Are Science and Religion Incompatible?

[Music] [Music] hi I'm Dan Barker and you were just listening to Roy Zimmerman singing his song creation science 101 which really sets up today's show this week's episode of FFRF s ask an atheist I'm the co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation and it's pi day today I'm Andrew Seidel FFRF specter of strategic response at a constitutional attorney here at FFRF pi day is a three one four for the number five yeah but only here apparently only here in the US now today we have a special guest with guest with us in the Friendly Atheist studio here at FFRF dr. Jerry Coyne Jerry Coyne is a professor of biology you've all read his books he's known for his commentary on intelligent design he's published dozens of papers elucidating the theory of evolution he's currently a professor emeritus at the University of Chicago in the Department of the ecology and evolution jerry's concentration is speciation and ecological and evolutionary genetics dr. coin is the author of the best-selling 2010 book why evolution is true and runs a popular website of that same name he also wrote the book faith versus fact published in 2015 dr. coin is a past recipient of FFRF emperor has no clothes award and an honorary director at FFRF Jerry welcome to ask an atheist great to be here now if you're in Madison Wisconsin come by freethought Hall tonight for a discussion with Dan and Jerry and a book signing dan and I have some questions that we are gonna ask dr. coin and if you'd like to ask a question please do so in the comments below or send an email to ask an atheist at F F or F dot org and we might pose your question to dr. coin now first Jerry this is ask an atheist and you identify as an atheist so can you tell us why well as a scientist that could answer in one word which is evidence a rather lack of evidence I didn't realize this I had a road to Damascus moment when I became an atheist I can still remember well it's been documented it was when the Beatles Sergeant Pepper album came out I think that was 67 but I can't remember for sure anyway you were four years old right no no I was about 16 or 17 and I was sitting on my parents couch nobody else's home I put the album on for the first time of course it was a you know an awakening for all of us who loved music and at one point and I can't remember the song but I still have the album it but I know of course I realized there was no God it just came to me I mean maybe it's the laws of physics that at that moment it was determined that I would realize that there was that God and I had realized then that everything that had been taught to me in my sort of secular Jewish upbringing I had gone to synagogue and stuff was wrong and that I've been sold the bill of goods for my whole life I hadn't really thought much about it it wasn't religious but you know it was an awakening and for about five minutes I was sweating and shaking and thinking oh my god after I die I'm not gonna go anywhere that's it and then somehow it passed and I was fine and ever since that moment I've never looked back well that just proves what I used to preach back then I used to preach that if you listen to the godless worldly music will destroy your yeah I wish I remember this song that was playing when I thought that I never like to think it was a day in the life the last song but I really can't remember Brett do you have the album so if you could remember we could blast that all over the country and you know convert so you wrote a couple of books why evolution is true which some people say is the single best explanation of evolutionary theory and faith versus fact why science and religion are incompatible and in the I guess it's an epigraph you quote Shelley Percy birth Shelley who said God is a hypothesis and as such stands in need of proof the onus probe Andy which is a fancy way to say burden of proof rests on the theists so why did you open your book with that shellie quote rule was to dispel the common notion that there is no overlap between science and religion that's the most common argument for why they're compatible because they deal with different realms Shelley recognized this back in the 18th century that they were not that religion makes claims about fact about the way the world is and about what exists and that's what puts it in conflict with science and Shelley realized that and in that quote he was a well-known atheist of course and we suffered because of it I think it was expelled from either Oxford at Cambridge he recognized that the idea of God is not something that to be proven true just by revelation but you need evidence for it and for such a strong hypothesis you need strong evidence this Hitchens said extraordinary or somebody said extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence and God is the most extraordinary claim so you know my whole thesis is sort of encapsulated in that quote that reminds me of a debate I did in San Diego where this young earth creationist opponent titled the debate not does God exist but does atheism make sense of reality and I said you're totally back we're not debating atheism and we atheist don't have any burden of proof we just don't have a belief and so I made them change the title of the debate back to does God exist so that he would have the burden of proving it and the rest of us you we have nothing to prove yeah I mean science the business of science is to make sense of real yeah the idea of religion is to try to force reality and it cuts the embed of pre-existing faith so that was dumb title well if the debate had been does science make sense of reality that would have been different but he was saying does atheism as if we have to it was if we have a worldview that we have to justify we're just not theistic yeah they were putting the onus probe analyst on the atheist as they always do of course that now burden of proof is something that I deal with as a lawyer quite a bit as well and now when it comes to the law or at least the First Amendment you've been something of a secular activists you've helped FFRF stop a couple creationist teachers you and I worked to expose NASA's multi-million dollar grant to Center for theological inquiry and you've actually read a few of my draft letters to check my science for me so you can tell us a little bit about why you think separation of state and church is important well for the same reason I think that the founding fathers and I know you have a book manuscript on this issue the thought was important because it allows the majority to tyrannize the minority religiously if you don't have this and it allows the minority to return on this so you know there is no rationale that I can see to allow religion much less any form of superstition they have a foothold in the way our nation is governed I mean I agree with Steve Pinker in his latest book enlightenment now that the way forward is through reason and religion is the antithesis of reason and the separation of church and state is the beginning of enforcing reason on the populace so that's why I support it you know now one of the counter arguments that we often heard when you and I were stopping I think we stopped three creationist professors if the memory serves a couple at Ball State and maybe one down in Georgia now but one of the counterweight arguments that we always hear is academic freedom and as an academic I wonder if you could discuss kind of the conflict between academic freedom yeah well I couldn't make freedom was misconstrued often as I mean it began as the right of a tenured professor or a professor to research whatever he or she wants to do that as your university could not tell you what to work on and that freedom to follow your curiosity wherever it went was the you know the metier of the university that should be now for some people academic freedom means that professors can say whatever they want to their students in the class and I don't agree with that I mean that's like saying that I could go into my class and teach some creationism and nobody could stop me well it could stop me because a I'm lying to my students and BIA does not comport with the serious purpose of an academic to to teach that kind of stuff so you know universities have every right to monitor what is said in the classroom they can't they should not punish professors for occasionally interject a personal opinion if they did that then every professor at the University of Chicago would be out but they can enforce standards of academic rigor rings so like a math professor couldn't spend the whole semester talking about fashion design or some other totally irrelevant topic yet to stick to their discipline pretty much and they and you know they can't deliberately distort it which is the problem at Ball State when Eric Heiden was teaching a class in intelligent design which was supposed to be a science class yes and he was telling the students were making them read stuff which simply was unscientific and the creationists cried you know first First Amendment you know academic freedom he could teach Freddie wants but in reality he was distorting in lying the Student Center eventually the head of the university stop this nonsense yeah that was Joe angora she Berengar she's gone now unfortunately but they still don't teach intelligent design in any public university that I know about Andrew said that when he was sending his letters to these institutions he asked you to check his science if what's his science any good I mean did you yeah as I recall I didn't have to make money oh why do you think about the FFRF is it science friendly and they don't screw up very much I mean I just saw the life-sized statue of Darwin over a which was very pleasing okay so it's the right close connection between atheism in science because they both rely on reason and evidence and so as I recall Andrew didn't require much so you know you you're a professional trained biologist scientist right that's your field you you work with the fruit flies the Drosophila your software Drosophila right yeah the fruit flies for years you were one of the leading researchers in that for a while you were the researcher is that right well not I mean there's a gazillion people working on a Drosophila all the way from molecular biology to ecology I can say that you know I got a lot of people interested in using fruit flies to study the origin species so that's my area because of this short generation yeah so you if you're interested in the genetics of different species to how one species turns into two then you can get a lot of information by crossing those two species together which you can do analyze them because it generationally takes 12 days to two weeks you can get a lot of genetic information early so you you really focus on biology then why are you writing about religion is that how does religion fit into your work with biology well it's because I was working in the one area or maybe two areas cosmology being the other in which science directly hits religion in the solar plexus evolution in cosmology I mean they both counteract the Genesis account of creation oh yeah but there's a lot of reasons why thinking that we evolved from other creatures that aren't like us makes people queasy here there's no I mean chemistry doesn't do that you know most physics doesn't do that nobody gets upset by the theory of relativity but they do by evolution and for my whole professional career I had to fight people including with some of my students who would you know reject what I was trying to tell them and when this first book came out why evolution it's true even the title was attacked I mean even my publishers were wary of the title as they said well maybe it is true but you have to be so much in your face about it and I said no it's just as true as you know any good scientific theory like the germ theory of disease are atoms so you know even at that time I was facing a little bit of queasiness about blatantly asserting the truth revolution and after I thought it for 30 years and faced all this pushback in Maryland I used to teach it and there was a preacher right underneath my classroom in the quad waving his Bible and saying how evolution was it sold the devil and so very quickly I got interested in the question of why religious people simply cannot accept the truth of evolution I mean if they're liberal religious people they should be able to accept the truth of revolution and comport it somehow with their religious beliefs after all there's a lot of things in the Bible that we know wrong that liberal religious people have accepted but evolution still I mean Catholic churches widely said to have accepted evolution yeah be done with evolution but if you look at the data 27 percent of American Catholics are young earth creationists Catholics yeah so they're going against their church's dogma and the reason I think is that what I said that there's simply something about the nature of evolutionary biology and Steve Stewart Williams wrote a whole book on this which is well worth reading lists all the reasons why evolution makes people uncomfortable its materialistic it seems to deny the existence of any objective morality it says that you know we're not special and a seal of things that's the big one yeah in fact morality and the lack of human exceptionalism of the two biggest reasons well what about the Bible it contradicts the Bible too yeah but I think you know most Americans except for evangelicals would not necessarily say that the Bible is literally true the latest Gallup poll shows that 40 percent of Americans are young earth creationist yeah so that leaves 6 and 10 open to some either fully materialistic view of evolution or some but metaphorical interpretation sortable theistic evolution that that God used evolution as his tool to create life nothing I have strong objections that in fact there are almost twice as many theistic evolutionists as there are straight naturalistic evolutions so the statistics are 40 percent young earth creationists about 34 percent theistic evolutionist Center only 19 percent naturalistic evolutionists anywhere okay a moment ago you use the word theory talking about the sciences some viewers might say AHA you use the word theory you're admitting that evolution is not actually true it's a theory yeah well that comes from a misunderstanding of the word theory which is meant to be an explanatory schema that manages to make sense of a lot of phenomena so we speak of the germ theory of disease and we still do that diseases like you know smallpox and color are caused by microorganisms that you can't see now everybody knows that's true except for the very few deniers of you know the germ of the fact that this is the case and we speak of the atomic theory that the smallest chemically identifiable bit of an element is an atom yeah those are theories too but you don't see people saying well atoms are just a theory or atoms don't exist yeah and yet they'll say that about evolution it's just a semantic argument against evolution based on misunderstanding of the word theory it's something we actually have to include in our legal letters all the time and I think you helped me craft some of that language in the beginning yeah you know the only way around this is to educate the public what theory means but unfortunately creationist says you must know well or willfully misunderstand this stuff you could tell them till you're blue in the face this is what a theory means and they still are gonna go back to this time-warner argument that Reagan started in 1980 it's the only a theory and so that acquitting theory with wild hypothesis well the phrase I use is as a musician I use the word music theory yes if I it's if I say music theory am I suggesting there's no such thing as music so that's one of the many many arguments against evolution well so we have a question from online from Layne Taylor which is what is the craziest anti-evolution argument that you've ever heard well there's two ways to interpret that crazy in terms of being just you know insane and offensive to any rational person and there's crazy in that it flies in the face of so much known evidence that you'd be foolish to accept it the first one I would say is that Satan put the fossils in the earth to fool people yes I mean that's just an insane argument because you know well it presumes that Satan is cleverer than God which I don't know if the Bible implies that but also that you know not just that the fossils are in a grander feliss but the dates have been adjusted the rate of radiometric decays when adjusted the order in which the fossils appear have been adjusted I have a t-shirt at home which says you know teach the controversy and it shows Satan with horns burying in the ground so that's pretty crazy the craziest sort of normal assertion which is the one that's supposed to easily refuted by evidence is that there are no transitional fossils between humans and our ape-like ancestors that all these Neanderthals and Homo erectus and Australopithecus creatures that are were affected with rickets and that's where they were bent over and that's just refuted by the fact that well the simple fact that every human ancestor must have had rickets yeah but also if you line up the human fossils in order from four million years ago to today you see this progression that's not how you're bent over it's the size of the skull the size of the teeth the configuration of your bones so that we came more and more upright in fact I was on a BBC show where we heard a bunch of creationist from England around the u.s. and tried to convince them that evolution was true and I went out in Lake Havasu I think in the Grand Canyon joint convince them that the Ark story was wrong they didn't buy it the one thing that the creationists could not deal with was going to Berkeley and have seeing all Donald I think resolved Johansen line up all the human skulls in order of time from officer pytheas today and say well look at this what do you make of this and they had no answer they could not Demark a towline that separated you know the eight forms from the in reforms and they at that point some of them began coming around you know what happened to me when I was a preacher I used to misunderstand evolution and I think that's the problem I would have been thinking back then how could I have evolved from my cousin how could how could my cousin become me when actually it's not your cousin it's your ancestors that you come from instead of thinking this way if you think this way you see that where there are these links in this progression coming through and I had to make a flip in my mind to actually understand what evolution was actually saying rather than what I thought it was saying yeah having you know taught it all my wife to me it seems so obvious but too many people just began the study revolution these things Duke problems and one of them is the one you said you know the the classical quote is you know if we evolve from apes I come there still Apes yeah and then you have to explain and Richard Dawkins has done this very well how you start with a common ancestor and then it branches off into all of increased yeah well if Protestantism came from Catholicism why are there still cats right her humans came from the US you guessed the religious why is there so though - yeah so I have a question for you you mentioned our Darwin statue in the library other than Darwin who would you say is your favorite scientist Oh Lord how many there's so many of them I you know it's been so my favorite whether you mean you know most accomplished scientist sees you most respect for their accomplishments or somebody that you just like as human beings well you can give multiple answers yeah well you know Newton is classically where they're with Darwin is somebody who you know reformed the human mind or Galileo Newton I have trouble liking a lot because he was religious and he spent all of his time doing alchemy so but I would certainly put him up there in the panoply and as well as Einstein he created a revolution in human thought and unfortunately was unable to capitalize that as he got older and over older he come to versions of physics like he wouldn't accept quantum mechanics fully and stuff but you know in terms of revolutionising the way we look at the universe that would be Darwin and Newton and Galileo and Einstein I think so and not Duane Gish or Michael Behe yeah I keep thinking that about twenty years ago the intelligent design movement said that by this time within twenty twenty-five years scientists will have accepted intelligent design we've turned the corner they said and and the evidence for intelligent design is right around the corner this was you know twenty years ago when I was gonna come out five years after that well here we still are they haven't produced anything yet they're still with us so believers always talk like that I used to preach second coming of Jesus is just a month or so it's just coming right away back in the 60s I was saying that you know and they've been saying it for millennia and how Lindsey who wrote that late great planet Earth book if you remember that he said the second coming of Christ could not possibly be any later than the mid-1980s he said you know and we were all yeah yeah there's something in the mind that you think this corner is gonna be turned and the scientific world is gonna be humbled and they know something that we don't believe in the Bible Jesus says that you know the Son of Man is gonna come into his kingdom before some of the listeners yeah Jesus died well that should have been the first clue that you know these people just haven't one reason after another to put it off so it's interesting that's very similar to the way the idea and creationists keep telling us that yes we're gonna come up with the evidence very soon that never appears and yet they still hold on to their belief so we have another question from online from Rachael gran she says she's a big fan she's wondering how would you counter the creationist claim that the earth is only around 6,000 years old and that that thereby proves evolution for me yeah well I mean dating this the way to do it radiometric dating you know you can google that or you can suggest to her that she'd do that there's lots of good websites that show how the earth is dated it's the rate of radiometric decay of elements and you know the creationists will say well that could have changed over time you know it could have sped up and therefore the earth looks younger than it really is sorry so but we have ways of cross-checking that which you're too complicated for me to explain on this kind of show but you can use like three or four different elements that have different decay rates to date the oldest rocks and they have to be igneous rocks and they all give a coincident a date so we have ways of crush checking how old the earth is and it's about 4.6 billion years ago and all the other we can put it to within there a couple hundred thousand years now so you know that's an irrefutable but even within history even within the last ten thousand years of history or whatever we knew for example that my Native American ancestors were on this continent twelve to fifteen thousand years ago which mean which was what five thousand years before the world was created they were already here and even I think even most young earth creationist realize yeah we have history that goes back beyond that point yeah well they could all I mean I don't know where this ten thousand years comes from unless it's Bishop Ussher but yeah that was six thousand years 4004 BC so you know by clinging to that young earth date they're really eroding their credibility severely oh well they're also missing out on such an a much better more grand view of the universe you know there's a spot in the Grand Canyon where you can hold your hand over two layers of rock and you span a billion years of the Earth's existence you used to be a guy that the grand can see I did that was a Grand Canyon tour guide yeah and just to be able to do that and then think well it's only six thousand years old it's just the tube user it's this view is so much more grand well to them they say well the view of a omnipotent omniscient God and the fact that we're gonna meet our grand father in heaven is a grander view of life you know unfortunately there's no evidence for it so we have another question that says it's kind of similar along those lines some sign some say that science can't deal with myths that it can't combat the inane biblical claims like Moses started humanity in the middle of the Neolithic can't we just use science to prove that the Bible is false you actually just use the Bible a minute ago to prove that the Bible is false but of course we can for many things and we can refute the claims that bait the biblically based claims of the earth is 6,000 years old we can refute the claim that there was an exodus of Jews from Egypt we can refute the Genesis 1 and 2 stories of course that the you know this is the order of creation and things happen instantaneously um there are some things in the Bible that are true some of the historical figures that are reduced and you would know this better than I do but Methuselah supposedly lived 960 which means he lived for one-sixth of the entire history of the human human race yeah I mean so the Bible is a mixture of statements that are literally true I mean there was punch this pilot he existed and that are false like the Exodus and like the census of Caesar Augustus which as far as I know never took place and there are things that are in principle refutable like Jesus rose from the dead where Jesus existed I mean I think we have no evidence that Jesus existed as a real human being that evening was a preacher so yes as far as I know the major claims of the Bible are the the testable claims that are refutable have been refuted the few claims that are true have been but rest and the claims there are claims that are irrefutable like there is a God you know as an atheist I can't say I know there is no God you just say there's strong evidence against it but if you say well there's some deity up there that created the laws of physics s that the earth emotion that's not what the Bible says you know but if that's a religious claim that's one that is impossible well that's why your book is titled faith versus fact right you can have your faith if you want to believe whatever you want but it's not the same as fact no and so you say the two are incompatible yes and I mean my thesis is there are lots of ways that people try to make them compatible Steve gules thesis that religion deals with me any morals and values and science skills with the truth about the universe is the most common way that people try to reconcile science and religion that they're non-overlapping magisteria but the first people to refute that claim were the theologians who said no no wait a minute we don't just say when eating morals and values we make factual assertions because if Jesus didn't live if he wasn't resurrected if there is no heaven then our religion is meaningless and in Hebrews 1 I think it says that I could show off some of my knowledge of the what you know if if there be no if Jesus be not resurrected then your faith is not true so yeah that was Paul and one of the epistles yeah ok so ok Hebrews talks about faith but yeah yeah I'm sorry you're right Hebrews my 11th man I have to recoup my knowledge of the No better things to read yeah well there was so much credibility with the religious you have to show that you've known it and I spent like a long time reading the King James version of the Bible when I wrote this it was one of the most tedious mind-numbing exercises I've ever done I'm like Richard Dawkins claim that the Bible is a great work of literature I didn't find that to be true at all there are bits of it that are nice but by and large that's a long tedious disquisition on who begat who and this is the way you're supposed to build the ark and you know you kill somebody if they are picking up sticks on the Sabbath I didn't find that to be great literature and I would maintain there was one copy of the Bible that existed and somebody found it in a bookstore in Bloomsbury and they picked it up and read it they would not think it was a great work of literature they'd say oh this is just the ravings of some lunatic yeah you know haven't throw it away well I know people who read the Bible and then became atheists the Bible was the reason why they gave up their faith because it's so nasty yeah well I also say that seminaries of the great generators life is too but I wouldn't know about that so I do want to say you're right about the historical existence of Jesus that there's no good evidence there is evidence I mean the Gospels the Gospels are evidence but it's not good evidence and so it lowers the probability that he existed not to 0 but it's very low well then would you say that the existence of the books about Paul Bunyan is constitutive there was a chance it's bad evidence evidence but it's bad evidence well yeah it's a fine line is just Everett it's that we don't even have to take seriously yeah I mean the fact that scriptures say that Jesus existed I would take more seriously if there was some extra biblical evidence for a Jesus person and I know that I mean this is this is put you in bed or with the illusion this if you deny that there's really strong evidence for Jesus person but that seems to be the fact but of course you know for Jesus to be the son of God and our Savior he has to have existed in the first place so if you say well there's not much evidence off the bat they just start yeah yeah that's important so we have a couple of questions from online Sam asked via email he said creationists always say that evolution can't be observed is that true oh no not at all I mean in my book this book I give three hundred I mean I list a book that Lit gives three hundred examples of evolution in action so yes we can see evolution in time now granted we cannot see a human time in a generation we cannot see a reptile evolving into a bird or a mammal but we can see evolution on a scale that is so fast that if extrapolated over millions of years it could have produced that plus we have the fossils that show this transformation happening and I always wonder what people demand to see things in real time in order to accept that I mean that's like saying that because we weren't there when George Washington lived that he didn't exist so we can question record all of recorded history because of that so the answer is yes we do see lots of ever and so evolution in real time and and there's more everyday in the journalist but second of all you know you don't have to see that Darwin didn't have any evidence for that and yet the Origin of Species was convincing to almost every reasonable person like if you're walking through a forest and you see these young saplings in these young trees and these mature trees you don't have to stand there and wait for 200 years to know what's happening to one of those trees you can observe all the different stages of their development and you can see how that tree girls without having to actually observe it in real time yeah although you could wash it give a bigger well I suppose is another one the evolution of stars has been well working yet but we rarely see anything happening like that the fact that historical evidence has not count as evidence for these peoples shows that there's some mental problem they have with understanding whatever it's really is well that's one of ken ham's favorite rejoinders is we were you there yeah you actually M you visited the arc park you know I can't see myself paying $30 to put it in the hand kick it's 42 now and then $10 for parking you don't have to because Andrew went and there's a video of Andrew there yeah I think that's up that's really not worthwhile there's it's really bad yeah I do not recommend it I haven't been to the Creation Museum either but for the same reason I don't want to enrich create fest but I kind of like to go I don't know if I could withhold oh my groans expletives if I will however no you shouldn't well I think there's guards there to keep people like me out from groaning well yeah or if you have any negative reaction publicly to the exhibits I think they give you out so talking about evolution in real time the grants on the Galapagos their book the beak of the Finch I found that amazing because how many decades have they been there observing during drought how the beaks get bigger and then during the wetter season how they get smaller and you can actually see changes within I don't know if that's a one species to another be can actually see physical evolutionary changes in real time yeah in fact that at that experiment where the there was a drought and the seeds got bigger because the small plants thought it was just one year 1976 and and they documented the whole thing this is the best example of evolution in real time we have I think as we know what happened exactly and we know the genetic basis for it and what happened was the finches with the small beaks literally died because they could not eat the big city open them yeah and you could find the corpses of the finches and you can see what who reproduce their left offspring I was the one with the bigger beaks and in fact in one generation the beak size went one year if the beak size went up 10% and that is a far faster rate of evolution we see in the fossil record of course they would say that's micro evolution well yeah because if you want to see macro evolution in real time hard to do but you just go to the fossils in there it is so yet we have another question that Cori Melton asks which is what can I do as a scientifically literate layperson to most effectively assure my science denying bible-believing friends and family into an understanding of science well that's a hard question it's one I'm often asked if there you first have to ascertain whether these are the kind of religious people whose minds are open and that eliminates a huge fool of people especially those who didn't tie evolution because the evidence revolution is everywhere in them you know Sagan Dawkins Dennett Gould you know everybody gives the evidence revolution so you know you have to find out before you waste your breath whether or not the air open-minded and then if they're open-minded I would just give them I mean I hate to be self-promoting I give them that book and say okay look I'm not gonna argue with you read this book and then get back to me we're actually given both the books probably would be better yeah although I mean I would this book doesn't say anything about religion except for one statement that I would probably take back if I were to write it again which is that liberal religions have always found a way to accommodate evolution but that's a tautology because what I meant by liberal religions are those religions are accommodated oh yeah so I'm pressure to just left religion out of that book entirely I just say relook the facts are here they're also online everywhere read this book and get back to me if you have any issues I don't think debating the way that Ken Ham debated Bill Nye is the way to settle the issue because it's an exercise in rhetoric you only have like an hour to change interchange your mind and that's not the way people change their mind so here well it does give an audience exposure to the fact that there is an articulate point of view that's different from them especially at a college when those students are really kind of in the middle they're just leaving home from the first time and I'll see someone like you up there articulating this it can go a long way towards influence that's why I reckon but the other side of that is that it gives by a scientists debating a creationist it gives the creationists credibility yeah because here we have a respected evolutionary biologist taking seriously the arguments of creation so maybe there's something to them well let the students decide yeah I think the way they should decide is not through debate but by reading and thinking and stuff it's not a quick process it's not something happens in an hour so you know if you can read my book or lots of other books Richard Dawkins has one in the Airman's Revolution and find a way around that evidence then you know but in Richard Dawkins look he starts off by saying he really didn't have to write it because you had already written of this yeah actually we had we added a mine at the same time yeah I was really scared when I heard Richard is writing his book because he's so much more well-known than I am and a much better writer and I thought well I'm screwed it turned out that the books they are overlap but non-overlapping magisteria they largely deal with different topics so the main point is the same and so they both sold pretty well independently so I had one more kind of question I wanted it's sort of the reverse of what you were just saying about a scientist debating a creationist and legitimizing that there are some scientists who are young earth creationists and who are a mordant maybe not young but creationists you know how do you think that affects the scientific field and do you have a nice sense of sort of what the demographics are among scientists Oh scientists are atheists by and large I had the statistics here in this book and the higher you go up in the scientific hierarchy in terms of accomplishment the more atheistic they become so on average I think something like 40 to 50 percent of the average American scientists or atheists or non-believers that contrasts with probably like five to ten percent of Americans being atheists if you look at scientists at elite universities and these are not defined by me but by the Elaine Eckland a sociologist at Rice at scientists who work at really good universities about 65% of them are atheists and if you look at the National Academy of Sciences which elects they're really highly qualified accomplished scientists 97% of them are atheist it's almost the exact reverse of the American public as a whole well we're out of time here Jerry but people who live in Madison in Dane County area can come tonight to freethought hall and hear you give a talk about more of the same issues what time is that thing that's at 7:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. tonight here in Madison in this building or Freeth aha there's the flyer up there on the screen so well thank you Jerry thanks for giving your time for coming all the way up here from Chicago from Deep South Chicago or joining us today it's a pleasure - thanks for having me and that's gonna do it for this episode of asking atheists so again remember if you're in Madison come by tonight we're Dan and Jerry you're gonna have another great conversation and chair you're gonna be signing books - I believe they'll be available for sale and join us next week at noon central time for another episode of FFRF ask an atheist [Music] [Music] you [Music]

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Keywords: why evolution is true by jerry coyne, Evolution, why evolution is true, is evolution true, evolution and atheism, creationism, jerry coyne youtube, jerry a coyne, Freedom From Religion Foundation, FFRF, Atheist, Atheism

Id: naM7nGrRpR8

Length: 40min 56sec (2456 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 14 2018