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.
DANIEL DENNETTI 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.
More Daniel Dennett Quotes
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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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Words are memes that can be pronounced.
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The way evolution always discovers reasons is by retroactive endorsement.
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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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The only meaning of life worth caring about is one that can withstand our best efforts to examine it.
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No matter how smart you are, you’re smarter if you take the easy ways when they are available.
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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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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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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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There may be things that are completely unknowable to us, so we must be careful not to treat the limits of our knowledge as sure guides to the limit of what there is.
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We have had plenty of atheist presidents; they just wouldn’t admit it.
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I think religion for many people is some sort of moral viagra.
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The mind is the effect, not the cause.
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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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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’s no polite way to say to somebody (religious followers) ‘Do you realize you’ve wasted your life?
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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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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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You don’t get to advertise all the good that your religion does without first scrupulously subtracting all the harm it does and considering seriously the question of whether some other religion, or no religion at all, does better.
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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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I am a philosopher, not a scientist, and we philosophers are better at questions than answers.
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Cost is always an object – the second law of thermodynamics sees to that.
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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.
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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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Philosophers’ Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity.
DANIEL DENNETT