The End of Faith (29 page)

S I N C E The End of Faith was first published, current events have remained a running confirmation of its central
thesis. There are days when almost every headline in the morning paper attests to the
social costs of religious faith, and the nightly news seems miracu- lously broadcast from
the fourteenth century. One spectacle of reli- gious hysteria follows fast upon the next.
Sanctimonious eruptions announcing the death of the pope (a man who actively opposed con-
dom use in sub-Saharan Africa and shielded frocked child molesters from secular justice)
are soon followed by other outbursts of reli- gious lunacy. At the time of this writing,
Muslims in several coun- tries are rioting over a report that U.S. interrogators
desecrated a copy of the Koran. Seventeen people are dead and hundreds injured. The
response of the U.S. government has been to offer up some lunacy of its own. No less a
spokeswoman than the Secretary of State has assured the righteous hordes that “the United
States gov- ernment will not tolerate any disrespect for the holy Koran.” What form our
government's intolerance will take remains unspecified. I await a knock on the door.

Such perfect visions of unreason have been punctuated by the more ordinary trespasses of
faith: daily reports of pious massacres in Iraq, of evangelical ravings against the evils
of a secular judiciary, of widespread religious coercion in the U.S. Air Force, of efforts
in at least twenty states to redefine science to include supernatural expla- nations of
the origin of life, of devout pharmacists refusing to fill prescriptions for birth
control, of movie theaters refusing to show documentaries that report the actual age of
the earth, and on and on and onward ... to the fifteenth century.

For anyone with eyes to see, there can be no doubt that religious faith remains a
perpetual source of human conflict. Religion per-

suades otherwise intelligent men and women to not think, or to think badly, about
questions of civilizational importance. And yet it remains taboo to criticize religious
faith in our society, or to even observe that some religions are less compassionate and
less tolerant than others. What is worst in us (outright delusion) has been ele- vated
beyond the reach of criticism, while what is best (reason and intellectual honesty) must
remain hidden, for fear of giving offense. The End of Faith represents my first attempt to call attention to the dangers and absurdities inherent in
this situation. I sincerely hope that readers will continue to find the book useful.

Sam Harris New York May 2005

1 Reason in Exile

1 As we will see in chapter 4, the chances are decidedly against the possi- bility that he comes from the lowest strata of society.

2 Some readers may object that the bomber in question is most likely to be a member of the
Liberations Tigers of Tamil Eelamthe Sri Lankan sep- aratist organization that has
perpetrated more acts of suicidal terrororism than any other group. Indeed, the “Tamil
Tigers” are often offered as a counterexample to any claim that suicidal terrorism is a
product of reli- gion. But to describe the Tamil Tigers as “secular”as R. A. Pape, “The
Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism,” American Political Science Review 97, no. 3 (2003): 20-32, and others haveis misleading. While the moti- vations of the
Tigers are not explicitly religious, they are Hindus who undoubtedly believe many
improbable things about the nature of life and death. The cult of martyr worship that they
have nurtured for decades has many of the features of religiosity that one would expect in
people who give their lives so easily for a cause. Secular Westerners often under-
estimate the degree to which certain cultures, steeped as they are in oth- erworldliness,
look upon death with less alarm than seems strictly rational. I was once traveling in
India when the government rescheduled the exams for students who were preparing to enter
the civil service: what appeared to me to be the least of bureaucratic inconveniences pre-
cipitated a wave of teenage self-immolations in protest. Hindus, even those whose preoccupations appear to be basically secular, often
harbor potent religious beliefs.

3 I am speaking here of “alchemy” as that body of ancient and ultimately fanciful
metallurgic and chemical techniques whose purpose was to transmute base metals into gold
and mundane materials into an “elixir of life.” It is true that there are people who claim
to find the alchemical lit-

erature prescient with the most contemporary truths of pharmacology, solid-state physics,
and a variety of other disciplines. I find the results of such Rorschach readings less
than inspiring, however. See T. McKenna, The Archaic Revival ([San Francisco]: Harper San Francisco, 1991), Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge (New York: Bantam Books, 1992), and True Hallucinations ([San Francisco]: Harper San Francisco, 1993), for an example of a bright and beautiful
mind that takes such revaluations of alchemy seriously, however.

4 S. J. Gould, “Nonoverlapping Magisteria,” Natural History, March 1997. 5 G. H. Gallup Jr., Religion in America 1996 (Princeton: Princeton Religion

Research Center, 1996). 6 This is not to deny that there are problems with democracy, particularly

when it is imposed prematurely on societies that have high birthrates, low levels of
literacy, profound ethnic and religious factionalism, and unstable economies. There is
clearly such a thing as a benevolent despo- tism, and it may be a necessary stage in the
political development of many societies. See R. D. Kaplan, “Was Democracy Just a Moment?,” Atlantic Monthly, Dec. 1997, pp. 55-80, and F. Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003).

7 Bernard Lewis, in “The Revolt of Islam,” New Yorker, Nov. 19, 2001, pp. 50-63, and The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (New York: Modern Library, 2003), has pointed out that the term “fundamentalist” was
coined by American Protestants and can be misleading when applied to other faiths. It
seems to me that the term has escaped into general usage, however, and that it now
signifies any sort of scriptural literalism. I use it only in this general sense. The
problems of applying the phrase to Islam in particular will be addressed in chapter 4.

8 C. W. Dugger, “Religious Riots Loom over Indian Politics,” New York Times, July 27, 2002. See also P. Mishra, “The Other Face of Fanaticism,” New York Times Magazine, Feb. 2, 2003, pp. 42-46.

9 A. Roy, War Talk (Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2003), 1. 10 As Lewis, Crisis of Islam, 57-58, notes, we have caused far more chaos in Central America, Southeast Asia, and
southern Africa. Those Muslim countries which have been occupied by foreign powers (like
Egypt) are in many ways much better off than countries (like Saudi Arabia) which have not.
Taking Saudia Arabia as an example, despite its relative wealth which is due to nothing
more than an accident of naturethis coun- try lags behind its neighbors in many respects.
The Saudis have only

NOTES TO PAGES 31-35 241

eight universities to serve 21 million people, and they did not abolish slavery until
1962. P. Berman, Terror and Liberalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 16, also points out that most of our conflicts of recent
years have been fought in defense of various Muslim populations: the first Gulf War was fought in defense of Kuwait and
Saudi Arabia, and was followed by a decade of air protection for the Iraqi Kurds in the
north and the Iraqi Shia in the south; the intervention in Somalia was designed to relieve
famine there; and our intervention in the Balkans was for the pur- pose of defending
Bosnians and Kosovars from marauding Christian Serbs. Our original support of the
mujahideen in Afghanistan belongs in this category as well. As Berman says, “In all of
recent history, no coun- try on earth has fought so hard and consistently as the United
States on behalf of Muslim populations.” This is true. And yet the Muslim world- view is
such that this fact, if acknowledged at all, is generally counted as a further grievance
against us; it is yet another source of Muslim “humil- iation.”

11 Of course, the Sunnis would still hate the Shiites, but this is also an expression of
their faith.

12 J. Bennet, “In Israeli Hospital, Bomber Tells of Trying to Kill Israelis,” New York Times, June 8, 2002.

13 “[I]n 1994, at a village south of Islamabad, police charged a doctor with setting fire to
the sacred Koran, a blasphemous crime punishable by death. Before he could be tried, an
enraged mob dragged him from the police station, doused him with kerosene, and burned him
alive.” J. A. Haught, Holy Hatred: Religious Conflicts of the '90s (Amherst, Mass.: Prometheus Books, 1995), 179.

14 S. P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).

15 As many commentators have observed, there is no Koranic equivalent of the New Testament
line “Render unto Caesar those things that are Cae- sar's, and render unto God those
things that are God's” (Matt. 22:21). As a result, there appears to be no Islamic basis
for the separation of the powers of the church and state. This, needless to say, is a
problem.

16 Lewis, Crisis of Islam, 20. 17 Just consider what would fill our newspapers if there were no conflict

between Israel and the Palestinians, the Indians and the Pakistanis, the Russians and the
Chechens, Muslim militants and the West, etc. Prob- lems between the West and countries
like China and North Korea would remainbut they, too, are often the result of an
uncritical acceptance of

a variety of dogmas. While our differences with North Korea, for instance, are not
explicitly religious, they are a direct consequence of the North Koreans' having grown
utterly deranged by their political ideol- ogy, their abject worship of their leaders, and
their lack of information about the outside world. They are now like a cargo cult armed
with nuclear weapons. If the 29 million inhabitants of North Korea knew that they were
unique among the world's basket cases, they might behave rather differently. The problem
of North Korea is, first and foremost, a problem of the unjustified (and unjustifiable)
beliefs of North Koreans. See P. Gourevitch, “Letter from Korea: Alone in the Dark,” New Yorker, Sept. 8, 2003, pp. 55-75.

18 See, e.g., D. Radin, The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psy- chic Phenomena (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), R. Sheldrake, The Sense of Being Stared At: And Other Aspects of the Extended Mind (New York: Crown, 2003), and R. S. Bobrow, “Paranormal Phenomena in the Medical Literature
Sufficient Smoke to Warrant a Search for Fire,” Med- ical Hypotheses 60 (2003): 864-68. There may even be some credible evi- dence for reincarnation. See I.
Stevenson, Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1974), Unlearned Language: New Studies in Xenoglossy (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1984), and Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect (West- port, Conn.: Praeger, 1997).

19 Yes, human beings can echolocate. We're just not very good at it. To demonstrate this,
simply close your eyes, hum loudly, and pass your hand back and forth in front of your
face. The sound reflecting off your hand indicates its position.

20 Witness John von Neumannmathematician, game theorist, savant of national defense, and
agnosticconverting to Catholicism while in the throes of cancer. See W. Poundstone, Prisoner's Dilemma (New York: Doubleday, 1992).

21 The Nazis disparaged the “Jewish physics” of Einstein, and the commu- nists rejected the
“capitalist biology” of Mendel and Darwin. But these were not rational criticismsas
witnessed by the fact that dissenting sci- entists were often imprisoned or killed.

These facts notwithstanding, K. Peng and R. E. Nisbett, “Culture, Dialectics, and
Reasoning about Contradiction,” American Psychologist 54 (1999): 741-54, have argued that significant differences in reasoning styles exist
across cultures. While the data appear to me to be inconclu- sive, even if Eastern and
Western minds address problems differently,

NOTES TO PAGES 46-5O 243

there is no reason why we cannot, in principle, agree about what it is ulti-

mately rational to believe. 22 The emergence in 2003 of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in

southern China is a recent example of the global implications of local health practices.
China's mishandling of the epidemic was born not of irrational medical beliefs but of
irrational political onesand the conse- quences, at the time of this writing, have not
been catastrophic. But it is not difficult to imagine a culture whose beliefs relative to
epidemiology could systematically impose unacceptable risks on the rest of us. There is
little doubt that we would ultimately quarantine, invade, or otherwise subjugate such a
society.

23 Los Angeles Times, March 18, 2002. 24 G. Wills, “With God on His Side,” New York Times Magazine, March 30,

2003. 25 M. Rees, Our Final Hour (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 61. 26 Questions of their plausibility aside, the mutual incompatibility of our

religious beliefs renders them suspect in principle. As Bertrand Russell observed, even if we were to grant that one of our religions must be
cor- rect in its every particular, given the number of conflicting views on offer, every
believer should expect damnation on mere probabilistic grounds.

27 Rees, Our Final Hour, has given our species no better than a 50 percent chance of surviving this century. While
his prognostications are nothing more than educated guesswork, they are worth taking
seriously. The man is not a crank.

2 The Nature of Belief

1 Proof of this fact is never so eloquent as when injury to the brain destroys one facet of
a person's memory while sparing the othersand indeed, it is largely upon such clinical
case histories (like W. B. Scoville and B. Milner, “Loss of Recent Memory after Bilateral
Hippocampal Lesions,” Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry 20 (1957): 11-21) that our understanding of human memory depends. Long-term memory has
since fragmented into semantic, episodic, procedural, and other forms of information processing; and short-term memory (gener- ally called
“working memory”) is now subdivided into phonological, visual, spatial, conceptual, echoic, and central executive components. Our analysis of both forms of memory is surely incomplete. The distinction

between semantic and episodic memory, for instance, doesn't seem to hold for topographical
recall (E. A. Maguire et al., “Recalling Routes around London: Activation of the Right
Hippocampus in Taxi Drivers,” Journal of Neuroscience 17 [1997]: 7103-10); and semantic memory seems susceptible to further division into
category-specific subtypes, as in memory for living v. nonliving things (S. L.
Thompson-Schill et al, “A Neural Basis for Category and Modality Specificity of Semantic
Knowl- edge,” Neuropsychologia 37 [1999]: 671-76; J. R. Hart et al., “Category- Specific Naming Deficit following
Cerebral Infarction,” Nature 316 [Aug. 1,1985]: 439-40)-

2 There are ways of construing the concept of “belief” that make it appear equally disjoint.
If we use the term too loosely, it can seem that the entire brain is intimately involved
in “belief” formation. Imagine, for instance, that a man has come to your door claiming to
represent the “Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes”:

1. You see the man's face, recognize it, and therefore “believe” that you know who this
person is. Activity in your fusiform cortex, espe- cially in the right hemisphere, is
crucial for such recognition to occur, and a lesion here will lead to prosopagnosia (the inability to recognize familiar faces, or indeed to see faces as faces at all). Using “belief” in this context, it is tempting to say that prosopagnosics have
lost certain “beliefs” about what other people look like.

2. Having recognized the man's face, you form the “belief,” based on your long-term memory
for both faces and facts that he is Ed McMa- hon, the famous spokesman for Publishers
Clearing House. Damage to your perirhinal and perihippocampal cortices would have
prevented this “belief” from forming. See R. R. Davies et al., “The Human Perirhinal
Cortex in Semantic Memory: An in Vivo and Postmortem Volumetric Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Study in Semantic Demen- tia, Alzheimer's Disease and Matched Controls,” Neuropathology and Applied Neurobiology 28, no. 2 (2002): 167-78 [abstract], and A. R. Giovagnoli et al., “Preserved Semantic
Access in Global Amnesia and Hippocampal Damage,” Clinical Neuropsychology 15 (2001): 508-15