38 quotes
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.
The distinction between responsible moral agents and beings with diminished or no responsibility is coherent, real, and important.
Elbow Room (1984)
Wherever there is a conscious mind, there is a point of view.
Time and the observer (1995)
Every human mind you've ever looked at … is a product not just of natural selection but of cultural redesign of enormous proportions.
Kinds of Minds (1996)
Not a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares.
Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness (2005)
If Nietzsche is the father of existentialism, then perhaps Darwin deserves the title of grandfather.
Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)
I think religion for many people is some sort of moral viagra.
The Darwinian Revolution is both a scientific and a philosophical revolution, and neither revolution could have occurred without the other.
Good intentions and inspiration are simply not enough.
Thank Goodness! (2006)
We really have to think of reasoning the way we think of romance, it takes two to tango. There has to be a communication.
Goodness comes in many forms, not just medicine and science.
Thank Goodness! (2006)
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.
Kinds Of Minds: Toward An Understanding Of Consciousness (2008)
The utility of a thought experiment is inversely proportional to the size of its departures from reality.
Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking (2013)
A prosthetically enhanced imagination is still liable to failure, especially if it is not used with sufficient rigor.
Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)
The methods of science aren't foolproof, but they are indefinitely perfectible. Just as important: there is a tradition of criticism that enforces improvement whenever and wherever flaws are discovered.
Postmodernism and truth (1998)
Friends were anxious to learn if I had had a near-death experience, and if so, what effect it had had on my longstanding public atheism.
Thank Goodness! (2006)
The earth has grown a nervous system, and it's us.
The Genius of Charles Darwin (2008)
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.
The Intentional Stance (1987)
A philosopher is someone who says, "We know it's possible in practice; we're trying to work out if it's possible in principle!"
Breaking the Spell (2006)
Animals are not just herbivores or carnivores. They are, in the nice coinage of the psychologist George Miller, informavores.
Kinds of Minds (1996)