barbara cathalinat

“absolute scientific proof, but in the everyday sense of “evidence so strong you would bet your savings on it.” In that sense, we can surely prove that there’s no God. This is the same sense, by the way, in which we can “prove” that the earth rotates on its axis, that a normal water molecule has one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms, and that we evolved from other creatures very different from modern humans. 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, Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible

“Theology is a subject without an object. Theologians don’t study God—they study what other theologians have said.” The claims”
― Jerry A. Coyne, Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible

“or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil—that takes religion.” He did not mean, of course, that religion turns all good people bad, but merely some of them,”
― Jerry A. Coyne, Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible

“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, Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible