Jerry Coyne

Theology is the post hoc rationalization of what you want to believe.

— Jerry Coyne

The fact that both Jews and Christians ignore some of God’s or Jesus’s commands, but scrupulously obey others, is absolute proof that people pick and choose their morality not on the basis of its divine source, but because it comports with some innate morality that they derived from other sources.

— Jerry Coyne

It takes a profound hypocrisy to try to reconcile for others things that you can’t reconcile for yourself.

— Jerry Coyne

No reputable theologian, or rational believer for that matter, adheres strictly to Biblical morality. As everyone knows, believers pick and choose their morality from a smorgasbord of divine commands, both good and bad, in scripture. And doing that shows that you have a sense of right and wrong that doesn’t come from the Bible or God. Ergo, it comes from evolution and culture.

— 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

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

— Jerry Coyne

Why, exactly, are scientists supposed to accord “respect” to a bunch of ancient fables that are not only ludicrous on their face, but motivate so much opposition to science?

— Jerry Coyne

Faith is a padlock of the mind, and few keys can open it.

— 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

Can a geology teacher blithely tell his students that the earth is flat, or a European history professor that the Holocaust didn’t happen? That’s not academic freedom, but dereliction of duty.

— Jerry Coyne

Some believers are fundamentalists about everything, but every believer is a fundamentalist about something.

— Jerry Coyne

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

— Jerry Coyne

An “intellectual tradition,” as anyone with two neurons to rub together knows, is not the same thing as evidence. But theologians seem to lack that second neuron.

— 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

Anybody who claims that people don’t cherry-pick their morality from the Bible, choosing that which comports with their extra-Biblical notions of what’s good and bad, is simply blind.

— Jerry Coyne

The justification for naturalism is that it works: we have never understood anything about the universe by assuming the supernatural, while assuming naturalism as a working hypothesis has moved our understanding ever forward.

— 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

Even more than religious belief, acceptance or denial of evolution is a test of character. For if you deny evolution is true, you are either pandering to the public even though you know better (showing that you’re ambitious but lack character), are truly ignorant of the facts (which means you can’t be trusted to be informed about crucial issues), or are a flat-out creationist (showing that you’re batshit crazy).

— Jerry Coyne

One child dead because of superstition is one too many.

— Jerry Coyne

Postmodernism poisons everything.

— Jerry Coyne

I have to say that I find Ali’s argument truly revolting—not just because it’s intellectually weak and actually deceptive, but because it debases the entire realm of university scholarship of which I’m a member. When I see pieces like hers—lame apologetics that are meant from the outset to reinforce an opinion already held—I thank Ceiling Cat that I am a scientist: a member of the guild in which using your scholarship to reinforce emotional commitments is considered a sin.

— Jerry Coyne

After all, by what lights can you see atheism as a “leap of faith”? What is the “faith” there? Failure to accept gods is no more a leap of faith than is doubting the existence of the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, or Santa Claus. It’s not “faith” when you refuse to accept a proposition for which there’s no evidence.

— Jerry Coyne

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.

— Jerry Coyne

Theology schools are the wisdom teeth of academia: useless and sometimes injurious remnants of earlier times. If you want to teach comparative religion in college, you can do it in sociology departments, and if you want to teach the history of religion or of how scripture was confected, you can do it in history departments. There is no rationale for a modern secular university to teach theology, for it is the study of a nonexistent being and its supposed wants.

— Jerry Coyne

On the Right we have a bunch of regressive conservatives who demonize minorities and women and have no sympathy for the downtrodden, while on the Left we have regressive Leftists who try to censor people’s speech, take the side of extremist Islamists against women and gays, and shut down disagreement by other Leftists who aren’t pure enough. What is a person to do? The answer, of course, is to call out both sides for regressive behavior.

— Jerry Coyne

Faith is not a virtue, but a character flaw.

— Jerry Coyne

The editorial, very poorly written for a college full of smart students, shows how far this “hate speech” cancer has spread. Let me provide for you Coyne’s Glossary for the words at issue:

— Jerry Coyne

We needn’t take things like reasoning on faith. We use reason because it works. And science isn’t really based on axioms: it’s not math. It’s based on a method that, refined over time, leads us to widely accepted facts about the universe: the facts that we can rely on to do things like establish the genealogy of species, cure disease, and land probes on comets. You can’t accomplish such things through prayer.

— Jerry Coyne

The realization that God is not the source of morality is, I think, one of the great contributions of philosophy to clarifying human thought.

— Jerry Coyne

Remember three things about censorship. First, it doesn’t work to suppress art or words that you don’t like. Second, trying to censor something just arouses interest in it, as well as resentment towards those who try to tell others what they can or cannot see. Third, exhibiting art or recommending that students read a book does not mean an endorsement of the image or contents.

— Jerry Coyne

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

— Jerry Coyne

The truth is the truth, regardless of whether it fits your ideological biases.

— Jerry Coyne

If religion makes a society happier, there’s no data to show that. All we see is that on average countries that are well off are less religious and are happier; and that goes for U.S. states as well. Checkmate, religionists.

— Jerry Coyne

If Hawking’s world is “small,” well, at least what he found was testable, and might be true. Father de Souza’s claims are either untestable or have already been shown to be doubtful, and he has no evidence for any of them. In requiring people to believe fairy tales, de Souza’s world is not just small, but nonexistent.

— Jerry Coyne

This implicit denigration of objectivity, and of the way science is done, irritates me immensely. It privileges anecdotes over data, “lived experience” over objective tests, and confirmation bias over uncomfortable truths. But that is the way that many humanities scholars, corrupted by postmodernism, have operated. Denying or denigrating an objective search for truth, they’re free to say whatever they want, or “discover” whatever they find ideologically convenient.

— Jerry Coyne

What the comedy club in Montreal is doing is not only ridiculous, but is a prime example of virtue signaling: making a gesture to trumpet your own ideological purity, but a gesture that has no effect on society and no mitigation of injustice.

— Jerry Coyne

In other words, (Helen) Pluckrose et al. got a lot more attention than I did. And that’s fine. For they did, to my mind, expose a creeping rot in the floorboards of academic humanities, which has becoming increasingly solipsistic, tendentious, propagandistic, and devoid of critical thinking but besotted with intersectionalist ideology.

— Jerry Coyne

There is no compromise possible between catering to woke students and maintaining journalistic standards. We all know that this is true. If you feed the beast, it only gets hungrier, and is never full.

— Jerry Coyne

“Safety” and “harm” have become the new buzzwords to use when somebody does something you don’t like.

— Jerry Coyne

Everyone else besides the faithful already knows that religion has nothing useful to say to science.

— Jerry Coyne

The battle for evolution seems never-ending. And the battle is part of a wider war, a war between rationality and superstition.

— 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

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

We humans have many vestigial features proving that we evolved. The most famous is the appendix.

— Jerry Coyne

Tiny, nonfunctional wings, a dangerous appendix, eyes that can’t see, and silly ear muscles simply don’t make sense if you think that species were specially created.

— Jerry Coyne

The biogeographic evidence for evolution is now so powerful that I have never seen a creationist book, article, or lecture that has tried to refute it. Creationists simply pretend that the evidence doesn’t exist.

— Jerry Coyne

We now have many of the answers that once eluded Darwin, thanks to two developments that he could not have imagined: continental drift and molecular taxonomy.

— Jerry Coyne

If you can’t think of an observation that could disprove a theory, that theory simply isn’t scientific.

— Jerry Coyne

If the history of science teaches us anything, it is that what conquers our ignorance is research, not giving up and attributing our ignorance to the miraculous work of a creator.

— 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

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

Evolution tells us where we came from, not where we can go.

— Jerry Coyne

A well-understood and testable hypothesis like sexual selection surely trumps an untestable appeal to the inscrutable caprices of a creator.

— Jerry Coyne

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.

— 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

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

Understanding reality, in the sense of being able to use what we know to predict what we don’t, is best achieved using the tools of science, and is never achieved using the methods of faith. That is attested by the acknowledged success of science in telling us about everything from the smallest bits of matter to the origin of the universe itself—compared with the abject failure of religion to tell us anything about gods, including whether they exist.

— 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

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

— Jerry Coyne

Ironically, as the credibility of creationists grows smaller, their voices get louder.

— Jerry Coyne

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

— Jerry Coyne

The rational scrutiny of religious faith involves asking believers only two questions:What makes you so sure that the claims of your faith are right and the claims of other faiths are wrong?

— Jerry Coyne

Any “knowledge” incapable of being revised with advances in data and human thinking does not deserve the name of knowledge.

— Jerry Coyne

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

— 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

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

— Jerry Coyne

“What distinguishes knowledge is not certainty but evidence.”

— Jerry Coyne

Claims of supernatural phenomena like the efficacy of prayer are rendered unfalsifiable by the assertion that “God will not be tested.” (Of course, if the tests had been successful, then testing God would have been fine!)

— Jerry Coyne

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

— 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

Although scientists come in all faiths, including no faith at all, there is no Hindu science, no Muslim science, and no Jewish science. There is only science, combining brainpower from the whole world to produce one accepted body of knowledge. In contrast, there are thousands of religions, most differing profoundly in what they see as “true.”

— Jerry Coyne

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?

— Jerry Coyne

You can find some religions without creationism, but you can’t find creationism without religion.

— Jerry Coyne

The question to ask believers is this: “Does it really matter whether what you believe about God is true—or don’t you care?” If it does matter, then you must justify your beliefs; if it doesn’t, then you must justify belief itself.

— 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

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

— 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

“Blasphemy” and “heresy” are terms of religion, not science.

— Jerry Coyne

In fact, changes like the elimination of limbo don’t come from new information, but from secular currents in society that make church dogma seem insupportable or even barbaric.

— 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

But all that changed when Darwin explained those designlike features by natural selection. The best evidence for God simply vanished.

— Jerry Coyne

One can’t read a great deal of theology without appreciating the mental dexterity of its practitioners when faced with hard problems. And as a scientist, I regret how much more we’d understand about nature had that dexterity been applied to science instead, or to any field involved in studying what’s real.

— 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

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

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

What I am saying is two things. First, religion hasn’t obviously come closer to understanding the divine....I also claim that insofar as theology or religious beliefs do change within a faith, those changes are driven largely by either science or changes in secular culture....Religious morality, at least as promulgated by priests, rabbis, imams, and theologians, is usually one step behind secular morality.

— Jerry Coyne

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

— Jerry Coyne

Our reliance on naturalism, then, is not an assumption decided in advance, but a result of experience—the experience of men like Darwin and Laplace who found that the only way forward was to posit natural rather than supernatural explanations. Because of this success, and the recurrent failure of supernaturalism to explain anything about the universe, naturalism is now taken for granted as the guiding principle of science.

— Jerry Coyne

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.

— Jerry Coyne

It’s important to realize that philosophical naturalism is, like atheism, a provisional view. It’s not the kind of worldview that says, “I know there is no god,” but the kind that says, “Until I see some evidence, I don’t accept the existence of gods.”

— Jerry Coyne

Science in fact has a lot to say about the supernatural. It can and has tested it, and so far has found no evidence for it....Indeed, over its history science has repeatedly investigated supernatural claims and, in principle, could find strong evidence for them. But that evidence hasn’t appeared.

— Jerry Coyne

This shows what we already know: belief may arise by indoctrination or authority, but is often maintained by social utility. But if no conceivable evidence can shake your faith in a theistic God, then you’ve deliberately removed yourself from rational discourse. In other words, your faith has trumped science.

— Jerry Coyne

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.

— 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

It is curious that those who claim such firm knowledge about God’s nature and works become silent when asked about God’s methods.

— Jerry Coyne

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

— 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

So if morality is innate, it’s certainly malleable.

— Jerry Coyne

But some of our moral behaviors, if not sentiments, almost certainly evolved. Evidence for that comes from finding parallels between the behavior of our own species and that of our relatives.

— Jerry Coyne

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

— Jerry Coyne

When one has a religious experience, what is “true” is only that one has had that experience, not that its contents convey anything about reality.

— Jerry Coyne

Can you prove that leprechauns don’t live in my garden? Well, not absolutely, but if you never see one, and they have no effects, than you can provisionally conclude that they don’t exist. And so it is with all the fanciful features and creatures we firmly believe don’t exist.

— 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

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

— Jerry Coyne

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.

— Jerry Coyne

The orderliness of nature—the so-called set of natural laws—is not an assumption but an observation.

— 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

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

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

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

Science has a huge advantage over “other ways of knowing”: built-in methods of self-correction.

— Jerry Coyne

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

— Jerry Coyne

Medicine can cure; faith cannot.

— 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

The first argument, that religion is a social necessity and will always be with us, is dubious. It can be demolished with only two words: northern Europe.

— Jerry Coyne

I’m not a Marxist, but Marx got at least one thing right: for many, religion weakens the incentive to fix both personal and societal problems.

— 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

What might be considered a real contribution of science to religious belief is the empirical demonstration that some of those beliefs are wrong.

— 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

In the end, why isn’t it better to find out how the world really works instead of making up stories about it, or accepting stories concocted centuries ago?

— Jerry Coyne

It is time to stop seeing faith as a virtue, and to stop using the term “person of faith” as a compliment.

— Jerry Coyne

A world that is faithless would not be without the arts, either. Those don’t rest on faith, so imaginative art, literature, and music would still be with us. Too, we would retain justice, law, and compassion, perhaps in even greater measure than now, for our judgment wouldn’t be warped by adherence to unevidenced divine strictures.

— Jerry Coyne

Indeed, secular morality, which is not twisted by adherence to the supposed commands of a god, is superior to most “religious” morality.

— Jerry Coyne

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

— Jerry Coyne