110+ Daniel Dennett Quotes On Religion, God And Cognitive

Daniel Dennett was an American philosopher, writer, and cognitive scientist. He was a key figure in the fields of philosophy of mind and philosophy of science, and is best known for his work on the philosophy of consciousness and the philosophical implications of evolutionary biology. He was also one of the most prominent atheists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Daniel Dennett on religion, god, cognitive.

Top 10 Daniel Dennett Quotes

1. Life itself is just a thin coat of paint on the planet, and we hold the paintbrush.
2. 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.
3. The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them-especially not from yourself.
4. There are no forces on this planet more dangerous to all of us than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism.
5. A child raised on a desert island, alone, without social interaction, without language, and thus lacking empathy, is still a sentient being.
6. There is no polite way to suggest to someone that they have devoted their life to a folly.
7. No matter how smart you are, you're smarter if you take the easy ways when they are available.
8. I think religion for many people is some sort of moral viagra.
9. 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.
10. 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 Short Quotes

• Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery.
• Words are memes that can be pronounced.
• True, you don't have to be religious to be crazy, but it helps.
• The way evolution always discovers reasons is by retroactive endorsement.
• Problems in science are sometimes made easier by adding complications.
• The only answer to the endless chains of why, why, why is that the alternatives died
• A scholar is just a library's way of making another library.
• We have had plenty of atheist presidents; they just wouldn't admit it.
• I am a philosopher, not a scientist, and we philosophers are better at questions than answers.
• AI makes philosophy honest

Daniel Dennett Quotes About Religion

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

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. — Daniel Dennett

Religion is defined as social systems whose participants avow a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought. — Daniel Dennett

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. — Daniel Dennett

Whereas religions may serve a benign purpose by letting many people feel comfortable with the level of morality they themselves can attain, no religion holds its member to the high standards of moral responsibility that the secular world of science and medicine does! — Daniel Dennett

You can't get through seminary and come out believing in God! — Daniel Dennett

... there could be talking bunny rabbits, spiders who write English messages in their webs, and for that matter, melancholy choo-choo trains. There could be, I suppose, but there aren't-so my theory doesn't have to explain them. — Daniel Dennett

...but I also can't prove that mushrooms could not be intergalactic spaceships spying on us. — Daniel Dennett

I even agree that the concept of god helps some people lead better lives. That does happen. Don't ever forget it. I just think there are better ways to help people lead better lives. — Daniel Dennett

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. — Daniel Dennett

Daniel Dennett Quotes About God

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. — Daniel Dennett

I don't myself need that role for God. My view is that creation itself, the universe itself, is the most wonderful thing deserving awe and respect. And that satisfies me as my substitute for God. — Daniel Dennett

Most people in the West who say they believe in God actually believe in belief in God. — Daniel Dennett

Reasons for declaring belief is not are not the same as reasons for believing in god. — Daniel Dennett

Daniel Dennett Quotes About People

Darwin's idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition. — Daniel Dennett

I think many people are terribly afraid of being demoted by the Darwinian scheme from the role of authors and creators in their own right into being just places where things happen in the universe. — Daniel Dennett

I am inclined to think that nothing could matter more than what people love. At any rate, I can think of no value that I would place higher. I would not want to live in a world without love. — Daniel Dennett

People ache to believe that we human beings are vastly different from all other species - and they are right! We are different. We are the only species that has an extra medium of design preservation and design communication: culture. — Daniel Dennett

I don't think the 9/11 attacks taught us anything we didn't already know about religion. It has long been obvious - even to the deeply religious - that religious fanaticism is an extremely dangerous deranger of otherwise sane and goodhearted people. — Daniel Dennett

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

People are afraid of being more ignorant than their children―especially, apparantly, their daughters. — Daniel Dennett

I'm the guy who reputedly denies that people experience colors or pains, and thinks that thermostats think — just ask my critics. — Daniel Dennett

Daniel Dennett Quotes About System

The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain anymore so it eats it! — Daniel Dennett

Up till now, we can suppose, nervous systems solved the 'Now what do I do?' problem by a relatively simple balancing act between a strictly limited repertoire of actions - if not the famous four F's (fight, flee, feed, or mate), then a modest elaboration of them. — Daniel Dennett

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 Dennett

The earth has grown a nervous system, and it's us. — Daniel Dennett

Daniel Dennett Famous Quotes And Sayings

Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery... a topic that often leaves even the most sophisticated thinkers tongue-tied and confused. And, as with all of the earlier mysteries, there are many who insist - and hope - that there will never be a demystification of consciousness. — Daniel Dennett

Are zombies possible? They're not just possible, they're actual. We're all zombies. Nobody is conscious — not in the systematically mysterious way that supports such doctrines as epiphenomenalism. *It would be an act of desperate intellectual dishonesty to quote this assertion out of context! — 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

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. — Daniel Dennett

Some philosophers can't bear to say simple things, like "Suppose a dog bites a man." They feel obliged instead to say, "Suppose a dog d bites a man m at time t," thereby demonstrating their unshakable commitment to logical rigor, even though they don't go on to manipulate any formulae involving d, m, and t. — Daniel Dennett

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 Dennett

Philosophers are never quite sure what they are talking about - about what the issues really are - and so often it takes them rather a long time to recognize that someone with a somewhat different approach (or destination, or starting point) is making a contribution. — Daniel Dennett

The point of asking questions is to find true answers; the point of measuring is to measure accurately; the point of making maps is to find your way to your destination... In short, the goal of truth goes without saying, in every human culture. — Daniel Dennett

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. — Daniel Dennett

Try to acquire the weird practice of savoring your mistakes, delighting in uncovering the strange quirks that led you astray. Then, when you have sucked out all the goodness to be gained from having made them, you can cheerfully forget them and go on to the next big opportunity. — Daniel Dennett

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. — Daniel Dennett

There's no polite way to say to somebody (religious followers) 'Do you realize you've wasted your life? — Daniel Dennett

There is no reality of consciousness independent of the effects of various vehicles of content on subsequent action (and hence, of course, on memory). — Daniel Dennett

Consciousness is cerebral celebrity--nothing more and nothing less. Those contents are conscious that persevere, that monopolize resources long enough to achieve certain typical and "symptomatic" effects--on memory, on the control of behavior and so forth. — Daniel Dennett

I think that there are no forces on this planet more dangerous to us all than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism, of all the species: Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, as well as countless smaller infections. Is there a conflict between science and religion here? There most certainly is. — Daniel Dennett

The haven all memes depend on reaching is the human mind, but a human mind is itself an artifact created when memes restructure a human brain in order to make it a better habitat for memes. — Daniel Dennett

Love is blind, as they say, and because love is blind, it often leads to tragedy: to conflicts in which one love is pitted against another love, and something has to give, with suffering guaranteed in any resolution. — Daniel Dennett

The kindly God who lovingly fashioned each and every one of us and sprinkled the sky with shining stars for our delight - that God is, like Santa Claus, a myth of childhood, not anything [that] a sane, undeluded adult could literally believe in. That God must either be turned into a symbol for something less concrete or abandoned altogether. — Daniel Dennett

It is not so much that we, using our brains, spin our yarns, as that our brains, using yarns, spin us. — Daniel Dennett

Some of the greatest, most revolutionary advances in science have been given their initial expression in attractively modest terms, with no fanfare. — Daniel Dennett

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. — Daniel Dennett

How good are the best musical imaginations? Can a trained musician, swiftly reading a score tell just how that voicing of dissonant oboes and flutes over the massed strings will sound? — Daniel Dennett

In 50 years - or 20 years, or 200 years - our current epistemic horizon (the Big Bang, roughly) may look as parochial as the horizon Newton had to settle for in his day, but no doubt there will still be good questions whose answers elude us. — Daniel Dennett

Words have a genealogy and it's easier to trace the evolution of a single word than the evolution of a language. — Daniel Dennett

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. — Daniel Dennett

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. — Daniel Dennett

Some cultural phenomena bear a striking resemblance to the cells of cell biology, actively preserving themselves in their social environments, finding the nutrients they need and fending off the causes of their dissolution. — Daniel Dennett

If the history of resistance to Darwinian thinking is a good measure, we can expect that long into the future, long after every triumph of human thought has been matched or surpassed by 'mere machines,' there will still be thinkers who insist that the human mind works in mysterious ways that no science can comprehend. — Daniel Dennett

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. — Daniel Dennett

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

Human freedom is not an illusion; it is an objective phenomenon, distinct from all other biological conditions and found in only one species - us. — Daniel Dennett

Every living thing is, from the cosmic perspective, incredibly lucky simply to be alive. Most, 90 percent and more, of all the organisms that have ever lived have died without viable offspring, but not a single one of your ancestors, going back to the dawn of life on Earth, suffered that normal misfortune. You spring from an unbroken line of winners. — Daniel Dennett

If you can approach the world's complexities, both its glories and its horrors, with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have seen, you have only scratched the surface, you will find worlds within worlds, beauties you could not heretofore imagine, and your own mundane preoccupations will shrink to proper size, not all that important in the greater scheme of things. — Daniel Dennett

An inert historical fact is any fact about a perfectly ordinary arrangement of matter in the world at some point in the past that is no longer discernible, a fact that has left no footprints at all in the world today. — Daniel Dennett

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

We should get used to the idea that we'll probably never be able to find - and confirm - a good explanation of the ultimate origin of the universe, though I see no reason to believe that we can't press much further on this question than we have managed to date. — Daniel Dennett

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

The mind is the effect, not the cause. — Daniel Dennett

In short, we need to recover the courage we celebrate in our heroes, and in particular, the courage to tolerate, for the sake of a free society, a level of risk we hardly ever imagined in the past. — Daniel Dennett

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

Cost is always an object - the second law of thermodynamics sees to that — Daniel Dennett

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. — Daniel Dennett

I have shown that those who deplore Artificial Intelligence are also those who deplore the evolutionary accounts of human mentality: if human minds are non-miraculous products of evolution, then they are, in the requisite sense, artifacts, and all their powers must have an ultimately mechanical explanation. We are descended from macros and made of macros, and nothing we can do is beyond the power of huge assemblies of macros. — Daniel Dennett

Not a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares. — Daniel Dennett

If I were to give a prize for the single best idea anybody ever had, I'd give it to Darwin for the idea of natural selection - ahead of Newton, ahead of Einstein - because his idea unites the two most disparate features of our universe: the world of purposeless, meaningless matter and motion, particles jostling on the one side, and the world of meaning and purpose, design on the other. — Daniel Dennett

In order to make a perfect and beautiful machine, it is not requisite to know how to make it. All the works of human genius can be understood in the end to be products of a cascade of generate-and-test procedures that are, at bottom, algorithmic and mindless. — Daniel Dennett

Has it ever occurred to you how lucky you are to be alive? More than 99 percent of all the creatures that have ever lived have died without progeny, but not a single one of your ancestors falls into that group! ... Not a single one of your ancestors, all the way back to the bacteria, succumbed to predation before reproducing, or lost out in the competition for a mate. — Daniel Dennett

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

Natural selection is not gene centrist and nor is biology all about genes; our comprehending minds are a result of our fast evolving culture. — Daniel Dennett

In fact, if you are faced with the prospect of running across an open field in which lightning bolts are going to be a problem, you are much better off if their timing and location are determined by something, since then they may be predictable by you, and hence avoidable. Determinism is the friend, not the foe, of those who dislike inevitability. — Daniel Dennett

Let me lay my cards on the table. If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone ever had, I'd give it to Darwin, ahead of even Newton or Einstein and everyone else. In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning, and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law. It is not just a wonderful idea. It is a dangerous idea. — Daniel Dennett

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. — Daniel Dennett

While we tend to conceive of the operations of the mind as unified and transparent, they're actually chaotic and opaque. There's no invisible boss in the brain, no central meaner, no unitary self in command of our activities and utterances. There's no internal spectator of a Cartesian theater in our heads to applaud the march of consciousness across its stage. — Daniel Dennett

Postmodernism, the school of 'thought' that proclaimed 'There are no truths, only interpretations' has largely played itself out in absurdity, but it has left behind a generation of academics in the humanities disabled by their distrust of the very idea of truth and their disrespect for evidence, settling for 'conversations' in which nobody is wrong and nothing can be confirmed, only asserted with whatever style you can muster. — Daniel Dennett

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

Those who feel guilty contemplating "betraying" the tradition they love by acknowledging their disapproval of elements within it should reflect on the fact that the very tradition to which they are so loyal—the "eternal" tradition introduced to them in their youth—is in fact the evolved product of many adjustments firmly but delicately made by earlier lovers of the same tradition. — Daniel Dennett

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

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. — Daniel Dennett

Highly technical philosophical arguments of the sort many philosophers favor are absent here. That is because I have a prior problem to deal with. I have learned that arguments, no matter how watertight, often fall on deaf ears. I am myself the author of arguments that I consider rigorous and unanswerable but that are often not such much rebutted or even dismissed as simply ignored. — Daniel Dennett

Philosophers' Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity. — Daniel Dennett

If the best the roboticists can hope for is the creation of some crude, cheesy, second-rate, artificial consciousness, they still win. — Daniel Dennett

I should emphasize this, to keep well-meaning but misguided multiculturalists at bay: the theoretical entities in which these tribal people frankly believe — the gods and other spirits — don't exist. These people are mistaken, and you know it as well as I do. It is possible for highly intelligent people to have a very useful but mistaken theory, and we don't have to pretend otherwise in order to show respect for these people and their ways. — Daniel Dennett

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. — Daniel Dennett

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. — Daniel Dennett

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

When people ask me what philosophy is, I say philosophy is what you do when you don't know what the right questions are yet. Once you get the questions right, then you go answer them, and that's typically not philosophy, that's one science or another. Anywhere in life where you find that people aren't quite sure what the right questions to ask are, what they're doing, then, is philosophy. — Daniel Dennett

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. — Daniel Dennett

Imagination is cheap as long as you don't have to worry about the details. — Daniel Dennett

Life Lessons by Daniel Dennett

1. Daniel Dennett encourages us to think critically and question our beliefs in order to form our own understanding of the world. He also emphasizes the importance of understanding the consequences of our actions and taking responsibility for them.
2. Dennett believes we should strive to be honest and open-minded, and to make sure we are not influenced by our own biases or preconceived notions.
3. He encourages us to be humble and to remember that we don't have all the answers, but that we can learn from our mistakes and grow as individuals.