Daniel Dennett
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"Daniel Clement Dennett III" is an American philosopher, writer, and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science.

He is currently the Co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies, the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, and a Academic rank#United States/University Professor at Tufts University. Dennett is an atheist and secularism/secularist, a member of the Secular Coalition for America advisory board, as well as an outspoken supporter of the Brights movement. Dennett is referred to as one of the "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in popular culture/Four Horsemen of New Atheism", along with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris (author)/Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens.

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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.

[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.

After Darwin, God's role changes from being the designer of all creatures, great and small, to being the designer of the laws of nature, from which natural selection can unfold, to being just perhaps the chooser of the laws.

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

There's nothing I like less than bad arguments for a view that I hold dear.

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.

Life itself is just a thin coat of paint on the planet, and we hold the paintbrush.