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.
DANIEL DENNETTReligions have depended on the relative isolation and ignorance of their flocks, forever and this is all breaking down.
More Daniel Dennett Quotes
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The only meaning of life worth caring about is one that can withstand our best efforts to examine it.
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You can’t get through seminary and come out believing in God!
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We have had plenty of atheist presidents; they just wouldn’t admit it.
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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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The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them-especially not from yourself.
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There are no forces on this planet more dangerous to all of us than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism.
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The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.
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The way evolution always discovers reasons is by retroactive endorsement.
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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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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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I’m the guy who reputedly denies that people experience colors or pains, and thinks that thermostats think — just ask my critics.
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It is not so much that we, using our brains, spin our yarns, as that our brains, using yarns, spin us.
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The best thing about saying thank goodness in place of thank God this that here really are lots of ways of repaying your debt of goodness – by setting to create more of it, for the benefit of those to come.
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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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There is a time for politeness and there is a time when you are obliged to be rude.
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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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Human freedom is not an illusion; it is an objective phenomenon, distinct from all other biological conditions and found in only one species – us.
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The earth has grown a nervous system, and it’s us.
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Religion is defined as social systems whose participants avow a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought.
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Problems in science are sometimes made easier by adding complications.
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I am a philosopher, not a scientist, and we philosophers are better at questions than answers.
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As every scuba diver knows, panic is your worst enemy: when it hits, your mind starts to thrash and you are likely to do something really stupid and self-destructive.
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Words are memes that can be pronounced.
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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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There are no good reasons to believe in god.
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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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