Daniel Dennett
Daniel Dennett
Daniel Clement Dennett III is an American philosopher, writer, and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science...
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth28 March 1942
Daniel Dennett quotes about
caring best-effort society
The only meaning of life worth caring about is one that can withstand our best efforts to examine it.
eye intelligent historical
Moreover, the eye contains a big flaw: the retina is inside out. Why would an almighty designer do such a thing? No intelligent designer, .. would put such a clumsy arrangement in a camcorder, and this is just one of the hundreds of accidents frozen in evolutionary history that confirm the mindlessness of the historical process.
religion agents approval
Religion is defined as social systems whose participants avow a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought.
writing people doubt
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.
religion atheism force
There are no forces on this planet more dangerous to all of us than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism.
gratitude blessing ideas
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.
faith believe order
I am confident that those who believe in belief are wrong. That is, we no more need to preserve the myth of God in order to preserve a just and stable society than we needed to cling to the Gold Standard to keep our currency sound. It was a useful crutch, but we've outgrown it. Denmark, according to a recent study, is the sanest, healthiest, happiest, most crime-free nation in the world, and by and large the Danes simply ignore the God issue. We should certainly hope that those who believe in belief are wrong, because belief is waning fast, and the props are beginning to buckle.
ignorance forever religion
Religions have depended on the relative isolation and ignorance of their flocks, forever and this is all breaking down.
religion thank-god debt
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.
technology understanding pace
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.
church pay matter
Churches have given us great treasures such as music and architecture. Whether that pays for the harm they have done is another matter.
cute girl sexy
It stands to reason that we love chocolate cake because it is sweet. Guys go for girls like this because they are sexy. We adore babies because they're so cute. And, of course, we are amused by jokes because they are funny. This is all backwards. It is. And Darwin shows us why.
law people roles
After Darwin, God's role changes from being the designer of all creatures great and small to being the designer of the laws of nature, from which natural selection can unfold, to being perhaps just the chooser of the laws. By the time God's role has been so diminished, he becomes a bit like a constitutional monarch, presiding ceremonially but not having any more work to do. That's a place for God if it makes people comfortable to keep God as the presider over the universe. I suppose that is satisfying for many.
knowledge may limits
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.