Today's debates over the place of religion in modern life often showcase the claim that belief in God stifles reason and science. As Richard Dawkins writes in his best-seller "The God Delusion," religious belief "discourages questioning by its very nature." In "The End of Faith," his own New Atheist manifesto, Sam Harris writes that religion represents "a vanishing point beyond which rational discourse proves impossible."

The argument that religion suppresses rational inquiry is often based on the...