Twenty False Statements by Sam Harris in Letter to a Christian Nation

Twenty Factual Errors in Letter to a Christian Nation

FALSE STATEMENT #1 According to a recent Gallup poll, only 12 per cent of Americans believe that life on earth has evolved through a natural process, without the interference of a deity. Thirty one percent believe that evolution has been “guided by God.The same Gallup poll revealed that 53 per cent of Americans are actually creationists." ( Page x )

FALSE STATEMENT #2 This means that despite a full century of scientific insights attesting to the antiquity of life and the greater antiquity of the earth, more than half our neighbors believe that the entire cosmos was created 6,000 years ago. (Pages x, xi)

FALSE STATEMENT # 3 If our worldview were put to a vote, notions of “intelligent design” would defeat the science of biology by nearly three to one. (Page x)

FALSE STATEMENT # 4 Those [ 53 % of Americans who are actually creationists ] with the power to elect our presidents and congressmen – and many who themselves get elected – believe that dinosaurs lived two by two upon Noah’s ark, that light from distant galaxies was created en route to the earth, and that the first members of our species were fashioned out of dirt and divine breath in a garden with a talking snake, by the hand of an invisible God. (Page xi)

FALSE STATEMENT # 5 Forty four percent of the American population is convinced that Jesus will return to judge the living and the dead sometime in the next fifty years. (Page Xi)

FALSE STATEMENT # 6 Questions of morality are questions of happiness and suffering (Page 6)

FALSE STATEMENT # 7 While the abolitionists of the eighteenth century were morally right, they were on the losing side of a theological argument (Page 17)

FALSE STATEMENT # 8 Nothing in Christian theology remedies the appalling deficiencies of the Bible on what is perhaps the greatest—and the easiest—moral question our society has ever had to face .[slavery] (Page 18)

FALSE STATEMENT # 9 Christian conservatives in our government have resisted a vaccination program on the grounds that HPV is a valuable impediment to pre-marital sex. (Pages 26-27)

FALSE STATEMENT # 10 These pious men and women want to preserve cervical cancer as an incentive toward abstinence, even if it sacrifices the lives of thousands of women each year (Pages 26-27)

FALSE STATEMENT #11 The rate of gonorrhea among American teens is seventy times higher than it is among their peers in the Netherlands and France. (Page 27)

FALSE STATEMENT #12 The fact that 30 percent of our sex-education programs teach abstinence only (at a cost of more than $200 million a year) surely has something to do with this. (Page 28)

FALSE STATEMENT #13 Reginald Finger, an Evangelical member of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, recently announced that he would consider opposing an HIV vaccine—thereby condemning millions of men and women to die unnecessarily from AIDS each year – because such a vaccine would encourage premarital sex by making it less risky. (Page 28)

FALSE STATEMENT # 14 Do the members of the National Academy of Sciences , 93 per cent of whom reject the idea of God, lie, cheat, and steal with abandon ? (Page 39)

FALSE STATEMENT # 15 Conversely, the 50 nations now ranked lowest in terms of the United Nation’s human development index are unwaveringly religious. (Page 44)

FALSE STATEMENT #16 The success of science often comes at the expense of religious dogma; the maintenance of religious dogma always comes at the expense of science (Page 63)

FALSE STATEMENT # 17 Since a belief in a biblical God finds no support in our growing scientific understanding of the world, Intelligent Design theorists invariably stake their claim on the areas of scientific ignorance. (Page 72)

FALSE STATEMENT #18 Like countless theists before them, fanciers of Intelligent Design regularly argue that the very fact that the Universe exists proves the existence of God. The argument runs more or less like this: everything that exists has a cause;space and time exist; space and time must, therefore, have been caused by something that stands outside of space and time; and the only thing that transcends space and time, and yet retains the power to create, is God. (Page 72)

FALSE STATEMENT # 19 Anyone who spoke with confidence about eradicating slavery in the United States in the year 1775 surely appeared to be wasting his time, and wasting it dangerously. (Page 87)

FALSE STATEMENT # 20 Consult the Bible, and you will discover that the creator of the universe clearly expects us to keep slaves. (page 14)

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