Religions Are Failed Sciences

In a Big Think interview, Sam Harris articulates the origins of religion, and how it was used to explain the initially inexplicable. Money quote:

I view religions as essentially failed sciences. I mean religion was the discourse that we had when all causes in the universe were opaque. We didn’t know . . . We didn’t know the basis of anything. We didn’t know why we were here. We didn’t know how diseases spread, or what disease was. We didn’t know how people . . . why people died early, and why others flourished. We don’t know what’s causing thunderstorms, or what’s causing crops to fail. And we very naturally . . . As a cognitive and behavioral imperative, we formed descriptions of the world, and we tried to figure out what’s going on.