Sam Harris Quotes About Evidence

Quotes about: Evidence

• While believing strongly, without evidence, is considered a mark of madness or stupidity in any other area of our lives, faith in God still holds immense prestige in our society. Religion is the one area of our discourse where it is considered noble to pretend to be certain about things no human being could possibly be certain about. It is telling that this aura of nobility extends only to those faiths that still have many subscribers. Anyone caught worshipping Poseidon, even at sea, will be thought insane.

  Sam Harris

  Atheist, Believe, Sea

  Sam Harris (2006). “Letter to a Christian Nation”, Alfred a Knopf Incorporated

• If someone doesn’t value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide that proves they should value evidence. If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument would you invoke to prove they should value logic?

  Sam Harris

  Logical Arguments, Should, Evidence

• The core of science is not a mathematical modeling--it is intellectual honesty. It is a willingness to have our certainties about the world constrained by good evidence and good argument.

  Sam Harris

  Honesty, Intellectual, World

• When considering the truth of a proposition, one is either engaged in an honest appraisal of the evidence and logical arguments, or one isn't. Religion is one area of our lives where people imagine that some other standard of intellectual integrity applies.

  Sam Harris

  Integrity, Logical Arguments, People

  Sam Harris (2006). “Letter to a Christian Nation”, Alfred a Knopf Incorporated

• I know of no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too desirous of evidence in support of their core beliefs.

  Sam Harris

  Faith, People, Support

  Sam Harris (2006). “Letter to a Christian Nation”, Alfred a Knopf Incorporated

• What I'm asking you to entertain is that there is nothing we need to believe on insufficient evidence in order to have deeply ethical and spiritual lives.

  Sam Harris

  Inspirational, Motivational, Spiritual

• Tell a devout Christian that his wife is cheating on him, or that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible, and he is likely to require as much evidence as anyone else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it. Tell him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him with fire for eternity if he fails to accept its every incredible claim about the universe, and he seems to require no evidence what so ever.

  Sam Harris

  Christian, Cheating, Atheist

• Every one of the world's "great" religions utterly trivializes the immensity and beauty of the cosmos. Books like the Bible and the Koran get almost every significant fact about us and our world wrong. Every scientific domain -- from cosmology to psychology to economics -- has superseded and surpassed the wisdom of Scripture. Everything of value that people get from religion can be had more honestly, without presuming anything on insufficient evidence. The rest is self-deception, set to music.

  Sam Harris

  Book, Our World, Self

• People who harbor strong convictions without evidence belong at the margins of our societies, not in our halls of power.

  Sam Harris

  Strong, Atheist, People

  Sam Harris (2005). “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason”, p.225, W. W. Norton & Company

• A kernel of truth lurks at the heart of religion, because spiritual experience, ethical behavior, and strong communities are essential for human happiness. And yet our religious traditions are intellectually defunct and politically ruinous. While spiritual experience is clearly a natural propensity of the human mind, we need not believe anything on insufficient evidence to actualize it.

  Sam Harris

  Spiritual, Religious, Strong

  Sam Harris (2005). “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason”, p.221, W. W. Norton & Company

• The difference between science and religion is the difference between a willingness to dispassionately consider new evidence and new arguments , and a passionate unwillingness to do so.

  Sam Harris

  Differences, Passionate, Argument

  "Science Must Destroy Religion" by Sam Harris, en.wikiquote.org. January 02, 2006.

• If history reveals any categorical truth, it is that an insufficient taste for evidence regularly brings out the worst in us. Add weapons of mass destruction to this diabolical clockwork, and you have . . . a recipe for the fall of civilization.

  Sam Harris

  Fall, Mass Destruction, Civilization

  Sam Harris (2005). “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason”, p.26, W. W. Norton & Company

• Science has long been in the value business. Despite a widespread belief to the contrary, scientific validity is not the result of scientists abstaining from making value judgments; rather, scientific validity is the result of scientists making their best efforts to value principles of reasoning that link their beliefs to reality, through reliable chains of evidence and argument.

  Sam Harris

  Reality, Objectivity, Best Effort

  "The Moral Landscape". Book by Sam Harris, 2010.

• When someone like myself points out the rather obvious and compelling evidence that God is cruel and unjust, because he visits suffering on innocent people of a scope and scale that would embarrass the most ambitious psychopath, we're told that? God is mysterious.

  Sam Harris

  People, Suffering, Religion

• People who harbor strong convictions without evidence belong at the margins of our societies, not in our halls of power. The only thing we should respect in a person’s faith is his desire for a better life in this world; we need never have respected his certainty that one awaits him in the next.

  Sam Harris

  Strong, People, Desire

  Sam Harris (2005). “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason”, p.225, W. W. Norton & Company

• The faith of religion is belief on insufficient evidence.

  Sam Harris

  Atheist, Atheism, Belief

• The idea, therefore, that religious faith is somehow a sacred human convention—distinguished, as it is, both by the extravagance of its claims and by the paucity of its evidence—is really too great a monstrosity to be appreciated in all its glory. Religious faith represents so uncompromising a misuse of the power of our minds that it forms a kind of perverse, cultural singularity—a vanishing point beyond which rational discourse proves impossible.

  Sam Harris

  Religious, Ideas, Mind

  Sam Harris (2005). “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason”, p.25, W. W. Norton & Company

• We rely on faith only in the context of claims for which there is no sufficient sensory or logical evidence.

  Sam Harris

  Atheist, Atheism, Logical

• Water is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen. What if someone says, “Well, that’s not how I choose to think about water.”? All we can do is appeal to scientific values. And if he doesn’t share those values, the conversation is over. If someone doesn’t value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide to prove they should value it? If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument could you provide to show the importance of logic?

  Sam Harris

  Thinking, Oxygen, Logical Arguments

• The only thing that permits human beings to collaborate with one another in a truly open-ended way is their willingness to have their beliefs modified by new facts. Only openness to evidence and argument will secure a common world for us.

  Sam Harris

  World, Way, Facts

  Sam Harris (2005). “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason”, p.48, W. W. Norton & Company

• The problem of human suffering is never too much rational thinking, or too high a demand for evidence. But the solutions are. ... Reason is nothing less than the guardian of love.

  Sam Harris

  Thinking, Suffering, Demand

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