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Empiricism provides the standard to which beliefs should answer. If we are capable of finding out what kind of world we live in, surely the best way of doing so is through our experience of it.

— John Dupré Darwin's Legacy: What Evolution Means Today (2003)

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More quotes by John Dupré

Obviously enough, we cannot decide what evolution entails without a fairly sharp conception of what it is.

Darwin's Legacy: What Evolution Means Today (2003)

Whatever the unique features of humans may be, there are realms of behaviour for which the similarities between ourselves and our near relatives are too great for it to be credible that in one case the behaviour reflects an underlying soul or mind, while in the other there is no such thing, only the grinding away of neural machinery.

Darwin's Legacy: What Evolution Means Today (2003)

One commonly held ideal of a possible good life is one spent in adoration of or service to the Supreme Being. It is hard to believe that the value of such a life is independent of whether there is, in fact, any such being to adore or serve. In sum, how we should live is a question that cannot be wholly separated from facts about how things are.

Darwin's Legacy: What Evolution Means Today (2003)

I should mention the possibility that there are moral rather than empirical reasons that favor religious belief. It is, of course, enormously problematic to offer as a sufficient reason for belief the suggestion that one would be better off believing it. This is generally described as wishful thinking.

Darwin's Legacy: What Evolution Means Today (2003)

Religious difference, arguably, remains the most effective basis for defending boundaries between them and us, and the withering away of this kind of mythology would, I think, be entirely salutary. This is to say nothing of the thought that it may well be better for people to believe what is true.

Darwin's Legacy: What Evolution Means Today (2003)

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