Michael Shermer quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Michael Shermer

Michael Shermer Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Michael Shermer on Wise Famous Quotes.

For solving a surprisingly large and varied number of problems, crowds are smarter than individuals.

Anecdotal thinking comes naturally; science requires training.

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.

Scientific prayer makes God a celestial lab rat, leading to bad science and worse religion.

An uncertain and doubting mind leads to fresh world visions and the possibility of new and ever-changing realities.

We are a fluke of nature, a quirk of evolution, a glorious contingency.

Absolute morality leads logically to absolute intolerance.

Accepting evolution does not force us to jettison our morals and ethics, and rejecting evolution does not ensure their constancy.

We think of our eyes as video cameras and our brains as blank tapes to be filled with sensory inputs.

Tenure in any department is serious business, because it means, essentially, employment for life.

Skepticism is not a position; skepticism is an approach to claims, in the same way that science is not a subject but a method.

Humans are pattern-seeking story-telling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns, whether they exist or not.

The belief that all knowledge is culturally determined and therefore lacks certainty is largely the product of an uncertain cultural milieu.

But because we live in an age of science, we have a preoccupation with corroborating our myths.

Myths are stories that express meaning, morality or motivation. Whether they are true or not is irrelevant.

Reality exists independent of human minds, but our understanding of it depends upon the beliefs we hold at any given time.

The concept of God is generated by a brain designed by evolution to find design in nature (a very recursive idea).

Because of the complexity of the problem, environmental skepticism was once tenable. No longer. It is time to flip from skepticism to activism.

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.

People believe in God because we are pattern-seeking, storytelling, mythmaking, religious, moral animals.

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.

We know evolution happened because innumerable bits of data from myriad fields of science conjoin to paint a rich portrait of life's pilgrimage.

Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.

In principle, skeptics are neither closed-minded nor cynical. We are curious but cautious.

We do not just blindly concede control to authorities; instead we follow the cues provided by our moral communities on how best to behave.

Being a skeptic just means being rational and empirical: thinking and seeing before believing.

Skepticism is not a position; it's a process.

Either the soul survives death or it does not, and there is no scientific evidence that it does.

Machine intelligence of a human nature could be a century away, and immortality is at least a millennium away, if not unattainable altogether.

I'm a skeptic not because I do not want to believe, but because I want to know.

There is no such thing as the supernatural or the paranormal. There is only the natural, the normal, and mysteries we have yet to explain.

Providentially, learned habits can be unlearned, especially in the context of moral groups.

To be a fully functioning moral agent, one cannot passively accept moral principles handed down by fiat. Moral principles require moral reasoning.

When alien abductees recount to me their stories, I do not deny that they had a real experience.

But there is only one surefire method of proper pattern recognition, and that is science.

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.

The reason is that in a group, individual errors on either side of the true figure cancel each other out.

The principal barrier to a general acceptance of the monist position is that it is counterintuitive.

Remember always that we are pattern-seeking primates who are especially adept at finding patterns with emotional meaning.

Human history is highly nonlinear and unpredictable.

I care what is actually true, even more than what I hope is true.

Skepticism is not a position that you stake out ahead of time and stick to no matter what.

I just witnessed an event so mysterious that it shook my skepticism.

False belief that morality can have a unique and objective state - to

The fate of the paranormal is to become the normal as our horizons of understanding expand.

In the long run, it is better to understand the way the world really is rather than how we would like it to be.

Rationality tied to moral decency is the most powerful joint instrument for good that our planet has ever known.

The "hypocrite" is the critic who disguises his own failings by focusing attention on the failings of others.

Conspiracies are a perennial favorite for television producers because there is always a receptive audience.

Dualists hold that body and soul are separate entities and that the soul will continue beyond the existence of the physical body.

There is a significant difference between having no belief in a God and believing there is no God ...

Flawed as they may be, science and the secular Enlightenment values expressed in Western democracies are our best hope for survival.

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.

The whole point of faith, in fact, is to believe regardless of the evidence, which is the very antithesis of science.

Skeptics question the validity of a particular claim by calling for evidence to prove or disprove it.

'Are science and religion compatible?' It's like [asking]: 'Are science and plumbing compatible?' They're just two different things.

One, I am skeptical of the effectiveness of nutritional supplements.