Jerry Coyne - Reason Quotes

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Living with uncertainty is hard for many people, and is one of the reasons why people prefer religious truths that are presented as absolute.

Jerry Coyne
I have argued that religion is to science as superstition is to reason; indeed, that is the very reason they are incompatible.

Jerry Coyne
Of course, atheism, which is merely the lack of belief in gods, isn't responsible for explaining altruism and ethics, a task that properly belongs to philosophy, science, and psychology. And those areas have offered plenty of nonreligious explanations for the Moral law and altruism. The explanations involve evolution, reason, and education.

Jerry Coyne
It doesn't trivialize morality to argue that it is based on evolution and secular reason.

Jerry Coyne
Now, science cannot completely exclude the possibility of supernatural explanation. It is possible—though very unlikely—that our whole world is controlled by elves. But supernatural explanations like these are simply never needed; we manage to understand the natural world just fine using reason and materialism.

Jerry Coyne
No, we don't have faith in reason and science in the same way as Cru members have faith in God. I see faith according to Walter Kaufmann's definition: strong belief in propositions for which there is insufficient evidence to command the assent of every reasonable person. We have confidence in science because it has led us to provisional truths—it works. Cru doesn't even know if there's any God, or, if there is a divine presence, that it's the Abrahamic god rather than the Hindu god, Yahweh, or Wotan. And we use reason in the same way: it leads us to truth. Revelation, dogma, and authority do not, for if they did there would be only one religion rather than thousands with their disparate and often conflicting doctrines.

Jerry Coyne
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
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
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
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 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