THE END OF FAITH: RELIGION, TERROR, AND THE FUTURE OF REASON. Sam Harris. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004. Pp. 348, $13-95. Reviewed by Geoffrey W. Sutton (Evangel University/Springfield, MO). The 9/11 Islamic terrorists emblazoned the psychological truism of the path from belief to behavior on the minds of millions. The world saw the lethiferous power of religious belief. We witnessed the purpose driven death. Sam Harris pummels readers with invidious images of destruction associated with religious belief. We may well dispute many of his conclusions, but the ineluctable truth is that belief matters. At times acerbic, Harris has prepared a puissant polemic focused primarily upon the terror of Islam with ample scathing visited upon Christianity and Judaism. His thesis is that the beliefs of religious people have become unhinged from reason to the point that meaningful conversations cannot take place. He asserts that reason is in exile (chapter one) and that survival requires a return from unproven beliefs to evidence-based reason when making decisions that affect human life. In chapters two and three, Harris examines the notion of belief and the manner in which numerous contradictory beliefs are accumulated from early authority figures. He notes important findings that people are conservative - they do not easily give up beliefs. As beliefs develop into a worldview, a subset deals with matters of religious faith. By way of example, Harris shows the importance of re-examining beliefs that can have powerful consequences on health and wellbeing. Harris provides two historical examples of the inquisition and the holocaust to demonstrate the incredible power of malevolent belief systems to wreak havoc in the lives of hapless victims. Harris wages war on Islam in chapter four. His major point is that there is a reason we are facing Islamic terrorists rather than people of another faith - the principle of jihad. He acknowledges that apologists for Islam interpret the jihad as a personal struggle, but warns of those warriors who believe in a holy war against all non-Muslims, who are by definition infidels or apostate. To further his point, he quotes several hadithic lines that encourage war on earth and promise eternal rewards for martyrs. He follows this litany with a list of massacres and pogroms against Jews and quotations from Pew Research that support an alarmingly high percentage of people in various countries that affirm the justification of suicide bombing in the name of Islam (e.g., Lebanon 73%, Ivory Coast 56%). In West of Eden (chapter 5), the author challenges the extant American theocracy, which is primarily an attack on the two-term presidency of George W. Bush and the values of Christian fundamentalists that he believes were foisted on the general public. This analysis appears a bit dated given the 2008 presidential election. However, there are clearly laws and political positions related to such issues as abortion, stem cell research, certain substances (e. …

The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason

Humans acquire much of their knowledge from the testimony of other people. An understanding of the way that information can be conveyed via gesture and vocalization is present in infancy. Thus, infants seek information from well-informed interlocutors, supply information to the ignorant, and make sense of communicative acts that they observe from a third-party perspective. This basic understanding is refined in the course of development. As they age, children's reasoning about testimony increasingly reflects an ability not just to detect imperfect or inaccurate claims but also to assess what inferences may or may not be drawn about informants given their particular situation. Children also attend to the broader characteristics of particular informants-their group membership, personality characteristics, and agreement or disagreement with other potential informants. When presented with unexpected or counterintuitive testimony, children are prone to set aside their own prior convictions, but they may sometimes defer to informants for inherently social reasons.

Cognitive Foundations of Learning from Testimony

Science vs. Religion: What Scientists Really Think:

The Belief in God and Immortality. A Psychological, Anthropological and Statistical Study.

Previous research has shown that children and adults express more confidence in the existence of unobservable scientific (e.g., germs), as compared to religious, phenomena (e.g., the soul). We aske...

Beliefs About Religious and Scientific Entities Among Parents and Children in Iran

Children display an "essentialist" bias in their everyday thinking about social categories. However, the degree and form of this bias varies with age and with the nature of the categories, as well as across cultures. This project investigated the development of the essentialist bias across five social categories (i.e., gender, nationality, religious affiliation, socioeconomic status (rich/poor), and sports-team supporter) in two countries. Children between 5 and 10 years of age in Turkey (Study 1, N = 74) and the United States (Study 2, N = 73), as well as adults in both countries (Study 3, N = 223), participated. Results indicate surprising cross-cultural parallels with respect to both the rank ordering of essentialist thinking across these five categories and increasing differentiation among them over development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Essentialization of Social Categories Across Development in Two Cultures.

Children in the United States come to distinguish historical from fictional story figures between the ages of 3 and 5 years, guided by the plausibility of the story events surrounding the figure (Corriveau, Kim, Schwalen, & Harris, 2009; Woolley & Cox, 2007). However, U.S. children vary in their reactions to stories that include fantastical events. Secular children with no religious education think of such stories and their protagonists as fictional, whereas children who have had a religious education are more prone to think of them as historically true. In the current studies, we asked if a sample of children in Iran who are regularly exposed to religious narratives in their daily lives resemble religious children in the United States. As expected, Iranian 5- and 6-year-olds systematically categorized figures in realistic stories as real, but they were also prone to think of figures in fantastical stories as real. We suggest that children's willingness to conceive of figures in fantastical stories as real is explained by their exposure to religious narratives alleging that miracles have actually happened.

Distinguishing between realistic and fantastical figures in Iran.

When learning about the existence of unobservable scientific phenomena such as germs or religious phenomena such as God, children are receptive to the testimony of other people. Research in Western cultures has shown that by 5 to 6 years of age, children-like adults-are confident about the existence of both scientific and religious phenomena. We examined the beliefs of secular and Christian children growing up in China as well as the beliefs of their parents. All participants-secular and Christian children, as well as their parents-were confident about the existence of the scientific phenomena. No such consensus emerged for religious phenomena. Whereas secular children and their parents were skeptical, Christian children and their parents were confident about the existence of the religious phenomena. Moreover, a similar pattern was found for Christian children in preschools and for Christian children with more extensive exposure to the secular state curriculum. Indeed, for religious phenomena, a positive association was found between the beliefs of Christian children and their parents, highlighting the potential influence of parental input in a predominantly secular society. Overall, the results indicate that children's religious beliefs are related to the beliefs of their parents, even when those beliefs go against the majority view. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Religious testimony in a secular society: Belief in unobservable entities among Chinese parents and their children.

We asked whether high levels of religiosity are inconsistent with a high valuation of science. We explored this possibility in three countries that diverge markedly in the relation between the state and religion. Parents in the United States (n = 126), China (n = 234) and Iran (n = 77) completed a survey about their personal and parental stance towards science. The relation between religiosity and the valuation of science varied sharply by country. In the U.S. sample, greater religiosity was associated with a lower valuation of science. A similar but weaker negative relation was found in the Chinese sample. Parents in the Iranian sample, by contrast, valued science highly, despite high levels of religiosity. Given the small size of our United States and Iranian samples, and the non-probabilistic nature of our samples in general, we caution readers not to generalise our findings beyond the current samples. Despite this caveat, these findings qualify the assumption that religiosity is inconsistent with the valuation of science and highlight the role of sociocultural context in shaping adults' perception of the relation between religion and science.

Telli Davoodi

Papers

Beliefs About Religious and Scientific Entities Among Parents and Children in Iran

Essentialization of Social Categories Across Development in Two Cultures.

Distinguishing between realistic and fantastical figures in Iran.

Religious testimony in a secular society: Belief in unobservable entities among Chinese parents and their children.

Are high levels of religiosity inconsistent with a high valuation of science? Evidence from the United States, China and Iran