Jerry Coyne: Quotes about science

Jerry Coyne is American biologist. Explore interesting quotes on science.

Jerry Coyne: 308 quotes3 likes

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

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

Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), p. 70

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

Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), pp. 78-79

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

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

Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), p. 67

““HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT?”
That’s the question you should always ask believers when they make unsupported assertions, ranging from “God is loving” to “Our souls live on after death.” The answer will always be one of two things: “The Bible says so,” or “I just know it to be true.” Neither of those are rational answers, but they satisfy the religious.
It is in fact the “how-do-you-know-that” query that really distinguishes New Atheism from Old. While atheists have always decried the lack of evidence for theism, it is the infusion of scientists and science-friendly people into atheism, starting with Carl Sagan and continuing on to Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, Pinker, and Dennett, that has made us realize that religious dogmas are in fact hypotheses, and you need reasons and evidence for accepting them. If you have none, then you have no reason to believe in God.
Nevertheless, religious dogma does change, but not because theology has found better reasons. It’s because a.) science has shown the dogma to be false (Genesis, Adam and Eve, creation, the Exodus, etc.) or b.) secular morality has shown that the tenets of religious belief are no longer supportable”

Jerry Coyne

hell as a place of fire, limbo, discrimination against gays, the Mormons’ refusal to let blacks be priests, etc. <br class="br">" Catholic official says that angels exist but are wingless http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2013/12/21/catholic-official-says-that-angels-exist-but-are-wingless/" December 21, 2013

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

Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), p. 83

“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

" A belated reply from Francis Spufford, who defends his faith http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/10/02/a-belated-reply-from-francis-spufford-who-defends-his-faith/" October 2, 2012

“When facing “scientific” arguments for God like these, ask yourself three questions. First, what’s more likely: that these are puzzles only because we refuse to see God as an answer, or simply because science hasn’t yet provided a naturalistic answer? In other words, is the religious explanation so compelling that we can tell scientists to stop working on the evolution and mechanics of consciousness, or on the origin of life, because there can never be a naturalistic explanation? Given the remarkable ability of science to solve problems once considered intractable, and the number of scientific phenomena that weren’t even known a hundred years ago, it’s probably more judicious to admit ignorance than to tout divinity.
Second, if invoking God seems more appealing than admitting scientific ignorance, ask yourself if religious explanations do anything more than rationalize our ignorance. That is, does the God hypothesis provide independent and novel predictions or clarify things once seen as puzzling—as truly scientific hypotheses do? Or are religious explanations simply stop-gaps that lead nowhere?…Does invoking God to explain the fine-tuning of the universe explain anything else about the universe? If not, then that brand of natural theology isn’t really science, but special pleading.
Finally, even if you attribute scientifically unexplained phenomena to God, ask yourself if the explanation gives evidence for your God—the God who undergirds your religion and your morality. If we do find evidence for, say, a supernatural origin of morality, can it be ascribed to the Christian God, or to Allah, Brahma, or any one god among the thousands worshipped on Earth? I’ve never seen advocates of natural theology address this question.”

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

Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), pp. 156-157

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

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

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

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

Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), p. 12

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

Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), p. 71

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

Jerry Coyne

Coyne (2011) " For the love of God... scientists in uproar at £1m religion prize http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/for-the-love-of-god-scientists-in-uproar-at-1631m-religion-prize-2264181.html" on independent.co.uk, April 6, 2011

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

Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), p. 206

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

Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), p. 120

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

Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), p. 211

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

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

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

Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), p. 113

“But none of this criticism of science makes religion even a tiny bit more credible…
In contrast, religion has never been right in its claims about the universe—at least not in a way that all rational people can accept. There is no reliable method to show that the Trinity exists, that God is loving and all-powerful, that we’ll meet our dead relatives in the afterlife, or that Brahma created the universe from a golden egg. Lacking a way to show its tenets are wrong, religion cannot show them to be right, even provisionally.”

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

Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), p. 224

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

Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), p. 147

“Although this book deals with the conflict between religion and science, I see this as only one battle in a wider war—a war between rationality and superstition. Religion is but a single brand of superstition (others include beliefs in astrology, paranormal phenomena, homeopathy, and spiritual healing), but it is the most widespread and harmful form of superstition. And science is but one form of rationality (philosophy and mathematics are others), but it is a highly developed form, and the only one capable of describing and understanding reality.”

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

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

“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

" William Lane Craig defends his ridiculous claim that animals don’t suffer http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2013/02/09/william-lane-craig-defends-his-ridiculous-claim-that-animals-dont-suffer/" February 9, 2013