The Incredulity of Yuval Noah Harari: Evaluating the World’s Foremost Big Story Historian

This article was published exclusively online in the Christian Research Journal, Volume 48, number 04 (2025).

When you support the Journal, you join the team and help provide the resources at equip.org that minister to people worldwide. These resources include our ever-growing database of more than 2,500 articles and Bible Answers, as well as our free Postmodern Realities podcast.

Another way you can support our online articles is by leaving us a tip. A tip is just a small amount, like $3, $5, or $10, which is the cost of a latte, lunch out, or coffee drink. To leave a tip, click here.

Yuval Noah Harari is a phenom. His monster hit Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Harper, 2015) sold more than 25 million copies worldwide and launched Harari from history professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem to public intellectual with a global impact. He commands massive speaking fees for relatively short talks on everything from human origins to AI to the ultimate destiny of humanity, all the while garnering praise from such luminaries as Barack Obama and Bill Gates.¹ His fourth book, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI (Random House, 2024), builds on his previous three releases. Harari offers massive visions, and the reading world loves him for it.

Sapiens weaves a story of humanity beginning with multiple species of humans living anonymously among the dominant lifeforms of their day. Harari identifies key changes, the first of which is the Cognitive Revolution, the moment we ceased to be one of many humans (Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis, Homo floresiensis, etc.) and truly became Homo sapiens (wise humans). We developed language and myths and the birth of religion, which Harari sees as one of the most powerful organizing principles for society. Next comes the Agricultural Revolution (which Harari characterizes as the domestication of man by wheat),² the Unification of Humanity, and, finally, the Scientific Revolution, which sets humankind on a course toward peace, prosperity, and possibly our destruction through mismanagement of our habitats and the abandonment of our humanity by merging with technology. It is the wildly popular tale of an insignificant ape taking a rocket ride to being the dominant species on the planet, only to be doomed to an embarrassingly brief reign on the incomprehensible time scale of history.

Nexus shifts focus to the evolution of information networks making the argument “humankind gains enormous power by building large networks of cooperation, but the way these networks are built predisposes us to use that power unwisely.”³ The increasing sophistication of information systems, from organic (people) to non-organic (machines) leads to an evaluation of the dangers represented in AI algorithms, which prioritize encouraging engagement in the social media economy over real contribution to the stability of society. Another massive vision of our ancestors developing primitive systems, then fast-tracking through information strategies toward an existential threat of our own design.

G. K. Chesterton once wrote there cannot be such a thing as one who specializes in the universe.⁴ Harari’s career is built on trying to do just that. He reportedly felt uncomfortable with how academic life drove him toward greater specialization in his field, medieval war history, and desired to be a big picture thinker.⁵ Unfortunately, individuals possess neither the time nor capacity to become experts on all human history and simultaneously an informed futurist. As Harari admitted in a lecture with anthropologist Jared Diamond, “The real big problem in answering big questions is that usually you cannot use the accepted methodology of scientific research, because you cannot really know what you’re talking about much of the time.”⁶

His goal is the big picture, and discrepancies in details are to be expected. However, there is a difference between a few innocent misstatements and leaving massive gaps in analysis while making critical errors. His most vocal critics arise from the academic community claiming Harari builds on the work of others without proper attribution, while ignoring established scholarship to serve his larger narrative. One critic noticed the entire first chapter of Sapiens has a single endnote citation.⁷

Anthropologist C. R. Hallpike offers a withering criticism of Harari and Sapiens.⁸ As an example, Harari claims, because we are genetically similar to Neanderthals and modern chimpanzees, the closer we look at ape society the fewer differences we will find between us and them.⁹ Hallpike pushes back, writing that the research proves the opposite is true — superficial similarities obscure how radically different humans and apes are.¹⁰ The most recent research indicates that basic cognitive and communication capacities of young human children and immature chimpanzees differ substantially. Hallpike offers this blunt assessment: “It would be fair to say that whenever his facts are broadly correct they are not new, and whenever he tries to strike out on his own he often gets things wrong, sometimes seriously.”¹¹

HARARI’S VIEW OF RELIGION

In each book, Harari integrates discussion of religions as useful fictions binding early societies and creating deeper connections, making larger societies beyond hunter-gatherer family groups possible. Harari believes all religions are myths. Myths and fictions are a major theme in his writings, and, in addition to religions, he considers morals, money, nations, and corporations myths as well. He defines religion as “a system of human norms and values that is founded on a belief in a superhuman order.”¹² A religion must meet two criteria: it is “an entire system of norms and values, rather than an isolated custom or belief,” and it “must claim to be based on superhuman laws rather than on human decisions.”¹³ Myths were initially local and exclusive to small communities, so the emergence of “universal and missionary” religions represents an advancement leading to the power of religion to unite people across nations and cultures.¹⁴

Religious beliefs are inter-subjective information existing “within the communication network linking the subjective consciousness of many individuals.”¹⁵ The beliefs of one individual or a few individuals do not impact inter-subjective information; if a critical mass of the members of society believe the myth, the information survives intact. If the larger society changes its mind, the idea mutates or dies. Animism, polytheism, dualism, and monotheism are all fantasies that served their purpose as inter-subjective information to bind communities.

Harari’s peculiar habit of making broad and unsupported claims extends to his discussions of religion as well. For example, early in Sapiens he declares without attribution: “Most scholars agree that animistic beliefs were common among ancient foragers. Animism (from ‘anima,’ ‘soul’ or ‘spirit in Latin) is the belief that almost every place, every animal, every plant and every natural phenomenon has awareness and feelings, and can communicate directly with humans.”¹⁶ But after two pages discussing the nature of animist cultures, he undermines the whole enterprise: “Any attempt to describe the specifics of archaic spirituality is highly speculative….it is better to be frank and admit we have only the haziest notions about the religions of ancient foragers.”¹⁷

MONOTHEISM

Harari sees religious beliefs as self-evidently false, regardless of how persistent they may be and whether those beliefs benefit society or not. Religious ideas evolved as their social function evolved. Humanity moved from animism to polytheism to monotheism, in an evolution as natural and determined as the increasing complexity of biological life through natural selection over time. The rise of monotheism out of a polytheistic world, the establishment of Judaism, and the birth of Christianity — three events of monumental importance to world history — are covered in a sparse four paragraphs of Sapiens¹⁸(compared to five pages he devotes to the founding of Buddhism,¹⁹which is of greater personal interest to Harari).

His website refers to Harari as a philosopher, which raises the question how he can dismiss monotheism as a myth without interacting with the most fundamental philosophical claims of theistic philosophers. Theism provides better answers to questions about why there is something rather than nothing, the explanation of objective moral facts and duties, creation ex nihilo (the universe coming into existence from nothing), the fine-tuning in the initial conditions of the universe which makes the universe life-permitting, the emergence of life from non-life, the emergence of minded beings, and so forth. Theistic philosophers argue that non-theistic explanations lack the power to sufficiently explain the experience of human existence. Monotheism is not the evolutionary byproduct of animism and polytheism — it is the explicit correction of those views.

In Homo Deus, he makes a weird effort to shoehorn animist themes into the Genesis creation account as something akin to a vestigial organ from an earlier transitional belief.²⁰ In reality, however, the biblical creation account differs altogether from traditional creation myths, which offer tales of worlds in chaos tortured into order through warring gods. The Genesis story is an act of ordered creation by a transcendent personal Creator who is separate from His material creation. Monotheism transforms the world, a revelation demystifying natural events as divine in nature, rebutting the idea of spiritual rocks and trees, tossing out the pantheon of gods, and placing an all-powerful being at the center of our understanding of life.

CHRISTIANITY

Harari characterizes the beginning of Christianity as a group of people continuing to worship a revolutionary rabbi who they could not accept was dead, arguing resurrection accounts are a coping mechanism of Jesus’s followers after he failed to fulfill his promise of a kingdom on earth before he died.²¹ Harari writes, “in one of history’s strangest twists, this esoteric Jewish sect took over the mighty Roman Empire.”²²

Is it possible the inexplicable success of Christianity stems from an even more and very real inexplicable event? Historian N. T. Wright details in his book, The Resurrection of the Son of God, how the resurrection of Jesus represents a pivot point in theology transforming our understanding of key religious concepts and introducing a powerful new way of understanding mankind’s relationship to life and death. These radical changes would be impossible to explain without a bodily resurrection.²³

Harari discusses the apostle Paul without reflecting too deeply on his skeptical past and transformation. The evidence shows, however, that Paul changed his beliefs after encountering a resurrected Jesus. Neither Paul nor Jesus’s brother James fit the mold of believers clinging to the memory of a beloved dead leader. They rejected Jesus’s divinity during His life but embraced it after the resurrection becoming leaders in the rapidly growing movement that was characterized by miraculous works testifying to the resurrection as a true event. Skeptic New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman acknowledges that we can reliably know the resurrection story is the foundation of the Chrisitan faith, which Ehrman rejects, writing, “What started Christianity was the Belief in the Resurrection. It was nothing else. Followers of Jesus came to believe he had been raised” (emphasis in original).²⁴ Christianity is a belief grounded in an event that transformed the world. Dismissing it all as a grief-induced delusion offers insufficient explanatory scope and power for the post-resurrection events.²⁵

CHRISTIANITY WORKS AND CHRISTIAN WORKS

In Nexus, Harari spends considerable space detailing how trust in the infallibility of Christian leaders, combined with the power of a false but salacious message, led to a terrible evil: the European witch hunts of the 15th and 16th centuries, which cost the lives of 40,000 to 50,000 innocent men, women, and children. Harari asserts that Christians fell into a fever of torture and murder driven by a widely disseminated book, through advances in printing, blending Christianity with folklore to convince massive numbers of people an army of satanic witches lived among them.²⁶ Other evils also arose through error like the Crusades and the Inquisitions. This all demonstrates, according to Harari, that religious believers are susceptible to being manipulated toward hate, fear, and violence.

By focusing on his criticisms of Christianity, he obscures an important point. Despite inarguable and discreet episodes of evil, Christianity (properly practiced) improved the world, laying the moral and intellectual foundations that would create modern democracies, universities, and inspiring human rights movements. Historian Tom Holland writes in his book, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World,  how Paul of Tarsus at the outset of Christianity declared that the God of Israel is no longer bound to a chosen nation, but through the atoning death and resurrection of Jesus is open to all people groups: “‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female for you are one in Christ Jesus.’ Only the world turned upside down could ever have sanctioned such an unprecedented, such a revolutionary, announcement.”²⁷

Harari wonders how Christianity spread so fast and lasted so long. Perhaps it helped that early believers stood apart in their egalitarian nature²⁸ and charitable work feeding thousands²⁹ and rescuing children left out to die of exposure in the grotesque Roman practice of disposing of unwanted children.³⁰ Christians served God by serving the poor and powerless, leading to the opening of early versions of hospitals³¹ where even people with leprosy were welcome to come for care. The desire to understand God’s created order led to the establishment of universities,³² the first of which was founded in Bologna, Italy, in 1088. In claiming that it was centuries later when people cast off the bonds of religious claims to infallibility, Harari ignores men like Peter Abelard (AD 1079–1142), who wrote in the early 12th century, “nothing can be believed unless it is first understood,”³³ and “By doubting we come to inquiry and by inquiry we discover the truth.”³⁴ Abelard also considered dialectical disputation as essential to training the mind. Harari bizarrely chooses to praise Amerigo Vespucci as the “first modern man” for admitting ignorance on a question in the late 16th century.

The Canon

Self-correcting mechanisms are an important part of strong information systems in Nexus, and a key part of Harari’s criticism of religion. He accuses religious belief systems of prioritizing infallibility of information, the idea that information and sources can enjoy absolute trust which provides a strong unifying element to communities that have grown larger than the small hunter gatherer societies of our ancestors. Religion provides order and a common worldview, but as circumstances change or knowledge accumulates, commitment to infallibility becomes a weakness.

His primary example for this position is the inability of Jewish sabbath and temple laws to translate into increasingly modern communities after the fall of Jerusalem. For example, as culture grew more complex, so does the question of what constitutes working on the sabbath. Can a person tear toilet paper or press elevator buttons and keep the sabbath? The effort to answer those questions requires amending God’s infallible word and creating new infallible rules which will require future infallible amendments. Harari dismisses the whole enterprise as flawed.

Harari makes a mistake when he extends the same criticism to the canonization process of the New Testament. He sees corruption when the early church chose 1 Timothy, a misogynistic and anti-homosexual text in Harari’s view, over The Acts of Paul and Thecla, a book more in line with modern sensibilities and which elevated women. This arbitrary choice changed the course of the church away from women’s equality and led to hundreds of years of mistreatment of women and the LGBTQ community.

This oft repeated criticism begins with a hidden assumption; a larger pool of documents was seriously considered and unfairly eliminated. Neither The Acts of Paul and Thecla, nor any of the many other documents (Gnostic Gospels, Apocryphal writings, wisdom writings, etc.), were ever seriously considered for inclusion. The standards were stringent and required that the documents be unquestionably linked to the apostles or associates of the apostles, while also having a self-authenticating nature — meaning the church testified to the truth of the Scripture through repeated sharing, reading, and witnessing the power of those texts to transform lives within the body of Christ. Harari’s preference for The Acts of Paul and Thecla in no way supports the idea it was unfairly excluded. New Testament scholar Craig Blomberg claims the text showed signs of anachronism and legendary accretion common in later documents.³⁵  The truth is the initial list for canonization excluded books ultimately received into the canon, including James, Jude, 2 and 3 John, and Revelation. Irenaeus, circa AD 180, described all other gospel accounts outside of the Synoptics and John as like “ropes woven out of sand.”³⁶ This was not a haphazard process, but a serious effort to close the canon to prevent the accretion of legends to the testimonies received from the apostles through the earliest church fathers.

THE ARGUMENT FROM INCREDULITY

Harari offers no argument against religion, theism, or Christianity beyond an argument from incredulity. He doesn’t trust the reality of anything beyond the material world, embracing what appears to be some form of philosophical positivism — the idea that a statement is meaningful only if it can be verified by logic or empirical observation. Therefore, according to such a view, religious or metaphysical claims are deemed meaningless.³⁷ Practically, for Harari, if it isn’t material, it just isn’t real. This isn’t a conclusion reached through sound analysis, but a dismissal grounded in something as equally non-material as religious belief, namely, bad philosophy. Positivism is ultimately self-refuting and undermines the necessary philosophical preconditions for effective empirical research. Truth is real, discoverable, and important, as are justice, love, courage, and virtue. This form of aggressive positivism can’t account for the fullness and richness of human existence.

A complete examination of Harari’s claims about religion isn’t possible in this piece. My goal is more modest. The central argument is that two things can be true. Yuval Noah Harari is an intelligent man and a brilliant communicator, but also sloppy and prone to errors of dismissal derived from his reductive view of reality and need to focus on impossibly big picture stories. Details appear to bore him. He is a natural storyteller elevated to modern prophet by his enthusiastic fans. But to quote one critical scholar, “He’s really the worst prophet I’ve ever read.”³⁸

Jay Watts is the founder and president of Merely Human Ministries, Inc., an organization committed to equipping Christians and pro-life advocates to defend the intrinsic dignity of all human life.

Notes:

1. Darshana Narayanan, “The Dangerous Populist Science of Yuval Noah Harari,” Current Affairs, July 6, 2022, https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2022/07/the-dangerous-populist-science-of-yuval-noah-harari.
2. Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Harper, 2015), 81.
3. Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI (Random House 2024), xiv.
4. G. K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils (Cassell and Company, 1922), 58.
5. Ian Parker, “Yuval Noah Harari’s History of Everyone, Ever,” The New Yorker, February 10, 2022, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/17/yuval-noah-harari-gives-the-really-big-picture.
6. Mauricio Meglioli, The Unbelievable Story of Sapiens (Mauricio Meglioli, 2022), 73.
7. Meglioli, The Unbelievable Story of Sapiens, 74.
8. C. R. Hallpike, “A Response to Yuval Noah Harari’s ‘Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind,’” New English Review, December 2017, https://www.newenglishreview.org/articles/a-response-to-yuval-hararis-sapiens-a-brief-history-of-humankind/.
9. Harari, Sapiens, 38.
10. Hallpike, “A Response to Yuval Noah Harari’s ‘Sapiens.’”
11. Hallpike, “A Response to Yuval Noah Harari’s ‘Sapiens.’”
12. Harari, Sapiens, 210.
13. Harari, Sapiens.
14. Harari, Sapiens, 210–211.
15. Harari, Sapiens, 117.
16. Harari, Sapiens, 54.
17. Harari, Sapiens, 55.
18. Harari, Sapiens, 217.
19. Harari, Sapiens, 223–27.
20. Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (Harper, 2017), 76–78.
21. Harari, Nexus, 379.
22. Harari, Sapiens, 218.
23. N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Fortress Press, 2003), 6–10.
24. Bart Ehrman, “An Easter Reflection,” The Bart Ehrman Blog: The History and Literature of Early Christianity, April 1, 2018, https://ehrmanblog.org/an-easter-reflection-2018/#:~:text=What%20started%20Christianity%20was%20the,they%20saw%20Jesus%20alive%20afterward.
25. See the works of William Lane Craig and Gary Habermas on arguments for the resurrection of Jesus as an event in history.
26. Harari, Nexus, 94–96.
27. Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World (Basic Books, 2019), 87.
28. Holland, Dominion, 94–95, 100; Karen Armstrong, Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (Anchor Books, 2015), 142–43.
29. Armstrong, Fields of Blood, 149.
30. Holland, Dominion, 143.
31. Holland, Dominion, 142.
32. Holland, Dominion, 237.
33. James Hannam, The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution (Regnery, 2011), 43.
34. Hannam, The Genesis of Science, 50.
35. Craig L. Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the New Testament: Countering Challenges to Evangelical Christian Beliefs (B&H Academic, 2016), 586–87.
36. Iraneus, Against Heresies 1.8.1, circa AD 180.
37. Thomas Uebel, “Vienna Circle”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2024 Edition), eds. Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman, accessed October 29, 2025, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2024/entries/vienna-circle/.
38. Andrew Orlowsky, “The Misanthropic History Man,” The Critic, March 2024, https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/march-2024/the-misanthropic-history-man/.