From Pinker's review:
"Coyne rejects the common argument that science itself is based on faith in the validity of reason and the lawfulness of nature. He reiterates the point made by many philosophers that we don’t, in fact, ‘believe’ in reason; we use reason — as does, necessarily, anyone who raises the question of the validity of reason in the first place. Reason is non-negotiable; the same cannot be said of standard matters of faith, such as the divinity of Jesus or the existence of an afterlife. But Coyne’s own philosophy is more pragmatic than foundational: science works. It makes valid predictions, from hominin fossils to the cosmic background radiation, and it allows us to change the world, from curing urinary tract infections to putting a man on the moon. This success provides strong — albeit not certain — grounds for believing that its methods and assumptions are valid. After all, the universe could have been like a dream, in which any bizarre sequence of events is possible. Taking note of its overwhelming lawfulness is not at all like accepting claims about miracles and deities on faith. Even the deepest religious proposition of all — the existence of God — is, according to Coyne, an empirical question. Here, he differs from many of his comrades in the anti-creationist movement who (at least for tactical reasons) impose a condition of ‘methodological naturalism’ on science which renders it incapable of evaluating the claims of religion, carving out a safe space in which believers can protect their beliefs while remaining sympathetic to science.
Coyne quotes several historical and recent writers, particularly Carl Sagan and the philosophers Yonatan Fishman and Maarten Boudry, while adding some examples of his own, to show how the existence of the God of scripture is a testable empirical hypothesis. The Bible’s historical accounts could have been corroborated by archaeology, genetics and philology. It could have contained uncannily prescient truths such as “thou shalt not travel faster than light” or “two strands entwined is the secret of life.” A bright light might appear in the heavens one day and a man clad in white robe and sandals, supported by winged angels, could descend from the sky, give sight to the blind, and resurrect the dead. We might discover that intercessory prayer can restore hearing or re-grow amputated limbs, or that anyone who speaks the Prophet Mohammed’s name in vain is immediately struck down by lightning, while those who pray to Allah five times a day are free from disease and misfortune.
Ancillary beliefs, such as the existence of an immaterial soul or a realm of fate beyond matter and energy, are just as falsifiable. We might discover a severed head that can speak. The data might show that bad things happen only to bad people. A prophet could predict earthquakes, epidemics, and terrorist attacks. My late aunt Hilda could beam a message from the great beyond telling us under which floorboard she hid her jewelry. The fact that these events are confined to tall tales and false memories which evaporate under scrutiny weakens the hypothesis that a God of scripture, who presides over immaterial souls, exists.
There are, of course, diluted versions of religious belief which survive such tests: allegorical interpretations of scripture, deistic gods who create the universe and then step back and watch what happens, erudite theological systems built on abstruse argumentation, and various liberal, humanistic, Spinozist, and East Asian philosophies which equate ‘God’ with the laws of the universe or barely mention him at all. The new atheists have come under withering attack by defenders of religion for focusing on literalist and fundamentalist brands of folk theism, which, they claim, are held by a minority of believers instead of these more abstract and sophisticated systems.
Coyne accepts the challenge. He cites polling data showing that in fact a large majority of religious people believe in the miracle-working, soul-supervising, prayer-answering God of the Bible, rather than the recondite abstractions of academic theologians. Nor, for that matter, are most theologians content with God as a mere metaphor or euphemism, or as a bystander who is impotent when it comes to accomplishing anything that matters. (Not for the first time, a two-state solution is rejected by both sides.) Coyne educated himself in the works of the most ‘sophisticated’ theologians, and pays them the respect of evaluating their arguments by the ordinary standards of intellectual discourse. He finds these arguments to be either patently false (such as that humans are endowed with an innate faculty for sensing the truth about God) or transparent ploys to defend the undefendable, such as the suggestion that the Resurrection was too cosmically important for God to have allowed it to be empirically verified.
Coyne’s final chapter is called “Why Does it Matter?”. The ultimate appeal of belief in belief is that religion is needed (at least by other people) as a bulwark against selfishness, shallowness, and immorality. Coyne replies that 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 justified 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."
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