There is no such thing as philosophy-free science, just science that has been conducted without any consideration of its underlying philosophical assumptions.
DANIEL DENNETTYou can’t get through seminary and come out believing in God!
More Daniel Dennett Quotes
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Cost is always an object – the second law of thermodynamics sees to that.
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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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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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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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I think religion for many people is some sort of moral viagra.
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In the long run I certainly hope information is the cure for fanaticism, but I am afraid information is more the cause than the cure.
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The way evolution always discovers reasons is by retroactive endorsement.
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We need to let our children grow up to face the world armed with knowledge, with much more knowledge than we ourselves had at their age. It is scary, but the alternative is worse.
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Most people in the West who say they believe in God actually believe in belief in God.
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Darwin’s idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition.
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There’s no polite way to say to somebody (religious followers) ‘Do you realize you’ve wasted your life?
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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.
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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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I am inclined to think that nothing could matter more than what people love. At any rate, I can think of no value that I would place higher. I would not want to live in a world without love.
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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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Sometimes you don’t just want to risk making mistakes; you actually want to make them – if only to give you something clear and detailed to fix.
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I look around the world and see so many wonderful things that I love and enjoy and benefit from, whether it’s art or music or clothing or food and all the rest. And I’d like to add a little to that goodness.
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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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The mind is the effect, not the cause.
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Words are memes that can be pronounced.
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I am a philosopher, not a scientist, and we philosophers are better at questions than answers.
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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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Not a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares.
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Churches have given us great treasures such as music and architecture. Whether that pays for the harm they have done is another matter.
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YES we have a soul but it’s made of lots of tiny robots.
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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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