Daniel Dennett

Darwin's Dangerous Idea

"If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone has ever had, I'd give it to Darwin, ahead of Newton and 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."p21

"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." p46

[Plantinga reacts to this statement and to Dennett's entire case for evolution starting on pg33 of Where the Conflict Really Lies]

"An impersonal, unreflective, robotic, mindless little scrap of molecular machinery is the ultimate basis of all the agency, and hence meaning, and hence consciousness, in the universe." p203

[Plantinga responds on p35 of Where the Conflict Really Lies]

"The theory of natural selection shows how every feature of the world can be the product of a blind, unforesightful, nonteleological, ultimately mechanical process of differential reproduction over long periods of time." p315 "the power of the theory of natural selection is not the power to prove exactly how (pre)history was, but only the power to prove how it could have been, given what we know about how things are." p.319

The Bright Stuff

"The time has come for us brights to come out of the closet. What is a bright? A bright is a person with a naturalist as opposed to a supernaturalist world view. We brights don't believe in ghosts or the Easter Bunny - or God. We disagree about many things, and hold a variety of views about morality, politics and the meaning of life, but we share a disbelief in black magic - and life after death." [Dawkins signed on, but Hitchens called it 'cringe-making']