Top 50 Jerry A. Coyne Quotes (2024 Update)

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

— Jerry A. Coyne

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

— Jerry A. Coyne

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

— Jerry A. Coyne

4. “Religion is based on dogma and belief, whereas science is based on doubt and questioning.”

— Jerry A. Coyne

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

— Jerry A. Coyne

6. “If the history of science shows us anything, it is that we get nowhere by labeling our ignorance “God”.”

— Jerry A. Coyne

7. “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 A. Coyne

8. “You can find religions without creationism, but you never find creationism without religion.”

— Jerry A. Coyne

9. “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 A. Coyne

10. “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 A. Coyne

11. “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.”

— Jerry A. Coyne

12. “It is clear, then, that whatever genetic heritage we have, it is not a straitjacket that traps us forever in the “beastly” ways of our forebears. Evolution tells us where we came from, not where we can go.”

— Jerry A. Coyne

13. “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!”

— Jerry A. Coyne

14. “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 A. Coyne

15. “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 A. Coyne

16. “We are the one creature to whom natural selection has bequeathed a brain complex enough to comprehend the laws that govern the universe. And we should be proud that we are the only species that has figured how we came to be.”

— Jerry A. Coyne

17. “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.”

— Jerry A. Coyne

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

— Jerry A. Coyne

19. “Theology is a subject without an object. Theologians don’t study God – they study what other theologians have said.” The claims.”

— Jerry A. Coyne

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

— Jerry A. Coyne

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

— Jerry A. Coyne

22. “These mysteries about how we evolved should not distract us from the indisputable fact that we did evolve.”

— Jerry A. Coyne

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

— Jerry A. Coyne

24. “Now, science cannot completely exclude the possibility of supernatural explanation. It is possible – though very unlikely – that our whole world is controlled by elves.”

— Jerry A. Coyne

25. “I do not see in religion the mystery of the incarnation so much as the mystery of the social order. It introduces into the thought of heaven an idea of equalization, which saves the rich from being massacred by the poor.”

— Jerry A. Coyne

26. “Faith may be a gift in religion, but in science it’s poison, for faith is no way to find truth.”

— Jerry A. Coyne

27. “Once again, the only sensible approach is tentatively to reject the dragon hypothesis, to be open to future physical data, and to wonder what the cause might be that so many apparently sane and sober people share the same strange delusion.”

— Jerry A. Coyne

28. “What distinguishes knowledge is not certainty but evidence.”

— Jerry A. Coyne

29. “In an essay on the cognitive value of art, the philosopher Matthew Kieran argues that whatever truth inheres in painting and literature comes.”

— Jerry A. Coyne

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

— Jerry A. Coyne

31. “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 A. Coyne

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

— Jerry A. Coyne

33. “With the notion of a theistic god and a vernacular notion of “proof” in hand, we can disprove a god’s existence in this way: If a thing is claimed to exist, and its existence has consequences, then the absence of those consequences is evidence against the existence of the thing. In other words, the absence of evidence – if evidence should be there – is indeed evidence of absence.”

— Jerry A. Coyne

34. “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 A. Coyne

35. “All of this suggests that lack of religious belief is a side effect of doing science. And as repugnant as that is to many, it’s really no surprise. For some people, at least, science’s habit of requiring evidence for belief, combined with its culture of pervasive doubt and questioning, must often carry over to other aspects of one’s life – including the possibility of religious faith.”

— Jerry A. Coyne

36. “I argue that in a world where people must support their opinions with evidence and reason rather than faith, we would experience less conflict over issues like assisted suicide, gay rights, birth control, and sexual morality.”

— Jerry A. Coyne

37. “No one infers a god from the simple, from the known, from what is understood, but from the complex, from the unknown, and incomprehensible. Our ignorance is God; what we know is science. – Robert Green Ingersoll.”

— Jerry A. Coyne

38. “To many, evolution gnaws at their sense of self. If evolution offers a lesson, it seems to be that we’re not only related to other creatures but, like them, are also the product of blind and impersonal evolutionary forces. If humans are just one of many outcomes of natural selection, maybe we aren’t so special after all. You can understand why this doesn’t sit well with many people who think that we came into being differently from other species, as the special goal of a divine intention.”

— Jerry A. Coyne

39. “If a thing is claimed to exist, and its existence has consequences, then the absence of those consequences is evidence against the existence of the thing.”

— Jerry A. Coyne

40. “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. But for the many who find themselves uncertain, or who accept evolution but are not sure how to argue their case, this volume gives a succinct summary of why modern science recognizes evolution as true.”

— Jerry A. Coyne

41. “Voltaire noted in 1763: “The interest I have in believing in something is not a proof that the something exists.”

— Jerry A. Coyne

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

— Jerry A. Coyne

43. “How can you derive meaning, purpose, or ethics from evolution? You can’t. Evolution is simply a theory about the process and patterns of life’s diversification, not a grand philosophical scheme about the meaning of life. It can’t tell us what to do, or how we should behave. And this is the big problem for many believers, who want to find in the story of our origins a reason for our existence, and a sense of how to behave.”

— Jerry A. Coyne

44. “IDers argue that such traits, involving many parts that must cooperate for that trait to function at all, defy Darwinian explanation. Therefore, by default, they must have been designed by a supernatural agent. This is commonly called the “God of the gaps” argument, and it is an argument from ignorance. What it really says is that if we don’t understand everything about how natural selection built a train, that lack of understanding itself is evidence for super-natural creation.”

— Jerry A. Coyne

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

— Jerry A. Coyne

46. “If Christianity gave rise to science between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, then you could give religion credit for everything that humans devised in that period.”

— Jerry A. Coyne

47. “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

— Jerry A. Coyne

48. “But the most important reason to concentrate on religion rather than other forms of irrationality is not to document a historical conflict, but because, among all forms of superstition, religion has by far the most potential for public harm. Few are damaged by belief in astrology; but, as we’ll see in the final chapter, many have been harmed by belief in a particular god or by the idea that faith is a virtue.”

— Jerry A. Coyne

49. “Each species is a masterpiece of evolution that humanity could not possibly duplicate even if we somehow accomplish the creation of new organisms by genetic engineering. – E. O. Wilson.”

— Jerry A. Coyne

50. “I argue that the toolkit of science, based on reason and empirical study, is reliable, while that of religion – including faith, dogma, and revelation – is unreliable and leads to incorrect, untestable, or conflicting conclusions. Indeed, by relying on faith rather than evidence, religion renders itself incapable of finding truth.”

— Jerry A. Coyne