Bart Anderson

agreed-upon moral precepts, such as telling the truth and not harming others, are rules for living together that any intelligent gregarious beings would put into their social contracts, needing no divine sanction. In contrast, little good can come from parochial doctrines that cannot be justifi ed by universal standards of reason. Coyne doesn’t dwell on obvious historical disasters, such as religious wars and persecutions, but he devotes a section apiece to some of the more insidious harms fostered by faith today: the withholding of medical care to sick children, the suppression of heretical biomedical research and public-health policies, the opposition to assisted dying, and the denial that anything should be done about anthropogenic climate change. In several sections, Coyne plays the ultimate empiricist trump card: data from Greg Paul showing that the godless democracies of northern and western Europe are thriving, while the religious ones — most pointedly the United States — have far higher rates of societal dysfunction, such as violent crime, preventable disease, and mediocre education. In his book, Coyne has examined every talking point in the New Atheism debate but one: the allegedly shrill, militant, extremist, fundamentalist tone of the anti-God squad. Here he leads by example. Faith Versus Fact is unquestionably partisan, but its tone is matter-of-fact, and the offense that its targets will surely take will come from the force of his arguments rather than any ridicule or cheap shots. Indeed, my only real criticism of the book is that it has been stripped of the sass and wit that enliven his blog whyevolutionistrue. Nonetheless, Faith Versus Fact is clear and gripping, and should be read by anyone interested in the tension between science and religion. By meeting the claims of the faitheists and accommodationists head-on, Coyne shows that in this debate the two sides aren’t preaching to their choirs or talking past each other, and that the truth does not always fall halfway between two extremes.