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This book lays out the main lines of evidence for evolution. For those who oppose Darwinism purely as a matter of faith, no amount of evidence will do—theirs is a belief not based on reason.
Jerry Coyne
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In fact, changes like the elimination of limbo don't come from new information, but from secular currents in society that make church dogma seem insupportable or even barbaric.
Jerry Coyne
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But some of our moral behaviors, if not sentiments, almost certainly evolved. Evidence for that comes from finding parallels between the behavior of our own species and that of our relatives.
Jerry Coyne
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Science has a huge advantage over other ways of knowing : built-in methods of self-correction.
Jerry Coyne
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The interest I have in believing in something is not a proof that the something exists.
Jerry Coyne
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Accommodationists further accuse scientists of having faith in reason. Yet reason is not an a priori assumption, but a tool that's been shown to work. We don't have faith in reason; we use reason, and we use it because it produces results and progressive understanding...
Reason is simply the way we justify our beliefs, and if you're not using it, whether you're justifying religious or scientific beliefs, you deserve no one's attention.
Jerry Coyne
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Faith is a padlock of the mind, and few keys can open it.
Jerry Coyne
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While our view of the world is filtered through our senses, evolution has, by and large, molded those senses to perceive the world accurately, for there's a severe penalty to be paid for seeing things wrongly. That holds not only for the external environment, but also for the character of others. Without accurate perceptions, we couldn't find food, avoid predators and other dangers, or form harmonious social groups. And following those perceptions is indeed the pursuit of true beliefs : beliefs based on evidence. Natural selection doesn't mold true beliefs; it molds the sensory and neural apparatus that, in general, promotes the formation of true beliefs.
Jerry Coyne
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I have to say that I find Ali's argument truly revolting—not just because it's intellectually weak and actually deceptive, but because it debases the entire realm of university scholarship of which I'm a member. When I see pieces like hers—lame apologetics that are meant from the outset to reinforce an opinion already held—I thank Ceiling Cat that I am a scientist: a member of the guild in which using your scholarship to reinforce emotional commitments is considered a sin.
Jerry Coyne
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Damn, but science is just a constant feed of cool new facts and theories. Theology doesn't come close.
Jerry Coyne
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The rapid change in many aspects of morality, even in the last century, also suggests that much of its innateness comes not from evolution but from learning. That's because evolutionary change simply doesn't occur fast enough to explain societal changes like our realization that women are not an inferior moiety of humanity, or that we shouldn't torture prisoners. The explanation for these changes must reside in reason and learning: our realization that there is no rational basis for giving ourselves moral privilege over those who belong to other groups.
Jerry Coyne
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What might be considered a real contribution of science to religious belief is the empirical demonstration that some of those beliefs are wrong.
Jerry Coyne
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One can't read a great deal of theology without appreciating the mental dexterity of its practitioners when faced with hard problems. And as a scientist, I regret how much more we'd understand about nature had that dexterity been applied to science instead, or to any field involved in studying what's real.
Jerry Coyne
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When one has a religious experience, what is true is only that one has had that experience, not that its contents convey anything about reality.
Jerry Coyne
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It is time to stop seeing faith as a virtue, and to stop using the term person of faith as a compliment.
Jerry Coyne
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It's clear that this resistance stems largely from religion. You can find religions without creationism, but you never find creationism without religion.
Jerry Coyne
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Religion claims to help us understand things about the universe, but, unlike science has no way to test or verify its claims. Both science and religion compete to understand reality, but only science has the method to verify its findings, while religion merely buttresses emotional and epistemic commitments made in advance, commitments impervious to evidence.
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Theists' typical response to these failures (i. e., of prayer to affect rates of healing) is to say either God won't let himself be tested or That's not what prayer is about: it's simply a way to converse with God. But you can bet that had these studies shown a large positive effect, the religious would be noisily flaunting this as evidence for God. The confirmation bias shown by accepting positive results but explaining away negative ones is an important difference between science and religion.
Jerry Coyne
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Our reliance on naturalism, then, is not an assumption decided in advance, but a result of experience—the experience of men like Darwin and Laplace who found that the only way forward was to posit natural rather than supernatural explanations. Because of this success, and the recurrent failure of supernaturalism to explain anything about the universe, naturalism is now taken for granted as the guiding principle of science.
Jerry Coyne
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If religion and science get along so well, why are so many scientists nonbelievers?
Jerry Coyne
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Religion has nothing to tell scientists that can improve their trade. Indeed, the progress of science has required shedding all vestiges of religion, whether those be the beliefs themselves or religious methods for finding truth. We do not need those hypotheses.
Jerry Coyne
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Science's results alone justify its usefulness, for it is, hands down, the single best way we've devised to understand the universe.
Jerry Coyne
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Come on, readers, give me one example of a question that religion has answered to everyone's satisfaction—one example of a truth found in religion's quest for truth.
Jerry Coyne
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The most important component of the incompatibility between science and religion is religion's dependence on faith.
Jerry Coyne
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These mysteries about how we evolved should not distract us from the indisputable fact that we did evolve.
Jerry Coyne
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Quote of the day
Be a sinner and sin strongly, but more strongly have faith and rejoice in Christ.
Martin Luther
Jerry Coyne
Born:
December 30, 1949
(age 74)
Bio:
Jerry Allen Coyne is an American professor of biology, known for his commentary on intelligent design. A prolific scientist and author, he has published dozens of papers elucidating the theory of evolution.
Known for:
Why Evolution Is True (2009)
Speciation (2004)
Most used words:
science
religion
faith
evidence
god
truth
religious
morality
claims
reason
evolution
find
people
beliefs
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