Jerry Coyne Quotes

121 Sourced Quotes

This shows what we already know: belief may arise by indoctrination or authority, but is often maintained by social utility. But if no conceivable evidence can shake your faith in a theistic God, then you've deliberately removed yourself from rational discourse. In other words, your faith has trumped science.

Jerry Coyne
Why, exactly, are scientists supposed to accord respect to a bunch of ancient fables that are not only ludicrous on their face, but motivate so much opposition to science?

Jerry Coyne
In the end, religious investigations of truth, unlike those of science, are deeply dependent on confirmation bias. You start with what you were taught to believe, or what you want to believe, and then accept only those facts that support your prejudices. This is the basis for the theological practice of apologetics, designed to defend religion against counterarguments and disconfirming evidence.... In contrast, science has no apologetics, for we test our conclusions by trying to find counterevidence.

Jerry Coyne
You can find some religions without creationism, but you can't find creationism without religion.

Jerry Coyne
Putting all this together, we see that religion is like Sagan's invisible dragon. The missing evidence for any god is simply too glaring, and the special pleading too unconvincing, to make its existence anything more than a logical possibility. It's reasonable to conclude, provisionally but confidently, that the absence of evidence for God is indeed evidence for his absence.

Jerry Coyne
In the end, a theory that can't be shown to be wrong can never be shown to be right.

Jerry Coyne
The biogeographic evidence for evolution is now so powerful that I have never seen a creationist book, article, or lecture that has tried to refute it. Creationists simply pretend that the evidence doesn't exist.

Jerry Coyne
Just as many churches don't want to be seen as rejecting science, neither do they wish to lag too far behind public morality, and so they often tweak their religious truths to reflect the zeitgeist.

Jerry Coyne
It doesn't trivialize morality to argue that it is based on evolution and secular reason.

Jerry Coyne
Atheism—at least the refusal to accept gods for which there's no evidence—is a logical outgrowth of science, and explains (at least to me) why, compared to Americans as a whole, scientists are so much more atheistic. If your career depends on establishing your confidence in a phenomenon proportional to the degree of evidence supporting it, then God is a no-go. The climate of doubt that is endemic—and essential—to the scientific enterprise is a true disaster for religion. Religious people know this, and that largely explains the many ways they attack science.

Jerry Coyne
These (i. e., the statements of the Nicene Creed) are all empirical statements about reality: they are either true or false, even if some are hard to investigate.
These claims, of course, absolutely conflict with those of other faiths. Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs don't recognize Jesus as the Messiah. Muslims believe that those who do so will spend eternity in hell. Doesn't choosing among such faiths require a way to evaluate whether this dogma is true?

Jerry Coyne
Theology is the post hoc rationalization of what you want to believe.

Jerry Coyne
That doesn't mean that the religious completely abjure evidence. If it supports their preconceptions, they'll accept it.

Jerry Coyne
Ironically, as the credibility of creationists grows smaller, their voices get louder.

Jerry Coyne
Blasphemy and heresy are terms of religion, not science.

Jerry Coyne
Science in fact has a lot to say about the supernatural. It can and has tested it, and so far has found no evidence for it.... Indeed, over its history science has repeatedly investigated supernatural claims and, in principle, could find strong evidence for them. But that evidence hasn't appeared.

Jerry Coyne
Evolution tells us where we came from, not where we can go.

Jerry Coyne
We humans have many vestigial features proving that we evolved. The most famous is the appendix.

Jerry Coyne
Religion is heavily laden with the kind of confirmation bias that makes people see their own faiths as true and all others as false. In other words, religion is replete with features to help people fool themselves.

Jerry Coyne
Hume was right about one thing: to have real confidence in a miracle, one needs evidence—massive, well-documented, and either replicated or independently corroborated evidence from multiple and reliable sources. No religious miracle even comes close to meeting those standards.

Jerry Coyne
The different claims among these faiths have consequences, for they've produce endless misery over the course of history.... Clearly, religions aren't incompatible only with science: they're incompatible with one another.... This farrago of conflicting and irresolvable claims about reality stands in stark contrast to science.

Jerry Coyne
After all, what new insights has religion produced in the last century?

Jerry Coyne
In religion, faith is a virtue. In science, faith is a vice.

Jerry Coyne
If you spend your life looking in vain for the Loch Ness Monster, stalking the lake with a camera, sounding it with sonar, and sending submersibles into its depths, and yet still find nothing, what is the more sensible view: to conclude provisionally that the monster simply isn't there, or to throw up your hands and say, It might be there; I'm not sure? Most people would give the first response—unless they're talking about God.

Jerry Coyne
Now, science cannot completely exclude the possibility of supernatural explanation. It is possible—though very unlikely—that our whole world is controlled by elves. But supernatural explanations like these are simply never needed; we manage to understand the natural world just fine using reason and materialism.

Jerry Coyne
The question to ask believers is this: Does it really matter whether what you believe about God is true—or don't you care? If it does matter, then you must justify your beliefs; if it doesn't, then you must justify belief itself.

Jerry Coyne
Tiny, nonfunctional wings, a dangerous appendix, eyes that can't see, and silly ear muscles simply don't make sense if you think that species were specially created.

Jerry Coyne
Although scientists come in all faiths, including no faith at all, there is no Hindu science, no Muslim science, and no Jewish science. There is only science, combining brainpower from the whole world to produce one accepted body of knowledge. In contrast, there are thousands of religions, most differing profoundly in what they see as true.

Jerry Coyne
We are the one creature to whom natural selection has bequeathed a brain complex enough to comprehend the laws that govern the universe. And we should be proud that we are the only species that has figured how we came to be.

Jerry Coyne
If the history of science teaches us anything, it is that what conquers our ignorance is research, not giving up and attributing our ignorance to the miraculous work of a creator.

Jerry Coyne