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title: "Sam Harris on The argument from religious experience"
description: "Harris takes religious experiences seriously as real psychological phenomena but argues they provide no evidence for God — they are better explained by neuroscience and contemplative practice."
canonical: https://opendoubt.com/people/sam-harris/on/argument-from-religious-experience
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# Sam Harris on The argument from religious experience

> Harris takes religious experiences seriously as real psychological phenomena but argues they provide no evidence for God — they are better explained by neuroscience and contemplative practice.

Position

# Sam Harris on _The argument from religious experience_

Nuanced positionNeuroscientist, philosopher, and author

Harris takes religious experiences seriously as real psychological phenomena but argues they provide no evidence for God — they are better explained by neuroscience and contemplative practice.

Sam Harris occupies a unique position on religious experience among the New Atheists. As a neuroscientist with extensive personal experience in meditation — including years of silent retreat in the traditions of Advaita Vedanta and Theravada Buddhism — he takes the phenomenology of mystical experience far more seriously than Dawkins or Hitchens. In Waking Up, he argues that the experiences mystics describe are real, replicable, and important. What he denies is the theological interpretation placed on them.

Harris argues that meditative and mystical experiences reveal genuine features of consciousness — particularly the illusory nature of the self — but that these features are properties of the brain, not evidence of God. A Christian mystic and a Buddhist monk may have structurally identical experiences, but one interprets it as union with Christ and the other as the dissolution of self. The experience is real; the interpretation is culturally supplied.

He is critical of both sides: atheists who dismiss religious experience as meaningless, and believers who treat it as evidence for their specific theology. Harris contends that the contemplative traditions have discovered something genuinely important about the nature of consciousness — that subjective experience can be investigated from the first person — but that this investigation requires no supernatural framework. Neuroscience and contemplative practice together can explain what religion can only mystify.

Key quotes

> “There is more to understanding the human condition than science and secular culture generally admit. But this does not mean we need to believe anything on insufficient evidence.”

Continue exploring

[

Sam Harris

Full profile — positions, quotes, and key moments.

](/people/sam-harris)[

The argument from religious experience

The full argument — stated fairly, then answered.

](/arguments/argument-from-religious-experience)

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