RE: What does Sam Harris mean by saying that religions are failed sciences?
January 12, 2024 at 10:35 pm
He is probably saying that religion was the prescience way that people used to reason about how the world functions.
Isaac Asimov gave a better explanation in his book "Words From Myths" where he goes into primitive people's heads
Isaac Asimov gave a better explanation in his book "Words From Myths" where he goes into primitive people's heads
Quote:Human beings wouldn't be human if they didn't wonder about the world about them. Many thousands of years ago, when mankind was still primitive, men must have looked out of caves and wondered about what they saw. What made the lightning flash?
Where did the wind come from? Why would winter start soon and why would all the green things die? And then why did they all come back to life the next spring?
Man wondered about himself, too. Why did men get sick sometimes? Why did all men get old and die eventually? Who first taught men how to use fire and how to weave cloth?
There were many number of questions but there were no answers. These were the days before science; before men had learned to experiment in order to determine the hows and whys of the universe.
What early man had to do was to invent what seemed to be the most logical answers. The raging wind was like the blowing of an angry man. The wind, however, was much stronger than the breath of any ordinary man and it had been blowing ever since man could remember. Therefore, the wind must be created by a tremendously huge and powerful man, one who never died. Such a superhuman being was a "god" or "demon."
The lightning seemed, perhaps, the huge, deadly spear of another god. Then, since arrows killed men, disease could be the result of invisible arrows fired by still another god. Since men and women married and had children, perhaps the green plants of the world were the children of the sky (a god) and the earth (a goddess). The gentle rain which made the plants grow was the marriage between them.
Perhaps a goddess was in charge of the plants of the world and grew angry because of some misfortune. She might have refused to let plants grow until things had been straightened out. That was why the green things died and winter came and that's why the world grew green again when winter was over and spring came.
Every group of human beings made up such stories.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
