John Dupré

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

"The limits of a creature’s consciousness are closely related to its particular set of capacities. As I shall elaborate in a moment, language provides us with an extraordinarily enhanced set of capacit…"

"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…"

"Faith is, I suppose, a rough synonym for belief, with an additional connotation that this belief is not grounded on anything. This is a difficult concept to take seriously from a philosophical point o…"

"And that is the real force of my earlier insistence on empiricism. My brand of empiricism does not insist that we must have fully compelling grounds for the things we believe, or indeed that we can fi…"

"Darwin and his intellectual descendants have provided us with fundamental insight into the nature of the world we live in and of our place within it, a contribution to our basic metaphysics. It is sti…"

"The main point I want to make in this chapter is that prior to the development of a convincing theory of evolution there was an argument of sorts for belief in God, and an argument that could have bee…"

"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. Th…"