Jerry Coyne on Life
Browse 5 quotations attributed to Jerry Coyne, catalogued under life, with dates where available.
This page displays 5 quotations attributed to Jerry Coyne and filed under "life" in QuoteLineage. The selection is ordered by stored importance and quality scores, not citation counts. A topic label describes how an entry is catalogued; it does not establish the theme's importance in the author's work.
Attributed to Jerry Coyne, entry #45722: "Living with uncertainty is hard for many people, and is one of the reasons why people prefer religious truths that are presented as absolute."
Attributed to Jerry Coyne, entry #106298: "One can meet all the emotional requisites of a human—except for the assurance that you’ll find a life after death—without the superstitions of religion."
5 Quotes by Jerry Coyne on Life
"Living with uncertainty is hard for many people, and is one of the reasons why people prefer religious truths that are presented as absolute."
"One can meet all the emotional requisites of a human—except for the assurance that you’ll find a life after death—without the superstitions of religion."
"After all, by what lights can you see atheism as a “leap of faith”? What is the “faith” there? Failure to accept gods is no more a leap of faith than is doubting the existence of the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, or Santa Claus. It’s not “faith” when you refuse to accept a proposition for which there’s no evidence."
"If you spend your life looking in vain for the Loch Ness Monster, stalking the lake with a camera, sounding it with sonar, and sending submersibles into its depths, and yet still find nothing, what is the more sensible view: to conclude provisionally that the monster simply isn’t there, or to throw up your hands and say, “It might be there; I’m not sure”? Most people would give the first response—unless they’re talking about God."
"As the journalist Nick Cohen noted about accusations that atheism is like religion, “It’s not a charge I’d throw around if I were seeking to defend faith. When people say of dozens of political and cultural movements from monetarism to Marxism that their followers treat their cause ‘like a religion,’ they never mean it as a compliment. They mean that dumb obedience to higher authority and an obstinate attachment to dogma mark its adherents."