Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible

Front Cover
Penguin, 2015 - Religion - 311 pages
The New York Times bestselling author explains why any attempt to make religion compatible with science is doomed to fail.

What we read in the news today is full of subjectivity, half-truths, and blatant falsehoods; and thus it is more necessary now than ever to safeguard the truth with facts. In his provocative new book, evolutionary biologist Jerry A. Coyne aims to do exactly that in the arena of religion. In clear, dispassionate detail he explains why the toolkit of science, based on reason and empirical study, is reliable, while that of religion--including faith, dogma, and revelation--leads to incorrect, untestable, or conflicting conclusions.

Coyne is responding to a national climate in which over half of Americans don't believe in evolution (and congressmen deny global warming), and warns that religious prejudices and strictures in politics, education, medicine, and social policy are on the rise. Extending the bestselling works of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens, he demolishes the claims of religion to provide verifiable "truth" by subjecting those claims to the same tests we use to establish truth in science.

Coyne irrefutably demonstrates the grave harm--to individuals and to our planet--in mistaking faith for fact in making the most important decisions about the world we live in.

 

Contents

CHAPTER
1
CHAPTER 2
26
CHAPTER 3
97
CHAPTER 4
151
CHAPTER 5
225
Acknowledgments
265
27
270
41
281
65
293
Index
297
22
300
Copyright

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About the author (2015)

Biology professor Jerry Allen Coyne was born in 1949 and teaches in the University of Chicago's Department of Ecology and Evolution. Coyne was the 1971 class valedictorian at the College of William & Mary. He received his Ph.D. in Biology from Harvard University and an NIH postdoc in genetics at UC Davis. Coyne has been the Vice President of the Society for the Study of Evolution and an associate editor of Evolution and The American Naturalist. Coyne's work has been published in scientific journals as well as The New York Times and The New Republic. He is known for his opposition to the creationist theory of intelligent design. Coyne wrote the bestselling book Why Evolution is True and co-authored Speciation with H. Allen Orr.

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