Michael Shermer Quotes
The recent medical controversy over whether vaccinations cause autism reveals a habit of human cognition — thinking anecdotally comes naturally, whereas thinking scientifically does not.
Science is not a thing. It's a verb. It's a way of thinking about things. It's a way of looking for natural explanations for all phenomena.
Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.
I’m a skeptic not because I do not want to believe, but because I want to know. How can we tell the difference between what we would like to be true and what is actually true? The answer is science.
Religious faith depends on a host of social, psychological and emotional factors that have little or nothing to do with probabilities, evidence and logic.
Humans are, by nature, pattern-seeking, storytelling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns whether they exist or not.
But the power of science lies in open publication, which, with the rise of the Internet, is no longer constrained by the price of paper.
In comparison, Google is brilliant because it uses an algorithm that ranks Web pages by the number of links to them, with those links themselves valued by the number of links to their page of origin.
Either the soul survives death or it does not, and there is no scientific evidence that it does.
There is a significant difference between having no belief in a God and believing there is no God.
In the long run, it is better to understand the way the world really is rather than how we would like it to be.
The price of liberty is, in addition to eternal vigilance, eternal patience with the vacuous blather occasionally expressed from behind the shield of free speech.
Belief is the natural state of things. It is the default option. We just believe. We believe all sorts of things. Belief is natural; disbelief, skepticism, science, is not natural.
To be a fully functioning moral agent, one cannot passively accept moral principles handed down by fiat. Moral principles require moral reasoning.
Believing that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator when it is only the wind does not cost much, but believing that a dangerous predator is the wind may cost an animal its life.
A Hubble Space Telescope photograph of the universe evokes far more awe for creation than light streaming through a stained glass window in a cathedral.
Mysteries once thought to be supernatural or paranormal happenings - such as astronomical or meteorological events - are incorporated into science once their causes are understood.
We think of our eyes as video cameras and our brains as blank tapes to be filled with sensory inputs.
The concept of God is generated by a brain designed by evolution to find design in nature (a very recursive idea).
Being a skeptic just means being rational and empirical: thinking and seeing before believing.
Accepting evolution does not force us to jettison our morals and ethics, and rejecting evolution does not ensure their constancy.
Myths are stories that express meaning, morality or motivation. Whether they are true or not is irrelevant.
Mammals are sentient beings that want to live and are afraid to die. Evolution vouchsafed us all with an instinct to survive, reproduce and flourish.
Skepticism is not a position; skepticism is an approach to claims, in the same way that science is not a subject but a method.
In science, if an idea is not falsifiable, it is not that it is wrong, it is that we cannot determine if it is wrong, and thus it is not even wrong.
We do not just blindly concede control to authorities; instead we follow the cues provided by our moral communities on how best to behave.
In principle, skeptics are neither closed-minded nor cynical. We are curious but cautious.
The actual atoms and molecules that make up my brain and body today are not the same ones that I was born with on September 8, 1954, a half-century ago this month.
So, of course, Gish's presentation was well received, which it would have been the case had he only gotten up and said "praise the Lord" and sat back down.
The fate of the paranormal is to become the normal as our horizons of understanding expand.
But there is only one surefire method of proper pattern recognition, and that is science.
Scientists like Bjorn Lomborg in The Skeptical Environmentalist have, in my opinion, properly nailed environmental extremists for these exaggerated scenarios.
When alien abductees recount to me their stories, I do not deny that they had a real experience.
We know evolution happened because innumerable bits of data from myriad fields of science conjoin to paint a rich portrait of life's pilgrimage.
The whole point of faith, in fact, is to believe regardless of the evidence, which is the very antithesis of science.
People believe in God because we are pattern-seeking, storytelling, mythmaking, religious, moral animals.
For solving a surprisingly large and varied number of problems, crowds are smarter than individuals.
My thesis is that morality exists outside the human mind in the sense of being not just a trait of individual humans, but a human trait; that is, a human universal.
Scientific prayer makes God a celestial lab rat, leading to bad science and worse religion.
Through no divine design or cosmic plan, we have inherited the mantle of life's caretaker on the earth, the only home we have ever known.
Are science and religion compatible? It's like, are science and plumbing compatible? They're just two different things.
Flawed as they may be, science and the secular Enlightenment values expressed in Western democracies are our best hope for survival.
Dualists hold that body and soul are separate entities and that the soul will continue beyond the existence of the physical body.
Skepticism is not a position that you stake out ahead of time and stick to no matter what.