Sam Harris charges theists with arrogance since, according to him:
“One of the monumental ironies of religious discourse can be found in the frequency with which people of faith praise themselves for their humility, while claiming to know facts about cosmology, chemistry and biology that no scientist knows.”1
Incidentally, we may note that we have responded to Sam Harris’ denial of the alleged myth that “Atheists are arrogant” in part six of my essay: Sam Harris-Myth Buster or Myth Maker?.
Firstly, Sam Harris should not think that no one can know something just because he does not know it-we have termed this: “the fallacy of presumed ubiquitous ignorance” or “the fallacy of presumed omni-ignorance.”
Secondly, let us offer some examples that will call into question whether Judeo-Christian believers are arrogant in the way that Sam Harris claims:
For millennia Jews and Christians claimed that the universe had a beginning. This was viewed, by some, as superstitious ignorance by the scientifically enlightened, to the point that some of them concocted, for example, the Steady State Theory. Then scientists “discovered” that the universe had a beginning.
Therefore, did Judeo-Christianity “claim” to know something that it did not know? Weren’t they right? Was it arrogant to do so? The most brilliant of modern scientists have discovered that the universe had a beginning, that it consists of time, space and matter, that it expands, that the Earth hangs of nothing, that it is spherical and that it possesses a hydrologic cycle and condensation, that the Pleiadian star system is bound together by mutual gravitational attraction, that that the Orion system has a “belt” (to name a few modern discoveries). Yet, can we really refer to something as a “discovery” if it has been known for millennia upon millennia?