We cannot all become experts in everything. I’m a biologist and I’m manifestly not an expert in Physics. So is it just faith when I accept the Big Bang, Quantum Theory – not really … it’s not blind faith, it’s reasoned faith. Richard Dawkins, with Matt Dillahunty, Vancouver 6th November 2016
9Trust is not the same as faith. A friend is someone you trust. Putting faith in anyone is a mistake. Christopher Hitchens
A surrender of reason in favour of faith is a fantastic false multiplier, a tremendous intensifier of all things that are divisive rather than inclusive, and that’s why its history is so stained with blood. Christopher Hitchens v Tony Blair: Is Religion a Force for Good in the World? debate 2010
A world without religious faith would be spiritually, morally and emotionally diminished. ibid.
Fed up of being told, Well faith should be respected. Why should it be? Christopher Hitchens, interview Divine Impulses
Our worst enemy in the world – the one that seeks to destroy us – is very obviously a faith-based one. Christopher Hitchens, interview Hardball 8th April 2009
Faith is the surrender of the mind; it's the surrender of reason, it’s the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other mammals. It’s our need to believe, and to surrender our scepticism and our reason; our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. Of all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated. Christopher Hitchens, interview Penn & Teller Bullshit! Showtime 2005
About once or twice every month I engage in public debates with those whose pressing need it is to woo and to win the approval of supernatural beings. Very often, when I give my view that there is no supernatural dimension, and certainly not one that is only or especially available to the faithful, and that the natural world is wonderful enough – and even miraculous enough if you insist – I attract pitying looks and anxious questions. How, in that case, I am asked, do I find meaning and purpose in life? How does a mere and gross materialist, with no expectation of a life to come, decide what, if anything, is worth caring about?
Depending on my mood, I sometimes but not always refrain from pointing out what a breathtakingly insulting and patronizing question this is. (It is on a par with the equally subtle inquiry: Since you don’t believe in our god, what stops you from stealing and lying and raping and killing to your heart’s content?) Just as the answer to the latter question is: self-respect and the desire for the respect of others – while in the meantime it is precisely those who think they have divine permission who are truly capable of any atrocity – so the answer to the first question falls into two parts. A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called ‘meaningless’ except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so. It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live one’s everyday life as if this were so. Whereas if one sought to define meaninglessness and futility, the idea that a human life should be expended in the guilty, fearful, self-obsessed propitiation of supernatural nonentities … but there, there. Enough. Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir
And here is the point, about myself and my co-thinkers. Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake. Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great p5
The offer of certainty, the offer of complete security, the offer of an impermeable faith that can’t give way, is an offer of something not worth having. I want to live my life taking the risk all the time that I don’t know anything like enough yet; that I haven’t understood enough; that I can’t know enough; that I’m always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom. I wouldn’t have it any other way. Christopher Hitchens
To ‘choose’ dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid. Christopher Hitchens
There’s always an infinite replenishment of the infinitely renewable resource of faith. Christopher Hitchens vs John Lennox, ‘Is God Great?’ debate Samford Socratic Club, Youtube 1.53.25 2017
Why would a rational God give a rat’s arse about whether we believe in Her? Why would God set Faith as the deciding factor in winning Her favour? esias, essay ‘The Trouble with God’
The danger of religious faith is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy. Sam Harris, The End of Faith
This is not to say that the deepest concerns of the faithful, whether moderate or extreme, are trivial or misguided. There is no denying that most of us have emotional and spiritual needs that are now addressed – however obliquely and at a terrible price – by mainstream religion. And these are needs that a mere understanding of our world, scientific or otherwise, will never fulfil. There is clearly a sacred dimension to our existence, and coming to terms with it could well be the highest purpose of human life. But we will find that it requires no faith in untestable propositions – Jesus was born of a virgin; the Koran is the word of God – for us to do this. ibid.
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. ibid.
The men who committed the atrocities of September 11 were certainly not ‘cowards’, as they were repeatedly described in the Western media, nor were they lunatics in any ordinary sense. They were men of faith – perfect faith, as it turns out – and this, it must finally be acknowledged, is a terrible thing to be. ibid.
Where we have reasons for what we believe, we have no need of faith; where we have no reasons, we have lost both our connection to the world and to one another. ibid.
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. ibid.
The only angels we need invoke are those of our better nature: reason, honesty, and love. The only demons we must fear are those that lurk inside every human mind: ignorance, hatred, greed, and faith, which is surely the devil’s masterpiece. ibid.
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. Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation
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. ibid.
It is time we admitted, from kings and presidents on down, that there is no evidence that any of our books was authored by the Creator of the universe. The Bible, it seems certain, was the work of sand-strewn men and women who thought the earth was flat and for whom a wheelbarrow would have been a breathtaking example of emerging technology. To rely on such a document as the basis for our worldview – however heroic the efforts of redactors – is to repudiate two thousand years of civilizing insights that the human mind has only just begun to inscribe upon itself through secular politics and scientific culture. We will see that the greatest problem confronting civilization is not merely religious extremism: rather, it is the larger set of cultural and intellectual accommodations we have made to faith itself. Sam Harris
Dear Person of Faith: Basically, I write as fundraiser for the wonderful new Tony Blair Foundation whose aim is to promote respect and understanding about the world’s major religions, and show how faith is a powerful force for good in the modern world. Tony Blair Faith Foundation, cited Professor Richard Dawkins
We have established Face to Faith, an inter-faith schools programme to counter intolerance and extremism. ibid.
My faith has always been an important part of my politics. Tony Blair
Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking. It’s nothing to brag about. Bill Maher, Religulous
That’s been their trick for hundreds of years: they say the word faith and somehow we all have to back off and pretend that what they believe is not destructive. Bill Maher, interview ‘Sex, Drugs & Religion’, 2010
694. These people suffer from one of the strangest of all brain disorders. It makes them think they have been touched by God. But their unusual condition is giving scientists an unusual insight into faith and the human mind ... Could it be that the physical make-up of our brain programs us to believe in God? Horizon: God on the Brain, BBC 2003
Scientists now believe what happens inside the mind of temporal lobe epileptic patients may just be an extreme case of what goes on inside all our brains. For everyone it now appears that temporal lobes are key in experiencing religious and spiritual belief. This explosive research studying how religious faith affects the brain is the inspiration for a completely new field of science: neuro-theology. ibid.
Could it be we somehow evolved religious belief as a survival mechanism? But if religious faith is somehow a by-product of evolution, does that mean belief in a God can be dismissed as a quirk of Nature? ibid.
It’s been suspected for a long time that the effectiveness of medical treatment depends partly on the patient’s faith in it. This power of belief – the Placebo Effect – offers hope that the mind can heal the body or at least reduce pain. The Mind Machine: Pain and Healing, 1988
Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable. H L Mencken
Faith is much better than belief. Belief is when someone else does the thinking. R Buckminster Fuller