There are no forces on this planet more dangerous to all of us than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism.
DANIEL DENNETTTrue, you don’t have to be religious to be crazy, but it helps.
More Daniel Dennett Quotes
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True, you don’t have to be religious to be crazy, but it helps.
DANIEL DENNETT -
The idea that God is a worthy recipient of our gratitude for the blessings of life but should not be held accountable for the disasters is a transparently disingenuous innovation of the theologians.
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What you can imagine depends on what you know. Philosophers who know only philosophy consign themselves to a janitorial role in the great enterprises of exploration that are illuminating the mysteries of our lives.
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Love is blind, as they say, and because love is blind, it often leads to tragedy: to conflicts in which one love is pitted against another love, and something has to give, with suffering guaranteed in any resolution.
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In the beginning, there were no reasons; there were only causes. Nothing had a purpose, nothing has so much as a function; there was no teleology in the world at all.
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There is no such thing as philosophy-free science, just science that has been conducted without any consideration of its underlying philosophical assumptions.
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The way evolution always discovers reasons is by retroactive endorsement.
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What you can imagine depends on what you know.
DANIEL DENNETT -
I don’t think there is any religious revival. I think what we are hearing, the furor, is merely the hysterical response of the churches the handwriting on the wall that they are seeing.
DANIEL DENNETT -
I am a philosopher, not a scientist, and we philosophers are better at questions than answers.
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The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them-especially not from yourself.
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It’s a no win situation. It’s a mug’s game. The religions have contrived to make it impossible to disagree with them critically without being rude. They play the hurt feelings card at every opportunity.
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The evidence for evolution pours in, not only from geology, paleontology, biogeography, and anatomy, but of course from molecular biology and every other branch of the life sciences.
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Go ahead and believe in God , if you like, but don’t imagine that you have been given any grounds for such a belief by science.
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Philosophers are never quite sure what they are talking about – about what the issues really are – and so often it takes them rather a long time to recognize that someone with a somewhat different approach (or destination, or starting point) is making a contribution.
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The only answer to the endless chains of why, why, why is that the alternatives died.
DANIEL DENNETT -
If I know better than you know what I am up to, it is only because I spend more time with myself than you do.
DANIEL DENNETT -
Philosophers’ Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity.
DANIEL DENNETT -
True, you don’t have to be religious to be crazy, but it helps. Indeed, if you are religious, you don’t have to be crazy in the medically certifiable sense in order to do massively crazy things.
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To put it bluntly but fairly, anyone today who doubts that the variety of life on this planet was produced by a process of evolution is simply ignorant — inexcusably ignorant, in a world where three out of four people have learned to read and write.
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There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an illusion.
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Now that mobile phones and the internet have altered the epistemic selective landscape in a revolutionary way, every religious organisation must scramble to evolve defences or become extinct.
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There is a time for politeness and there is a time when you are obliged to be rude.
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Life itself is just a thin coat of paint on the planet, and we hold the paintbrush.
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Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery.
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I’m the guy who reputedly denies that people experience colors or pains, and thinks that thermostats think — just ask my critics.
DANIEL DENNETT