What does Sam Harris mean by saying that religions are failed sciences?

[neil]

To me, religion is the result of the corruption of something that originated from science, and the reason it happens is because there are greedy people who want wealth, power, and control (or already have it and want more), and will lie, cheat, and steal to get it. It's something that I think has been happening ever since the dawn of mankind (a couple million years ago), it has been happening ever since, is happening today, and will continue to happen in the foreseeable future.

I'm curious about this... What is the science which existed prior to religion? Do you have some examples? In what way was it corrupted to become religion? 

The word "science" in its modern sense started in the 18th century. Before that when people investigated the world it was called natural philosophy. The separation of what we call science from what we call philosophy is quite recent. And philosophy was largely integrated with religion for most of that time.

Some branches of science got started in practices that were intrinsically involved in religion. For example, the desire for improved astrology motivated astronomy. (Remember that Kepler served as court astrologer for the Holy Roman Empire.) Alchemy was founded on various Neoplatonic beliefs that we would call religious today, but which gave rise to modern chemistry eventually, after much weeding and sorting. (See the history of Paracelsus.) 

So I don't understand why you put science first, as if it had a pure uncorrupted state before religion came in.

Perhaps you're right and I'm wrong, and I should've said philosophy rather than science.

Generally, I like to try to focus on examining the big picture and not get hung up with quibbling or semantics, but this is an online forum where the audience is broad and diverse.

I'm thinking of science in the sense of its fundamental, underlying scope, intent, and purpose, not from the perspective of how much we've progressed with our skills in advanced scientific understanding, or how we've been able to develop the technology we have achieved today.

You give the example of astronomy for the sake of improving astrology; I don't know if that was its original, true, or only purpose, but let's go with that. Did something before astrology lead up to its development in the first place? I have my doubts that one day human beings just started rollin' with astrology without any rhyme or reason.

There are some general examples, that I can think of, involving applications of astronomical patterns for practical purposes, such as navigation (both by land and by sea), farming, gathering, and hunting. Astronomy today is used scientifically for those purposes even today, and who's to say that early human beings weren't also applying this concept in some way (perhaps at an instinctive level), even if they didn't grasp modern day concepts of astronomy or the vocabulary didn't exist back then. A moth navigates using the moon, and it doesn't need to know anything about what the moon is, what it's doing, how it got there, etc.

I learned about how this story of Jesus (the "son of God") rising from the dead after 3 days actually originated for the pattern of the sunrise or sunset taking place at the same point along the horizon from "Part I: The Greatest Story Ever Told" of Peter Joseph's "Zeitgeist: The Movie". Here's an example of something that's actually useful for early humans/farmers to know in order to best determine the yearly pattern of what days to start planting seeds, gathering crops (etc.) in order to maximize crop yields - thus having more food, that was turned into something for religion.

Such awareness early on about the relationship and pattern between the Earth (or the horizon, back then) and the Sun was probably originally a trade secret, so farmers could make bank on the market; this was probably what actual O.G. esoteric knowledge really was, back then, which over time deteriorated or corrupted itself into something in the form of a myth, superstition, or religion (as an example).

This is my personal interpretation/comprehension/opinion of what the deal is - it's not meant to be exactly accurate factual material, per se.