It is time that scientists and other public intellectuals observed that the contest between faith and reason is zero-sum.
Interpretation
The conflict between faith and reason leads to a situation where one cannot coexist with the other as both are vying for dominance.
Sam Harris suggests that there is an inherent conflict between faith and reason, indicating that the reliance on faith undermines the pursuit of rational understanding. This contention asserts that whenever one side gains influence or acceptance, the other diminishes, creating a zero-sum scenario where faith and reason cannot thrive together.
In practice
In a debate about the role of science in society, one might cite this quote to emphasize the importance of reason over blind faith.
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 also true that the less competent a person is in a given domain, the more he will tend to overestimate his abilities. This often produces an ugly marriage of confidence and ignorance that is very difficult to correct for.
In the women's world, as well as in the men's world, there exists the class law and the class struggle, and it appears as fully established that sometimes between the socialist working women and those belonging to the middle class, there may be antagonisms.
It is true that classical libertarian thought is opposed to state intervention in social life, as a consequence of deeper assumptions about the human need for liberty, diversity, and free association.
I don't write about good and evil with this enormous dichotomy. I write about people. I write about people doing the kinds of things that people do.
I was a wife and mother, blameless in moral life, with a deep sense of duty and a proud self-respect; it was while I was this that doubt struck me, and while I was in the guarded circle of the home, with no dream of outside work or outside liberty, that I lost all faith in Christianity.
The people's instincts are still right. You see them come to the rescue of someone-a child who falls down a well-hundreds of people rush to help, and labor and equipment are volunteered without any thought of who's going to pay for it. This is a basic feeling in Americans. They don't stand back in such a circumstance and ask what the government's going to do about it.
Aging does not need to be hidden or denied, but can be understood, affirmed and experienced as a process of growth by which the mystery of life is slowly revealed to us.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.