:71-75; 19:30-38). This difference of opinion offers about as much room for compromise as a coin toss.
Washington Post / Newsweek Website
Faith Won’t Heal a Divided World
The Case Against Faith | Cover
Nov 13, 2006 Issue
Faith and doubt inform two important pieces in the Special Report. One, by former Bush speechwriter and adviser Michael Gerson, lays out a new, broader vision for conservative Christians. To offer a radically different view, we invited Sam Harris, an atheist who is the author of “Letter to a Christian Nation” and “The End of Faith,” to offer his perspective on mixing politics and religion...
Do We Really Need Bad Reasons To Be Good?
Either we can have a 21st-century conversation about morality and human happiness—availing ourselves of all the scientific insights and philosophical arguments that have accumulated in the last 2,000 years of human discourse—or we can confine ourselves to an Iron Age conversation as it is preserved in our holy books.
The End of Liberalism?
...Increasingly, Americans will come to believe that the only people hard-headed enough to fight the religious lunatics of the Muslim world are the religious lunatics of the West…
‘God’s Rottweiler’ Barks
The bestselling author of The End of Faith responds to Pope Benedict XVI’s speech on the interplay between faith and reason. Harris: “It is ironic that a man who has just disparaged Islam as ‘evil’ and ‘inhuman’ before 250,000 onlookers and the world press, is now talking about a ‘genuine dialogue of cultures.’ ”
The Language of Ignorance
In this essay, the bestselling secularist author of The End of Faith delivers a scathing review of The Language of God, a new book by Human Genome Project head Francis Collins that attempts to demonstrate a harmony between science and evangelical Christianity.
Reply to a Christian
“Since the publication of my first book, The End of Faith, I have received thousands of letters and e-mails from religious believers insisting that I am wrong not to believe in God. Invariably, the most unpleasant of these communications have come from Christians.”
Response to Controversy
A few of the subjects that I raised in The End of Faith continue to inspire an unusual amount of malicious commentary, selective quotation, and controversy. I’ve elaborated on these topics here:
The Myth of Secular Moral Chaos
“One cannot criticize religious dogmatism for long without encountering the following claim, advanced as though it were a self-evident fact of nature: there is no secular basis for morality. Raping and killing children can only really be wrong, the thinking goes, if there is a God who says it is.”
Ode to Reason
Robert Hambourger’s unfavorable review of my book, The End of Faith ("Ode to Intolerance,” Winter 2006) alleges that I do not understand religion—at least as it is practiced by most people, most of the time. While he sought to illustrate this contention by stringing together many disconnected quotations from my book, he showed no sign of actually having understood my argument against religious faith. The fact that Mr. Hambourger has spent some of his considerable academic energies expounding upon “the reasonableness of belief in miracles” is quite telling…
The Harvard International Review, Spring 2006
PDF
Killing the Buddha
“Kill the Buddha,” says the old koan. “Kill Buddhism,” says Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, who argues that Buddhism’s philosophy, insight, and practices would benefit more people if they were not presented as a religion.
Reply to Leon Wieseltier
Wieseltier writes with triumphal smugness about the ‘’excesses of naturalism’’ that apparently blight Dennett’s work. He might as well have pointed out the ‘’excesses of historical accuracy’’ or the ‘’excesses of logical coherence.’’
Who Are the Moderate Muslims?
“Ever since the atrocities of September 11th, 2001, there has been a lot of hopeful talk in the Western press about the vast majority of Muslims who are religious “moderates.” Being moderates, they necessarily repudiate the theology of Osama bin Laden and disavow terrorism. Nor would they ever dream of killing another human being over a cartoon. Where are these moderate Muslims? How many of them exist? And how can we best empower them?”
The Reality of Islam
“In recent days, crowds of thousands have gathered throughout the Muslim world—burning European embassies, issuing threats, and even taking hostages—in protest over 12 cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad that were first published in a Danish newspaper last September.”
A Contemplative Science
“I recently spent a week with one hundred fellow scientists at a retreat center in rural Massachusetts. The meeting attracted a diverse group: physicists, neuroscientists, psychologists, clinicians, and a philosopher or two; all devoted to the study of the human mind. In many respects it was like any other scientific retreat: we gathered each day in a large hall; we took long walks in the snow; we ate communally. At this meeting, however, six days passed before anyone uttered a word.”
The Edge Annual Question—2006
WHAT IS YOUR DANGEROUS IDEA?
An Atheist Manifesto
“Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply a refusal to deny the obvious. Unfortunately, we live in a world in which the obvious is overlooked as a matter of principle...The atheist, by merely being in touch with reality, appears shamefully out of touch with the fantasy life of his neighbors.”
Selling Out Science
“With the miasma of “Intelligent Design” slowly poisoning our intellectual discourse, it is amazing to consider that a significant percentage of scientists—40 percent!—still believe that reason and faith are compatible.”
Bombing Our Illusions II
“In my last post, I argued that there is a direct link between Islam and suicide bombing. Many readers of this blog considered this post to be offensive, tendentious, and even irresponsible. An addendum seems to be in order.”
Bombing Our Illusions
“Open the newspaper today—or tomorrow, or almost any day for many years to come—and you will discover that some pious Muslim has deliberately blown himself to bits for the purpose of killing “infidels” or “apostates.” It is likely that the bomber was male, middle class, and comparatively well educated. It is especially likely that he was guided by the sincere expectation of spending eternity in Paradise.”
There is No God (And You Know It)
“Somewhere in the world a man has abducted a little girl. Soon he will rape, torture, and kill her. If an atrocity of this kind is not occurring at precisely this moment, it will happen in a few hours, or days at most. Such is the confidence we can draw from the statistical laws that govern the lives of six billion human beings.”
Rational Mysticism
“If anyone has written a book more critical of religious faith than I have, I’m not aware of it. This is not to say that The End of Faith does not have many shortcomings—but appeasing religious irrationality is not among them.”
The Politics of Ignorance
“It is time that scientists and other public intellectuals observed that the contest between faith and reason is zero-sum.”
The Virus of Religious Moderation
“Perhaps it should come as no surprise that a mere wall of water sweeping innocent multitudes from the beaches of 12 countries on Boxing Day, failed to raise global doubts about God’s existence.”
The Edge Annual Question—2005
WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE BUT CANNOT PROVE?
Holy Terror
It appears that President Bush and the Republicans in the Senate have failed (for the moment) to bring the U.S. Constitution into greater conformity with Leviticus and the writings of St. Paul…
The Los Angeles Times, August 15, 2004