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

[FlatAssembler]

[Kitan Etos]

I need to see the quote and possibly its surrounding text.

[Nay_Sayer]

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

I don't see how can somebody think that religions are somehow failed sciences. Religions were not trying to follow the scientific method and failed at it, they were doing the opposite of the scientific method from the beginning. A failed science is perhaps n-rays or stuff like that, certainly not Christianity and Islam.

He means that religions (originally, at least) attempted to explicate the physical world. They actually did make rather fumbling attempts at scientific methodology. Since their explanations of the natural world - crop failures, rain, thunder, volcanoes, etc - turned out to be wrong, they failed.

Boru

[awty]

And thus was born the science of Gawddidit.

[Anomalocaris]

I don't see how can somebody think that religions are somehow failed sciences. Religions were not trying to follow the scientific method and failed at it, they were doing the opposite of the scientific method from the beginning. A failed science is perhaps n-rays or stuff like that, certainly not Christianity and Islam.

i think he used the word poorly.   religions are failed, and mostly disingenuous, efforts to make sense of reality in ways that can be validated and are persistently useful, while science are much more sincere and rather more successful efforts at the same thing. 

The chasm in their motivation and performance highlights the fact that one is not the equivalent of the other.

[Fake Messiah]

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

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.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

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

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.

That’s EXACTLY the kind of thing you say when you OD on sesame seeds and your heme iron levels are off kilter.

Boru

[Nanny]

Sam Harris is an enigma to me. Wildly intelligent, supremely arrogant, and seems to put feet in his mouth at regular intervals. His "spiritual atheism" sticks in my craw, too.

It's like he wants to be the Joe Rogan of new atheism. There's a meat-headedness to him that baffles me.

[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.