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Indeed, secular morality, which is not twisted by adherence to the supposed commands of a god, is superior to most religious morality.
Jerry Coyne
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I was flabbergasted. How could it be that someone found evidence convincing but was still not convinced? The answer, of course, was that his religion had immunized him against my evidence.
Jerry Coyne
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In the end theologians are jealous of science, for they are aware that it has greater authority than do their own ways of finding truth : dogma, authority, and revelation. Science does find truth, faith does not.
Jerry Coyne
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It takes a profound hypocrisy to try to reconcile for others things that you can't reconcile for yourself.
Jerry Coyne
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But this (a listing of illustrations of how the genome can change other than by mutations) doesn't constitute a crisis—it's a very interesting finding that shows that variation in a genome can arise by processes other than mutation of an organism's own DNA. The disposition of that variation still must occur via either natural selection (it can be good or bad) or genetic drift (no effect on fitness). This hasn't really changed the theory of evolution one iota, though it's changed our view of where organisms can acquire new genes.
Jerry Coyne
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It didn't take long to realize the futility of using evidence to sell evolution to Americans, for faith led them to discount and reject the facts right before their noses.
Jerry Coyne
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Anybody who claims that people don't cherry-pick their morality from the Bible, choosing that which comports with their extra-Biblical notions of what's good and bad, is simply blind.
Jerry Coyne
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Every bit of truth clawed from nature over the last four centuries has involved completely ignoring God, for even religious scientists park their faith at the laboratory door.
Jerry Coyne
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So if morality is innate, it's certainly malleable.
Jerry Coyne
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I will have achieved my aim if, by the end of this book, you demand that people produce good reasons for what they believe—not only in religion, but in any area in which evidence can be brought to bear. I'll have achieved my aim when people devote as much effort to choosing a system of belief as they do to choosing their doctor. I'll have achieved my aim If the public stops awarding special authority about the universe and the human condition to preachers, imams, and clerics simply because they are religious figures. And above all, I'll have achieved my aim if, when you hear someone described as a person of faith, you see it as criticism rather than praise.
Jerry Coyne
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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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Any knowledge incapable of being revised with advances in data and human thinking does not deserve the name of knowledge.
Jerry Coyne
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It's important to realize that philosophical naturalism is, like atheism, a provisional view. It's not the kind of worldview that says, I know there is no god, but the kind that says, Until I see some evidence, I don't accept the existence of gods.
Jerry Coyne
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Isn't science, as some maintain, based on a faith that it's good to pursue the truth? Hardly. The notion that knowledge is better than ignorance is not a quasi-religious faith, but a preference: we prefer to know the truth because accepting what's false doesn't give us useful answers about the universe.
Jerry Coyne
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A well-understood and testable hypothesis like sexual selection surely trumps an untestable appeal to the inscrutable caprices of a creator.
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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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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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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These mysteries about how we evolved should not distract us from the indisputable fact that we did evolve.
Jerry Coyne
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After all, by what lights can you see atheism as a leap of faith? What is the faith there? Failure to accept gods is no more a leap of faith than is doubting the existence of the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, or Santa Claus. It's not faith when you refuse to accept a proposition for which there's no evidence.
Jerry Coyne
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Quote of the day
Marriages are made in heaven and consummated on earth.
John Lyly
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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