Michael Shermer
Tenure in any department is serious business, because it means, essentially, employment for life.
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.
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.
Having a Nobel Prize or being a famous scientist will get you a week to a week and a half, metaphorically speaking, of a hearing for your new idea, but after that, it's going to tank if you don't have the evidence and support for it.
In the past 10,000 years, humans have devised roughly 100,000 religions based on roughly 2,500 gods. So the only difference between myself and the believers is that I am skeptical of 2,500 gods whereas they are skeptical of 2,499 gods. We're only one God away from total agreement.Collection: Funny
Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.Collection: Smart
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.Collection: Believe
Humans are, by nature, pattern-seeking, storytelling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns whether they exist or not.Collection: Animal
In science , all conclusions are provisional, subject to new evidence and better arguments, the very antithesis of religious faith.Collection: Faith
The whole point of faith, in fact, is to believe regardless of the evidence, which is the very antithesis of science.Collection: Atheist
There is a significant difference between having no belief in a God and believing there is no God.Collection: Believe
Myths are about the human struggle to deal with the great passages of time and life--birth, death, marriage, the transitions from childhood to adulthood to old age. They meet a need in the psychological or spiritual nature of humans that has absolutely nothing to do with science. To try to turn a myth into a science, or a science into a myth, is an insult to myths, an insult to religion, and an insult to science. In attempting to do this, creationists have missed the significance, meaning, and sublime nature of myths. They took a beautiful story of creation and re-creation and ruined it.Collection: Beautiful
Science is not the affirmation of a set of beliefs but a process of inquiry aimed at building a testable body of knowledge constantly open to rejection or confirmation. In science, knowledge is fluid and certainty fleeting. That is at the heart of its limitations. It is also its greatest strength.Collection: Heart
People have a hard time accepting free-market economics for the same reason they have a hard time accepting evolution: it is counterintuitive. Life looks intelligently designed, so our natural inclination is to infer that there must be an intelligent designer--a God. Similarly, the economy looks designed, so our natural inclination is to infer that we need a designer--a government. In fact, emergence and complexity theory explains how the principles of self-organization and emergence cause complex systems to arise from simple systems without a top-down designer.Collection: Intelligent
Absolute morality leads logically to absolute intolerance.Collection: Morality
Myths, whether in written or visual form, serve a vital role of asking unanswerable questions and providing unquestionable answers. Most of us, most of the time, have a low tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty. We want to reduce the cognitive dissonance of not knowing by filling the gaps with answers. Traditionally, religious myths have served that role, but today — the age of science — science fiction is our mythology.Collection: Religious
Remember always that we are pattern-seeking primates who are especially adept at finding patterns with emotional meaning.Collection: Emotional
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.Collection: Ideas
Skepticism is not a position; skepticism is an approach to claims, in the same way that science is not a subject but a method.Collection: Way
I’m a skeptic not because I do not want to believe, but because I want to know.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Motivation
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.Collection: Atheism
Scientists like Bjorn Lomborg in The Skeptical Environmentalist have, in my opinion, properly nailed environmental extremists for these exaggerated scenarios.Collection: Environmental
The question itself [of UFOs] I think is legitimate. It's interesting, it's fascinating. It's mythic in scale and one of the grand questions. It's like the God question or, you know, the meaning-of-life question. It's one of those, on that scale. So you'd have to be made of wood not to be interested and, you know, have they come here? Are they up there?Collection: Thinking
Perceiving the world as well designed and thus the product of a designer, and even seeing divine providence in the daily affairs of life, may be the product of a brain adapted to finding patterns in nature. (38)Collection: Brain
We want to be special. We want our place in the cosmos to be central. We want evolution-even godless evolution-to have been directed toward us so that we stand at the pinnacle of nature's ladder of progress. Rewind the tape of life and we want to believe that we (Homo Sapiens) would appear again and again. Would we? Probably not.Collection: Believe
The concept of God is generated by a brain designed by evolution to find design in nature (a very recursive idea).Collection: Ideas
Are science and religion compatible? It's like, are science and plumbing compatible? They're just two different things.Collection: God
People believe in God because we are pattern-seeking, storytelling, mythmaking, religious, moral animals.Collection: Religious
It is sad that while science moves ahead in exciting new areas of research, fine-tuning our knowledge of how life originated and evolved, creationists remain mired in medieval debates about angels on the head of a pin and animals in the belly of an Ark.Collection: Moving
No such individual would find the Golden Rule surprising in any way because at its base lies the foundation of most human interactions and exchanges and it can be found in countless texts throughout recorded history and from around the world - a testimony to its universality.Collection: Lying
We're all talking about the same thing, whether it's religious people or New Age spiritual people or Buddhists or scientists. We're all talking about having a sense of awe and wonder at something grander than ourselves.Collection: Spiritual
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.Collection: Mind
Intelligent Design is a remarkably uncreative theory that abandons the search for understanding at the very point where it is most needed. If Intelligent Design is really a science, then the burden is on its scientists to discover the mechanisms used by the Intelligent Designer. (80)Collection: Intelligent
Because of the complexity of the problem, environmental skepticism was once tenable. No longer. It is time to flip from skepticism to activism.Collection: Environmental
The human capacity for self-delusion is boundless, and the effects of belief are overpowering.Collection: Self
Since humans are by nature tribal, the overall goal is to expand the concept of the tribe to include ALL members of the species, in a global free society.Collection: Goal
I am an atheist. There, I said it. Are you happy, all you atheists out there who have remonstrated with me for adopting the agnostic moniker? If "atheist" means someone who does not believe in God, then an atheist is what I am. But I detest all such labels. Call me what you like - humanist, secular humanist, agnostic, nonbeliever, nontheist, freethinker, heretic, or even bright. I prefer skeptic.Collection: Atheist
How can we find spiritual meaning in a scientific worldview? Spirituality is a way of being in the world, a sense of one’s place in the cosmos, a relationship to that which extends beyond oneself. . . . Does scientific explanation of the world diminish its spiritual beauty? I think not. Science and spirituality are complementary, not conflicting; additive, not detractive. Anything that generates a sense of awe may be a source of spirituality. Science does this in spades. (158-159)Collection: Spiritual
Skepticism is not a position; it's a process.Collection: Process
People who espouse Intelligent Design believe nature is so complex as to require an intelligent designer-God. Similarly, liberals believe the economy is so complex as to require an intelligent designer-government.Collection: Believe
Machine intelligence of a human nature could be a century away, and immortality is at least a millennium away, if not unattainable altogether.Collection: Machines
Ultimately all hominids came from Africa, and therefore everyone in America should simply check the box next to 'African-American.' My maternal grandmother was German and my maternal grandfather was Greek. The next time I fill out one of those forms I am going to check 'Other' and write in the truth about my racial and cultural heritage: 'African-Greek-German-American.' And proud of it.Collection: Writing
We want to be open-minded enough to accept radial new ideas when they occasionally come along, but we don't want to be so open-minded that our brains fall out.Collection: Fall
As Enlightenment philosophers and scholars consciously adopted the methods of science to establish such abstract concepts as rights, liberty, and justice, successive generations have become schooled in thinking of these abstractions as applied to others in matrices-like mental rotations.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Liberty
If spirituality is the sense of awe and humility in the face of the creation, what could be more awesome and humbling than the deep space discovered by Hubble and the cosmologists, and the deep time discovered by Darwin and the evolutionists.Collection: Humility
I just witnessed an event so mysterious that it shook my skepticism.Collection: Events
Creationists have also changed their name ... to intelligent design theorists who study 'irreducible complexity' and the 'abrupt appearance' of life-yet more jargon for 'God did it.' ... Notice that they have no interest in replacing evolution with native American creation myths or including the Code of Hammarabi alongside the posting of the Ten Commandments in public schools.Collection: Native American