Read Online The End of Faith by Sam Harris - Free Book Online

refinements in vision, of the sort found everywhere
     in the animal kingdom, would never have come about at all.
    For this reason, it seems uncontroversial to say that all higher- order cognitive states
     (of which beliefs are an example) are in some way an outgrowth of our capacity for action.
     In adaptive terms, belief has been extraordinarily useful. It is, after all, by believing various propositions about the world that we predict events and con- sider the likely
     consequences of our actions. Beliefs are principles of action: whatever they may be at the level of the brain, they are pro- cesses by which our
     understanding (and misunderstanding) of the world is represented and made available to
     guide our behavior.4
    THE power that belief has over our emotional lives appears to be total. For every emotion
     that you are capable of feeling, there is surely a belief that could invoke it in a matter
     of moments. Consider the following proposition:
    Your daughter is being slowly tortured in an English jail.
    What is it that stands between you and the absolute panic that such a proposition would
     loose in the mind and body of a person who believed it? Perhaps you do not have a
     daughter, or you know her to be safely at home, or you believe that English jailors are
     renowned for their congeniality. Whatever the reason, the door to belief has not yet swung
     upon its hinges.
    The link between belief and behavior raises the stakes con- siderably. Some propositions
     are so dangerous that it may even be
    ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an extraor- dinary claim, but it
     merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live. Certain beliefs place
     their adherents beyond the reach of every peaceful means of persuasion, while inspiring
     them to commit acts of extraordinary violence against others. There is, in fact, no
     talking to some people. If they cannot be captured, and they often cannot, otherwise
     tolerant people may be justified in killing them in self-defense. This is what the United
     States attempted in Afghanistan, and it is what we and other Western pow- ers are bound to
     attempt, at an even greater cost to ourselves and to innocents abroad, elsewhere in the
     Muslim world. We will continue to spill blood in what is, at bottom, a war of ideas.5
    The Necessity for Logical Coherence
    The first thing to notice about beliefs is that they must suffer the company of their
     neighbors. Beliefs are both logically and semanti- cally related. Each constrains, and is
     in turn constrained by, many oth- ers. A belief like the Boeing 747 is the world's best airplane logically entails many other beliefs that are both more basic (e.g., airplanes exist) and more derivative (e.g., 747s are better than 757s). The belief that some men are husbands demands that the proposition some women are wives also be endorsed, because the very terms “husband” and “wife” mutually define one another.6 In fact, logical and semantic constraints appear to be two sides of the same coin, because
     our need to understand what words mean in each new context requires that our beliefs be
     free from contradiction (at least locally). If I am to mean the same thing by the word
     “mother” from one instance to the next, I cannot both believe my mother was born in Rome and believe my mother was born in Nevada. Even if my mother were born on an air- plane flying at supersonic speeds, these
     propositions cannot both be true. There are tricks to be played hereperhaps there is a
     town called “Rome” somewhere in the state of Nevada; or perhaps “mother”
    means “biological mother” in one sentence and “adoptive mother” in anotherbut these
     exceptions only prove the rule. To know what a given belief is about, I must know what my words mean; to know what my words mean, my beliefs must be generally
     consistent.7 There is just no escaping the fact that there is a tight