Jerry Coyne - Claims Quotes

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Most of the world's believers reject these claims (i. e., of Scientology, Mormonism, and Christian Science) as blatantly false. But that's only because these three religions are fairly new. They were founded in the last two centuries, and we see their origin not as divine but as obvious fabrications of humans—in the case of Joseph Smith, of a con man. But if you look with equally critical eyes at the doctrines of older faiths, their tenets seem equally bizarre.

Jerry Coyne
The rational scrutiny of religious faith involves asking believers only two questions:

How do you know that?

What makes you so sure that the claims of your faith are right and the claims of other faiths are wrong?

Jerry Coyne
What I am saying is two things. First, religion hasn't obviously come closer to understanding the divine.... I also claim that insofar as theology or religious beliefs do change within a faith, those changes are driven largely by either science or changes in secular culture.... Religious morality, at least as promulgated by priests, rabbis, imams, and theologians, is usually one step behind secular morality.

Jerry Coyne
Religion may be a quest for the truth, but it has no way of finding the truth, or verifying what it claims to find. Our knowledge of what God is like has not advanced one iota over the ideas of the 1500s.
And insofar as theological interpretation has changed, it's done so not as a result of faith's quest for truth, but of pressure from science and secular morality. Really, can any theologian, philosopher, or scientist tell me anything about God now that we didn't know 500 years ago? Then ask a scientist what we know now about science that we didn't know in 1500.

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
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
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
My claim is this: science and religion are incompatible because they have different methods for getting knowledge about reality, have different ways of assessing the reliability of that knowledge, and, in the end, arrive at conflicting conclusions about the universe. Knowledge acquired by religion is at odds not only with scientific knowledge, but also with knowledge professed by other religions. In the end, religion's methods, unlike those of science, are useless for understanding reality.

Jerry Coyne
In the end, theistic evolution is not a useful compromise between science and religion. Insofar as it makes testable predictions, it has been falsified, and insofar as it makes claims that can't be tested, it can be ignored.

Jerry Coyne
Science has only two things to contribute to religion: an analysis of the evolutionary, cultural, and psychological basis for believing things that aren't true, and a scientific disproof of some of faith's claims (e. g., Adam and Eve, the Great Flood). Religion has nothing to contribute to science, and science is best off staying as far away from faith as possible. The constructive dialogue between science and faith is, in reality, a destructive monlogue, with science making all the good points, tearing down religion in the process.

Jerry Coyne
It is curious that those who claim such firm knowledge about God's nature and works become silent when asked about God's methods.

Jerry Coyne
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
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
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
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
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