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. Daniel Dennett More Quotes by Daniel Dennett More Quotes From Daniel Dennett The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them - especially not from yourself. Instead of turning away in denial when you make a mistake, you should become a connoisseur of your own mistakes, turning them over in your mind as if they were works of art, which in a way they are. Daniel Dennett mind mistake art Religions have depended on the relative isolation and ignorance of their flocks, forever and this is all breaking down. Daniel Dennett ignorance forever religion When people ask me what philosophy is, I say philosophy is what you do when Daniel Dennett answers philosophy people There is no polite way to suggest to someone that they have devoted their life to a folly. Daniel Dennett polite folly way 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. Daniel Dennett doubt writing people 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. Daniel Dennett atheism atheist art 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. Daniel Dennett growing-up scary children True, you don't have to be religious to be crazy, but it helps. Indeed, if you are religious, you don't have to be crazy in the medically certifiable sense in order to do massively crazy things. Daniel Dennett crazy religious order There is no such thing as philosophy-free science, just science that has been conducted without any consideration of its underlying philosophical assumptions. Daniel Dennett honesty integrity philosophy I am a philosopher, not a scientist, and we philosophers are better at questions than answers. Daniel Dennett philosopher scientist answers Most people in the West who say they believe in God actually believe in belief in God. Daniel Dennett atheism believe people I listen to all these complaints about rudeness and intemperateness, and the opinion that I come to is that there is no polite way of asking somebody: have you considered the possibility that your entire life has been devoted to a delusion? But that’s a good question to ask. Of course we should ask that question and of course it’s going to offend people. Tough. Daniel Dennett good-questions asking people Religion is defined as social systems whose participants avow a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought. Daniel Dennett agents approval religion It's this expandable capacity to represent reasons that we have that gives us a soul. But what's it made of? It's made of neurons. It's made of lots of tiny robots. And we can actually explain the structure and operation of that kind of soul, whereas an eternal, immortal, immaterial soul is just a metaphysical rug under which you sweep your embarrassment for not having any explanation. Daniel Dennett robots soul giving Virtually every major technological advance in the history of the human species- back to the invention of stone tools and the domestication of fire has been ethically ambiguous. If you want to reason about faith, and offer a reasoned (and reason responsive) defense of faith as an extra category of belief worthy of special consideration, I'm eager to play. I certainly grant the existence of the phenomenon of faith; what I want to see is a reasoned ground for taking faith seriously as a way of getting to the truth , and not, say, just as a way people comfort themselves and each other Daniel Dennett fire play people The task of the mind is to produce future, as the poet Paul Valery once put it. A mind is fundamentally an anticipator, an expectation-generator. It mines the present for clues, which it refines with the help of the materials it has saved from the past, turning them into anticipations of the future. And then it acts, rationally, on the basis of those hard-won anticipations. Daniel Dennett expectations mind past Homunculi are bogeymen only if they duplicate entire the talents they are rung in to explain. If one can get a team or committee of relatively ignorant, narrow-minded, blind homunculi to produce the intelligent behaviour of the whole, this is progress. Daniel Dennett ignorant team intelligent If the concept of consciousness were to fall to science, what would happen to our sense of moral agency and free will? If conscious experience were reduced somehow to mere matter in motion, what would happen to our appreciation of love and pain and dreams and joy? If conscious human beings were just animated material objects, how could anything we do to them be right or wrong? Daniel Dennett pain dream appreciation My faith in the expertise of physicists like Richard Feynman, for instance, permits me to endorse—and, if it comes to it, bet heavily on the truth of—a proposition that I don't understand. So far, my faith is not unlike religious faith, but I am not in the slightest bit motivated to go to my death rather than recant the formulas of physics. Watch: E doesn't equal mc2, it doesn't, it doesn't! I was lying, so there! Daniel Dennett richard-feynman religious lying The earth has grown a nervous system, and it's us. Daniel Dennett nervous-system nervous earth
