Science, in the broadest sense, includes all reasonable claims to knowledge about ourselves and the world.
Interpretation
Science encompasses all logical and evidence-based knowledge about humanity and the universe.
In this quote, Sam Harris suggests that science is not limited to traditional scientific disciplines, but rather includes any credible assertion that can be justified by evidence and reason. It emphasizes the importance of a scientific approach to understanding both our internal human experiences and the external world around us, thereby creating a holistic view of knowledge.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of education, one could say, 'As Sam Harris stated, science encompasses all reasonable claims to knowledge about ourselves and the world.'
Everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness. We form friendships so that we can feel certain emotions, like love, and avoid others, like loneliness. We eat specific foods to enjoy their fleeting presence on our tongues. We read for the pleasure of thinking another person's thoughts.
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.
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.
It is time that we admitted that faith is nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail.
It is taboo in our society to criticize a persons religious faith... these taboos are offensive, deeply unreasonable, but worse than that, they are getting people killed. This is really my concern. My concern is that our religions, the diversity of our religious doctrines, is going to get us killed. I'm worried that our religious discourse- our religious beliefs are ultimately incompatible with civilization.
It is time that scientists and other public intellectuals observed that the contest between faith and reason is zero-sum.
It was because of Henderson that I stayed... It was he and he alone who kept me in Toronto and in Canada. Were it not for Henderson, I believe insulin would have been a product of the United States.
The internal machinery of life, the chemistry of the parts, is something beautiful. And it turns out that all life is interconnected with all other life.
There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
'Conservation' (the conservation law) means this ... that there is a number, which you can calculate, at one moment-and as nature undergoes its multitude of changes, this number doesn't change. That is, if you calculate again, this quantity, it'll be the same as it was before. An example is the conservation of energy: there's a quantity that you can calculate according to a certain rule, and it comes out the same answer after, no matter what happens, happens.
As agonizing a disease as cancer is, I do not think it can be said that our civilization is threatened by it. ... But a very plausible case can be made that our civilization is fundamentally threatened by the lack of adequate fertility control. Exponential increases of population will dominate any arithmetic increases, even those brought about by heroic technological initiatives, in the availability of food and resources, as Malthus long ago realized.
As followers of natural science we know nothing of any relation between thoughts and the brain, except as a gross correlation in time and space.
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