Gregory Walter Graffin, Ph.D, (born November 6, 1964) is an American punk rock musician, college professor, and author. He is most recognized as the lead vocalist, songwriter, and only constant member of the noted Los Angeles band Bad Religion, which he co-founded in 1979.
Graffin attended El Camino Real High School, then double-majored in anthropology and geology as an undergraduate at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He went on to earn a master's degree in geology from UCLA and received his Ph.D. from Cornell University. The Ph.D. dissertation was officially a zoology Ph.D., supervised by William B. Provine at Cornell. The title of his dissertation is "Evolution, Monism, Atheism, and the Naturalist World-View: Perspectives from Evolutionary Biology". Greg Graffin returned to UCLA where he taught Life Science 1. In a June 2008 interview with Bad Religion bassist Jay Bentley, he mentioned that Graffin would be teaching there from January to March 2009. In April 2011, Graffin revealed that he would return to Cornell University that fall to co-teach a course in evolution for 14 weeks.
"Faith in your partner, your fellow men, your friends, is very important, because without it there's no mutual component to your relationship, and relationships are important. So, faith plays an important role, but faith in people you don't know, faith in religious or political leaders or even people on stages, people who are popular in the public eye, you shouldn't have faith in those people. You should listen to what they have to say and use it."
-- Greg Graffin
"Wired Magazine came out with a big expos'e of "the new atheists". I was interviewed for it--and yet I think I was included as a sidebar but not as a main feature and I think the main reason they did that was because they noticed that I wasn't that happy billing myself as an atheist. To me it just doesn't say that much; it doesn't say much about you. Instead I bill myself as a naturalist, which I think says a lot more. Because a naturalist is someone who... first of all--they study natural science, and they have a hopeful message--I think--to send to the world, which is... we can agree on what the truth is... and it has to be through experimentation, verification, and new discoveries, followed by more verification. So... if we can agree on those terms, we can agree that the truth changes, based on new discoveries, and the structure of science is such that you can never be so sure of something, because a new discovery can rework the framework--it can reconstruct the framework of your science and you have to look at the world differently. That makes it a very dynamic and exciting place to be. And if you say "you're an atheist", it's not really saying much about how you came to that conclusion. But if you say "you're a naturalist", I think it says something. You've reached that point because you've studied science, because you believe there's a fundamental way of looking at the world that is part of a long tradition. And so, I prefer naturalist."
