Jerry Coyne Quotes

121 Sourced Quotes

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
Any knowledge incapable of being revised with advances in data and human thinking does not deserve the name of knowledge.

Jerry Coyne
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
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
A well-understood and testable hypothesis like sexual selection surely trumps an untestable appeal to the inscrutable caprices of a creator.

Jerry Coyne
The most important component of the incompatibility between science and religion is religion's dependence on faith.

Jerry Coyne
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
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
These mysteries about how we evolved should not distract us from the indisputable fact that we did evolve.

Jerry Coyne
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
Since neither Robbins, nor Hart, nor any other Sophisticated Theologian™ or Hipster Poet has produced any evidence for God that would convince someone who wasn't already a believer or an incipient believer, we needn't take their claims seriously. The reason people like Robbins sneer at the New Atheists' call for evidence is because believers don't have any.

Jerry Coyne
I am SO tired of this trope. It may indeed be the case that we can't justify a priori via philosophical lucubrations that we arrive at the truth about nature only by using the methods of science. My answer to that is increasingly becoming, So bloody what? The use of science is justified because it works, not because we can justify it philosophically. If we are interested in finding out what causes malaria, no amount of appeal to a deity, philosophical rumination, listening to music, reading novels, or waiting for a revelation will answer that question. We have to use scientific methods, which, of course, is how causes of disease are found.

Jerry Coyne
But the God hypothesis for morality and altruism has its own problems. It fails, for example, to specify exactly which moral judgments were instilled in people by God and which, if any, might rest on secular reason. It doesn't explain why slavery, torture, and disdain for women and strangers were considered proper behaviors not too long ago, but are now seen as immoral. For if anything is true, God-given morality should remain constant over time and space. In contrast, if morality reflects a malleable social veneer on an evolutionary base, it should change as society changes. And it has.

Jerry Coyne
But none of this criticism of science makes religion even a tiny bit more credible...
In contrast, religion has never been right in its claims about the universe—at least not in a way that all rational people can accept. There is no reliable method to show that the Trinity exists, that God is loving and all-powerful, that we'll meet our dead relatives in the afterlife, or that Brahma created the universe from a golden egg. Lacking a way to show its tenets are wrong, religion cannot show them to be right, even provisionally.

Jerry Coyne
In the end, why isn't it better to find out how the world really works instead of making up stories about it, or accepting stories concocted centuries ago?

Jerry Coyne
Claims of supernatural phenomena like the efficacy of prayer are rendered unfalsifiable by the assertion that God will not be tested. (Of course, if the tests had been successful, then testing God would have been fine!)

Jerry Coyne
Faith is a padlock of the mind, and few keys can open it.

Jerry Coyne
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
If religion and science get along so well, why are so many scientists nonbelievers?

Jerry Coyne
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
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
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.

Jerry Coyne
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
It is time to stop seeing faith as a virtue, and to stop using the term person of faith as a compliment.

Jerry Coyne
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
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
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
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
Damn, but science is just a constant feed of cool new facts and theories. Theology doesn't come close.

Jerry Coyne
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