I think religion for many people is some sort of moral viagra.
DANIEL DENNETTI’m the guy who reputedly denies that people experience colors or pains, and thinks that thermostats think — just ask my critics.
More Daniel Dennett Quotes
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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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Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery.
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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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There are no forces on this planet more dangerous to all of us than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism.
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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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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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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 secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.
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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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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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AI makes philosophy honest.
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We have had plenty of atheist presidents; they just wouldn’t admit it.
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What you can imagine depends on what you know.
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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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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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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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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 chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them-especially not from yourself.
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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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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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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 way evolution always discovers reasons is by retroactive endorsement.
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I am a philosopher, not a scientist, and we philosophers are better at questions than answers.
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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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We live in a world that is subjectively open. And we are designed by evolution to be “informavores”, epistemically hungry seekers of information, in an endless quest to improve our purchase on the world, the better to make decisions about our subjectively open future.
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Religions have depended on the relative isolation and ignorance of their flocks, forever and this is all breaking down.
DANIEL DENNETT