La mayor parte de las formas de degradación personal y maldad pública se desencadenan y sustentan con la mentira. Los actos de adulterio y demás desl… - Sam Harris

We are not self-caused little gods.

This is not (as you have charged) to paint religion with a broad brush. I am very quick to distinguish gradations of bad ideas; some clearly have no consequences at all (or at least not yet); some put civilization itself in peril. The problem with dogmatism, however, is that one can never quite predict how terrible its costs will be. To use one of my favorite examples, consider the Christian dogma that human life begins at the moment of conception: On its face, this belief seems likely to only improve our world. After all, it is the very quintessence of a life-affirming doctrine.

Enter embryonic stem-cell research. Suddenly, this “life begins at the moment of conception” business becomes the chief impediment to medical progress. Who would have thought that such an innocuous idea could unnecessarily prolong the agony of tens of millions of people? This is the problem with dogmatism, no matter how seemingly benign: it is unresponsive to reality. Dogmatism is a failure of cognition (as well as a commitment to such failure); it is the state of being closed to new evidence and new arguments. And this frame of mind is rightly despised in every area of culture, on every subject, except where it goes by the name of “religious faith.” In this guise, parading its most grotesque faults as virtues, it is granted a special dispensation, even in the pages of Nature.

I talk a lot about this in the book. Why is it that our universe gets gradually more complex? Once you get into biology, the fundamental reason is that if you’re living in a complex environment, then the smarter you are the more successful you’ll be, because you can exploit regularities in the environment to your advantage. Eventually all the other organisms are motivated, in turn, to get smarter. As organisms get smarter and smarter, they keep creating an ever more complex environment for one another, and they all get smarter.