Jerry Coyne quotes - page 2
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
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
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
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
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
Theodicy is the Achilles Heel of faith. There is no reasonable answer to the problem of gratuitous evil (i. e., the slaughter of children or mass killings by natural phenomena like tsunamis), and the will to continue believing in the face of such things truly shows the folly of faith. For those evils prove absolutely either that God is not benevolent and omnipotent, or that there is no god. (Special pleading like "we don't know God's mind” doesn't wash, for the same people who say such things also claim to know that God is benevolent and omnipotent). Both nonbelief or belief in a malicious or uncaring God are unacceptable to the goddy. Ergo, any rational person who contemplates gratuitous evil must become an agnostic, an atheist, or someone who rejects the Abrahamic God. It is a touchstone of rationality.
Jerry Coyne
Religion may be a quest for the truth, but it has no way of finding the truth, or verifying what it claims to find. Our knowledge of what God is like has not advanced one iota over the ideas of the 1500s.
And insofar as theological interpretation has changed, it's done so not as a result of faith's quest for truth, but of pressure from science and secular morality. Really, can any theologian, philosopher, or scientist tell me anything about God now that we didn't know 500 years ago? Then ask a scientist what we know now about science that we didn't know in 1500.
Jerry Coyne
The rapid change in many aspects of morality, even in the last century, also suggests that much of its "innateness” comes not from evolution but from learning. That's because evolutionary change simply doesn't occur fast enough to explain societal changes like our realization that women are not an inferior moiety of humanity, or that we shouldn't torture prisoners. The explanation for these changes must reside in reason and learning: our realization that there is no rational basis for giving ourselves moral privilege over those who belong to other groups.
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
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