Jerry Coyne - Truth Quotes

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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
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
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
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
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
Every bit of truth clawed from nature over the last four centuries has involved completely ignoring God, for even religious scientists park their faith at the laboratory door.

Jerry Coyne
In the end theologians are jealous of science, for they are aware that it has greater authority than do their own ways of finding truth : dogma, authority, and revelation. Science does find truth, faith does not.

Jerry Coyne
For good people to do evil doesn't require only religion, or even any religion, but simply one of its key elements: belief without evidence—in other words, faith. And that kind of faith is seen not just in religion, but in any authoritarian ideology that puts dogma above truth and frowns on dissent.

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
The methodological conflicts between science and religion cannot be brokered, for faith has no reliable way to find truth.

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
In the end, religious investigations of truth, unlike those of science, are deeply dependent on confirmation bias. You start with what you were taught to believe, or what you want to believe, and then accept only those facts that support your prejudices. This is the basis for the theological practice of apologetics, designed to defend religion against counterarguments and disconfirming evidence.... In contrast, science has no apologetics, for we test our conclusions by trying to find counterevidence.

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 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
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
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
In other words, truth is simply what is: what exists in reality and can be verified by rational and independent observers.

Jerry Coyne