Jerry Coyne Quotes

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

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.

There are no activists so authoritarian and unforgiving as gender activists.

In the end, a theory that can’t be shown to be wrong can never be shown to be right.

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

He is a dissimulator, a back-pedaler, a coward, and a self-serving ignoramus. In other words, he’s a politician.

That doesn’t mean that the religious completely abjure evidence. If it supports their preconceptions, they’ll accept it.

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.

The interest I have in believing in something is not a proof that the something exists.

Damn, but science is just a constant feed of cool new facts and theories. Theology doesn’t come close.

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.

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.

So because of this one word, used with every intent to be polite, the Easthampton Public Schools lost its best candidate. That’s simply asinine and ridiculous. Look at the tradeoff: they gave away their best candidate so that the word “ladies” could be publicly and eternally demonized. These DEI “experts” should be treated with the ridicule and contempt they deserve.

Hume was right about one thing: to have real confidence in a miracle, one needs evidence—massive, well-documented, and either replicated or independently corroborated evidence from multiple and reliable sources. No religious miracle even comes close to meeting those standards.

Science’s results alone justify its usefulness, for it is, hands down, the single best way we’ve devised to understand the universe.