Jerry Coyne - Religion Quotes

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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
Above all, religion, faith healing, and alternative medicine all show the diagnostic feature of faith: an agenda not to find the truth, but to support one's biases, emotions, and personal beliefs.

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

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
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
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
One can meet all the emotional requisites of a human—except for the assurance that you'll find a life after death—without the superstitions of religion.

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
In religion, faith is a virtue. In science, faith is a vice.

Jerry Coyne
After all, what new insights has religion produced in the last century?

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
Religion is heavily laden with the kind of confirmation bias that makes people see their own faiths as true and all others as false. In other words, religion is replete with features to help people fool themselves.

Jerry Coyne
Blasphemy and heresy are terms of religion, not science.

Jerry Coyne
Atheism—at least the refusal to accept gods for which there's no evidence—is a logical outgrowth of science, and explains (at least to me) why, compared to Americans as a whole, scientists are so much more atheistic. If your career depends on establishing your confidence in a phenomenon proportional to the degree of evidence supporting it, then God is a no-go. The climate of doubt that is endemic—and essential—to the scientific enterprise is a true disaster for religion. Religious people know this, and that largely explains the many ways they attack science.

Jerry Coyne
Putting all this together, we see that religion is like Sagan's invisible dragon. The missing evidence for any god is simply too glaring, and the special pleading too unconvincing, to make its existence anything more than a logical possibility. It's reasonable to conclude, provisionally but confidently, that the absence of evidence for God is indeed evidence for his absence.

Jerry Coyne
You can find some religions without creationism, but you can't find creationism without religion.

Jerry Coyne
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
Science and religion, then, are competitors in the business of finding out what is true about our universe. In this goal religion has failed miserably, for its tools for discerning truth are useless. These areas are incompatible in precisely the same way, and in the same sense, that rationality is incompatible with irrationality.

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
Theologians intensely dislike the definition of faith as belief without—or in the face of—evidence, for that practice sounds irrational. But it surely is, as is any system that requires supporting a priori beliefs without good evidence. In religion, but not science, that kind of faith is seen as a virtue.

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
As the journalist Nick Cohen noted about accusations that atheism is like religion, It's not a charge I'd throw around if I were seeking to defend faith. When people say of dozens of political and cultural movements from monetarism to Marxism that their followers treat their cause 'like a religion,' they never mean it as a compliment. They mean that dumb obedience to higher authority and an obstinate attachment to dogma mark its adherents.

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

Jerry Coyne
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
To a very large extent, which religion you accept and which you reject are accidents of birth. And after you've been religious for years, and surrounded by those who believe likewise, you become emotionally invested in your faith's truth. This makes you more susceptible to confirmation bias and less likely to be skeptical about your beliefs.

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
Religion has no warrant and no method for decreeing what is and what is not beyond science.

Jerry Coyne
Because of the hegemony of fundamentalist religion in the United States, this country has been among the most resistant to the fact of human evolution.

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
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