Jerry Coyne - Morality Quotes

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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
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
The fact that both Jews and Christians ignore some of God's or Jesus's commands, but scrupulously obey others, is absolute proof that people pick and choose their morality not on the basis of its divine source, but because it comports with some innate morality that they derived from other sources.

Jerry Coyne
No reputable theologian, or rational believer for that matter, adheres strictly to Biblical morality. As everyone knows, believers pick and choose their morality from a smorgasbord of divine commands, both good and bad, in scripture. And doing that shows that you have a sense of right and wrong that doesn't come from the Bible or God. Ergo, it comes from evolution and culture.

Jerry Coyne
Indeed, secular morality, which is not twisted by adherence to the supposed commands of a god, is superior to most religious morality.

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
So if morality is innate, it's certainly malleable.

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
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