Jerry Coyne Quotes

If you spend your life looking in vain for the Loch Ness Monster, stalking the lake with a camera, sounding it with sonar, and sending submersibles into its depths, and yet still find nothing, what is the more sensible view: to conclude provisionally that the monster simply isn’t there, or to throw up your hands and say, “It might be there; I’m not sure”? Most people would give the first response—unless they’re talking about God.

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.

The U.S., for example, has made huge strides in racial equality and racial justice since 1940, but to listen to some Wokesters you’d think that racism now is as bad as—or even worse than—the days of Jim Crow. Wokesters claim that it’s just gone underground and has a different form. This, to me, is a ludicrous belief, refuted by tons of evidence.

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.

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?

Isn’t it time for us to stop taking this nonsense seriously? I regard panpsychists as I regard theologians: they both make stuff up, none of what they say is testable, and they both actually get paid to foist nonsense on the world.

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.

The conflation of faith as “unevidenced belief” with its vernacular use as “confidence based on experience” is simply a word trick used to buttress religion.

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.

One of the purposes of a university is to find the truth, but that can’t be done if free discussion is banned.

He is the embodiment of greed, ambition, bigotry, and dislike of the marginalized. Of course, all that means is that he simply instantiates in a clear way the values of the GOP, but they don’t like those being so out in the open! Trump is in fact the very product of what Republicans stand for: he’s a monster they created, but now they don’t like it. They want those values, but expressed sotto voce, and by a slicker candidate.

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.

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.

It didn’t take long to realize the futility of using evidence to sell evolution to Americans, for faith led them to discount and reject the facts right before their noses.

Guilt is the great weapon of the Authoritarian Left, and we must resist it when it comes to endorsing free expression.