“If we are going to use this top-down approach, we are going to have to be bold. We are going to have to be speculative, but there is good and bad speculation, and this is not an unparalleled activity in science. … Those scientists who have no taste for this sort of speculative enterprise will just have to stay in the trenches and do without it, while the rest of us risk embarrassing mistakes and have a lot of fun.”
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Daniel Dennett 86
American philosopher 1942Related quotes

Nobel Lecture http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1995/perl-lecture.html, Martin L. Perl, The Nobel Prize in Physics 1995
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“Speculations? I have none. I am resting on certainties.”
When asked about his speculations on life beyond death, as quoted in The Homiletic Review (April 1896), p. 442
Context: Speculations? I have none. I am resting on certainties. I know whom I have believed and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day.
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Variant: Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are.

Source: The God of Jane: A Psychic Manifesto (1981), p. 58
Context: When we believe that science or religion "has the truth," we stop our speculations. While still referring to the theory of evolution, science accepts it as a fact, about existence, and therefore any speculation that threatens that theory becomes almost heretical. So often it seems that there is no other choice in the matter of man's origin than a meaningless universe and an earth populated by creatures who fight for survival, or a universe created by Christianity's objectified God. And to me, at least, the Eastern religions present no acceptable answers, either.