Jerry A. Coyne Quotes
If the history of science shows us anything, it is that we get nowhere by labeling our ignorance “God”.
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.
Religion is based on dogma and belief, whereas science is based on doubt and questioning.
We don't have faith in reason; we use reason because, unlike revelation, it produces results and understanding. Even discussing why we should use reason employs reason!
Damn, but science is just a constant feed of cool new facts and theories. Theology doesn't come close.
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.
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.
We humans have many vestigial features proving that we evolved. The most famous is the appendix.
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?
These mysteries about how we evolved should not distract us from the indisputable fact that we did evolve.
Some believers are fundamentalists about everything, but every believer is a fundamentalist about something.
A well-understood and testable hypothesis like sexual selection surely trumps an untestable appeal to the inscrutable caprices of a creator.
You can find religions without creationism, but you never find creationism without religion.
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.
If you can't think of an observation that could disprove a theory, that theory simply isn't scientific.
The battle for evolution seems never-ending. And the battle is part of a wider war, a war between rationality and superstition.
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.
It takes a profound hypocrisy to try to reconcile for others things that you can't reconcile for yourself.
There is no horror, no amount of evil in the world, that a true believer can't rationalize as consistent with a loving God. It's the ultimate way of fooling yourself.
Now, science cannot completely exclude the possibility of supernatural explanation. It is possible - though very unlikely - that our whole world is controlled by elves.
