Jerry Coyne: Trending quotes (page 3)

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

Jerry Coyne

" Another billboard kerfuffle http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2013/12/22/another-billboard-kerfuffle/" December 22, 2013

“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

" National Coalition Against Censorship and PEN defend Met’s showing of a “controversial” painting https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2017/12/09/national-coalition-against-censorship-and-pen-defend-mets-showing-of-a-controversial-painting/" December 9, 2017

Books , Art , Reading

“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 book Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible

Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), p. 254

Religion

“I have argued that religion is to science as superstition is to reason; indeed, that is the very reason they are incompatible.”

Jerry Coyne book Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible

Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), p. 258

Religion , Science

“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 book Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible

Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), pp. 210-211

Faith , Way , Understanding

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

Jerry Coyne

" Don McLeroy leaves creationist comment: evolution can’t explain “biochemical complexity” http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2013/01/30/don-mcleroy-leaves-creationist-comment-evolution-cant-explain-biochemical-complexity/" January 30, 2013

Faith

“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 book Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible

Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), p. 51

Faith , Way , Hell , Reality

“Most religions, and certainly the Abrahamic ones, have three features that are foreign to science. The most important is religion’s linkage to moral codes that define and enforce proper behavior, behavior supposedly reflecting God’s will. The second is the widespread belief in eternal reward and punishment: the notion that after death not just your fate but everyone else’s depends on adherence to conduct mandated by your religion. And the third is the notion of absolute truth: that the nature of your god, and what it wants, is unchanging. While some believers see their ability to fathom God’s nature as limited, and don’t accept the notion of a heaven or hell, the certainty of religious dogma is ar more absolute and far less provisional than the pronouncements of science.
This combination of certainty, morality, and universal punishment is toxic. It is what leads many believers not only to accept unenlightened views, like the disenfranchisement of women and gays, opposition to birth control, and intrusions into people’s private sex lives, but also to force those views on others, including their own children and society at large, and sometimes even to kill those who disagree.”

Jerry Coyne book Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible

Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), pp. 219-220

Death , Women , God , Fate

“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

" Atheism grows on campus http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2013/02/10/religion-dispatches-on-atheism/" February 10, 2013

God , Truth , Faith , Religion

“Medicine can cure; faith cannot.”

Jerry Coyne book Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible

Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), p. 236

Faith

“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

" It’s going to be a bizarre election year https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2016/03/09/its-going-to-be-a-bizarre-election-year/" March 9, 2016

Way

“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 book Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible

Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), p. 92

Men , Way , Failure , Nature

“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.””

Jerry Coyne book Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible

We do not need those hypotheses.
Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), p. 257

Truth , Religion , Science

“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 book Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible

Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), p. 39

World , Faith , Religion , Knowledge

“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 book Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible

Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), pp. 66-67

Truth , Religion , Support , Science

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

Jerry Coyne

" The disingenuous Professor Ruse http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/07/29/the-disingenuous-professor-ruse/" July 29, 2012

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

Jerry Coyne

" In an article on race and medicine, New York Times does its best to ignore and denigrate race https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2017/12/11/in-an-article-on-race-and-medicine-new-york-times-does-its-best-to-ignore-and-denigrate-race/" December 11, 2017

Truth

“I could go on, but the point is clear: religions make explicit claims about reality—about what exists and happens in the universe. These claims involve the existence of gods, the number of such gods (polytheism or monotheism), their character and behavior (usually loving and beneficent, but, in the case of Hindu and ancient Greek gods, sometimes mischievous or malevolent), how they interact with the world, whether or not there are souls or life after death, and, above all, how the deities wish us to behave—their moral code.
These are empirical claims, and although some may be hard to test, they must, like all claims about reality, be defended with a combination of evidence and reason. If we find no credible evidence, no good reasons to believe, then those claims should be disregarded, just as most of us ignore claims about ESP, astrology, and alien abduction. After all, beliefs important enough to affect you for eternity surely deserve the closest scrutiny.”

Jerry Coyne book Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible

Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), p. 23

Love , Life , Death , God

“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

" More bigotry at Britain’s National Union of Students https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2016/07/20/more-bigotry-at-britains-national-union-of-students/" July 20, 2016

Women , People , Behavior , Personality

“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

" Feminist geography at Dartmouth https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2018/04/02/feminist-geography-at-dartmouth/" April 2, 2018

Truth , Way , Search , Science