The problem is that no ethical system has ever achieved consensus. Ethical systems are completely unlike mathematics or science. This is a source of concern.
DANIEL DENNETTWe have had plenty of atheist presidents; they just wouldn’t admit it.
More Daniel Dennett Quotes
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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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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 secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.
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The mind is the effect, not the cause.
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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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You can’t get through seminary and come out believing in God!
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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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Not a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares.
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A scholar is just a library’s way of making another library.
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Thanks to technology, what almost anybody can do has been multiplied a thousandfold, and our moral understanding about what we ought to do hasn’t kept pace.
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I think that what one can see from a Darwinian account is how the addition of culture in our species turns us into a very special sort of animal, an animal that can be a moral agent in a way that no other animal can be.
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Darwin’s idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition.
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I am a philosopher, not a scientist, and we philosophers are better at questions than answers.
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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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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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Minds are in limited supply, and each mind has a limited capacity for memes, and hence there is considerable competition among memes for entry in as many minds as possible.
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Words are memes that can be pronounced.
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There are no good reasons to believe in god.
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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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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 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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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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There are no forces on this planet more dangerous to all of us than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism.
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We have had plenty of atheist presidents; they just wouldn’t admit it.
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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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Problems in science are sometimes made easier by adding complications.
DANIEL DENNETT