Words matter. These are the best Michael Shermer Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
We know evolution happened because innumerable bits of data from myriad fields of science conjoin to paint a rich portrait of life’s pilgrimage.
One, I am skeptical of the effectiveness of nutritional supplements.
Scientific prayer makes God a celestial lab rat, leading to bad science and worse religion.
Scientists are skeptics. It’s unfortunate that the word ‘skeptic’ has taken on other connotations in the culture involving nihilism and cynicism. Really, in its pure and original meaning, it’s just thoughtful inquiry.
As a social primate species, we modulate our morals with signals from family, friends and social groups with whom we identify because in our evolutionary past, those attributes helped individuals to survive and reproduce.
In the long run, it is better to understand the way the world really is rather than how we would like it to be.
Providentially, learned habits can be unlearned, especially in the context of moral groups.
Being a skeptic just means being rational and empirical: thinking and seeing before believing.
Science operates in the natural, not the supernatural. In fact, I go so far as to state that there is no such thing as the supernatural or the paranormal.
The principal barrier to a general acceptance of the monist position is that it is counterintuitive.
No single discovery from any of these fields denotes proof of evolution, but together they reveal that life evolved in a certain sequence by a particular process.
I always accepted the libertarian position of minimum regulation in the sale and use of firearms because I placed guns under the beneficial rubric of minimal restrictions on individuals.
Skeptics question the validity of a particular claim by calling for evidence to prove or disprove it.
We do not just blindly concede control to authorities; instead we follow the cues provided by our moral communities on how best to behave.
When religious believers invoke miracles and acts of creation ex nihilo, that is the end of the search for them, whereas for scientists, the identification of such mysteries is only the beginning. Science picks up where theology leaves off.
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.
Conspiracies are a perennial favorite for television producers because there is always a receptive audience.
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.
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.
Dualists hold that body and soul are separate entities and that the soul will continue beyond the existence of the physical body.
We think of our eyes as video cameras and our brains as blank tapes to be filled with sensory inputs.
When alien abductees recount to me their stories, I do not deny that they had a real experience.
Tenure in any department is serious business, because it means, essentially, employment for life.
Plato wove historical fact into literary myth.
Anecdotal thinking comes naturally; science requires training.
There are checks and balances in science. There’s somebody checking the people doing the science, and then there’s somebody who checks the checkers and somebody who checks the checker’s checkers.
In my experience, people are usually fired for reasons having to do with budgetary constraints, incompetence or not fulfilling the terms of a contract.
The reason people turn to supernatural explanations is that the mind abhors a vacuum of explanation. Because we do not yet have a fully natural explanation for mind and consciousness, people turn to supernatural explanations to fill the void.
Either the soul survives death or it does not, and there is no scientific evidence that it does.
We should be exploring consciousness at the neural level and higher, where the arrow of causal analysis points up toward such principles as emergence and self-organization.
In order to displace a prevailing theory or paradigm in science, it is not enough to merely point out what it cannot explain; you have to offer a new theory that explains more data, and do so in a testable way.
But there is only one surefire method of proper pattern recognition, and that is science.
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.
My libertarian beliefs have not always served me well. Like most people who hold strong ideological convictions, I find that, too often, my beliefs trump the scientific facts.
