Michael Shermer Quotes

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

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

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

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.

Play hard, work hard, love hard ... The bottom line for me is to live life to the fullest in the here-and-now instead of a hoped-for hereafter, and make every day count in some meaningful way and do something-no matter how small it is-to make the world a better place.

Once beliefs are formed, the brain begins to look for and find confirmatory evidence in support of those beliefs, which adds an emotional boost of further confidence in the beliefs and thereby accelerates the process of reinforcing them, and round and round the process goes in a positive feedback loop of belief confirmation.

What is the probability that Yahweh is the one true god, and Amon Ra, Aphrodite, Apollo, Baal, Brahma, Ganesha, Isis, Mithra, Osiris, Shiva, Thor, Vishnu, Wotan, Zeus, and the other 986 gods are false gods? As skeptics like to say, everyone is an atheist about these gods; some of us just go one god further.

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.

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)

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.

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

Being deeply knowledgeable on one subject narrows one's focus and increases confidence, but it also blurs dissenting views until they are no longer visible, thereby transforming data collection into bias confirmation and morphing self-deception into self-assurance.

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.

Believers can have both religion and science as long as there is no attempt to make A non-A, to make reality unreal, to turn naturalism into supernaturalism. (125)

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)

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.

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.

There may be a genetic basis to how much dopamine each of our brains produces. The gene that codes for the production of dopamine is called DRD4 (dopamine receptor D4) and is located on the short arm of the eleventh chromosome. When dopamine is released by certain neurons in the brain it is picked up by other neurons that are receptive to its chemical structure, thereby establishing dopamine pathways that stimulate organisms to become more active and reward certain behaviors that then get repeated. If you knock out dopamine from either a rat or a human, for example, they will become catatonic. If you overstimulate the production of dopamine, you get frenetic behavior in rats and schizophrenic behavior in humans.

The Liberty Principle: It is a higher moral principle to always seek liberty with someone else's liberty in mind, and never seek liberty when it leads to someone else's loss of liberty through force or fraud. The Liberty Principle is an extrapolation from the fundamental principle of all liberty as practiced in Western society: The freedom to believe and act as we choose so long as our beliefs and actions do not infringe on the equal freedom of others.

As Karl Marx once noted: 'Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.' William Jennings Bryan and the Scopes trial was a tragedy. The creationists and intelligent design theorists are a farce.

Many Christians say that they get their morality from the Bible, but this cannot be true because as holy books go the Bible is possibly the most unhelpful guide ever written for determining right from wrong. It's chock-full of bizarre stories about dysfunctional families, advice about how to beat your slaves, how to kill your headstrong kids, how to sell your virgin daughters, and other clearly outdated practices that most cultures gave up centuries ago.

Religious faith depends on a host of social, psychological and emotional factors that have little or nothing to do with probabilities, evidence and logic

It is no longer acceptable to simply assert your moral beliefs; you have to provide reasons for them, and those reasons had better be grounded in rational arguments and empirical evidence or else they will likely be ignored or rejected.

Testing the theory that we have an innate moral sense as proposed by such Enlightenment thinkers as Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson, Bloom provides experimental evidence that "our natural endowments" include "a moral sense - some capacity to distinguish between kind and cruel actions; empathy and compassion - suffering at the pain of those around us and the wish to make this pain go away; a rudimentary sense of fairness - a tendency to favor equal divisions of resources; a rudimentary sense of justice - a desire to see good actions rewarded and bad actions punished.

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

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.

Finally, from what we now know about the cosmos, to think that all this was created for just one species among the tens of millions of species who live on one planet circling one of a couple of hundred billion stars that are located in one galaxy among hundreds of billions of galaxies, all of which are in one universe among perhaps an infinite number of universes all nestled within a grand cosmic multiverse, is provincially insular and anthropocentrically blinkered. Which is more likely? That the universe was designed just for us, or that we see the universe as having been designed just for us?

Mysteries once thought to be supernatural or paranormal happenings - such as astronomical or meteorological events - are incorporated into science once their causes are understood.

A poignant example of what it often takes to bring about an end to a superstitious barbaric act may be seen in the Indian practice of suttee, or the burning of widows. The British government abolished suttee by outlawing it, and followed up by severely punishing transgressors. As the nineteenth-century British commander in chief in India, General Charles Napier, told his charges who complained that suttee was their cultural custom that the British should respect: Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.

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.

Dr. Mark Crisplin, a Portland, Oregon, ER doctor, reviewed the original EEG readings of a number of patients claimed by the scientists as being flatlined or "dead" and discovered that this was not at all the case. "What they showed was slowing, attenuation, and other changes, but only a minority of patients had a flat line, and it [dying] took longer than 10 seconds. The curious thing was that even a little blood flow in some patients was enough to keep EEGs normal." In fact, most cardiac patients were given CPR, which by definition delivers some oxygen to the brain (that's the whole point of doing it). Crisplin concluded: "By the definitions presented in the Lancet paper, nobody experienced clinical death. No doctor would ever declare a patient in the middle of a code 99 dead, much less brain dead. Having your heart stop for 2 to 10 minutes and being promptly resuscitated doesn't make you 'clinically dead.' It only means your heart isn't beating and you may not be conscious."31 Again, since our normal experience is of stimuli coming into the brain from the outside, when one part of the brain abnormally generates these illusions, another part of the brain - quite possibly the left-hemisphere interpreter described by neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga - interprets them as external events. Hence, the abnormal is interpreted as supernormal or paranormal.

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.

The world's religions are tribal and xenophobic by nature, serving to regulate moral rules within the community but not seeking to embrace humanity outside their circle. Religion, by definition, forms an identity of those like us, in sharp distinction from those not us, those heathens, those unbelievers. Most religions were pulled into the modern Enlightenment with their fingernails dug into the past. Change in religious beliefs and practices, when it happens at all, is slow and cumbersome, and it is almost always in response to the church or its leaders facing outside political or cultural forces.

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

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

Rather than there being two distinct and unambiguous categories of
constrained and unconstrained (or tragic and utopian) visions of human
nature, I think there is just one vision with a sliding scale. Let's call this the
Realistic Vision. If you believe that human nature is partly constrained in
all respects - morally, physically, and intellectually - then you hold a
Realistic Vision of human nature.

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

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

Science is a set of methods designed to describe and interpret observed or inferred phenomenon, past or present, and aimed at building a testable body of knowledge open to rejection or confirmation.

Dopamine enhances the ability of neurons to transmit signals between one another. How? By acting as an agonist (as opposed to antagonist), or a substance that enhances neural activity. Dopamine binds to specific receptor molecule sites on the synaptic clefts of the neurons, as if it were the CTS that normally bind there.12 It increases the rate of neural firing in association with pattern recognition, which means that synaptic connections between neurons are likely to increase in response to a perceived pattern, thereby cementing those perceived patterns into long-term memory through the actual physical growth of new neural connections and the reinforcement of old synaptic links.
Increasing dopamine increases pattern detection; scientists have found that dopamine agonists not only enhance learning but in higher doses can also trigger symptoms of psychosis, such as hallucinations, which may be related to that fine line between creativity (discriminate patternicity) and madness (indiscriminate patternicity). The dose is the key. Too much of it and you are likely to be making lots of Type I errors - false positives - in which you find connections that are not really there. Too little and you make Type II errors - false negatives - in which you miss connections that are real.

The recent medical controversy over whether vaccinations cause autism reveals a habit of human cognition - thinking anecdotally comes naturally, whereas thinking scientifically does not.

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

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)

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

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.

Of all the chemical transmitter substances sloshing around in your brain, it appears that dopamine may be the most directly related to the neural correlates of belief. Dopamine, in fact, is critical in association learning and the reward system of the brain that Skinner discovered through his process of operant conditioning, whereby any behavior that is reinforced tends to be repeated. A reinforcement is, by definition, something that is rewarding to the organism; that is to say, it makes the brain direct the body to repeat the behavior in order to get another positive reward.

In the end, then, suffrage for women came down to the vote of one young man, influenced by his mom. It was rumored that "the anti-suffragists were so angry at his decision that they chased him from the chamber, forced him to climb out a window of the Capitol and inch along a ledge to safety."15 Thus suffrage arrived in the United States, kicking and screaming.

Neuroscientist David Comings drew out the larger implications of such hallucinations for the relationship between our rational and spiritual brains:
The psychedelic drugs like DMT often produce a sensation of "contact," of being in the presence of and interaction with a non-human being. Highly intelligent and sophisticated test subjects who knew these feelings were drug-induced nevertheless insisted the contact had really happened. The temporal lobe-limbic system's emotional tape recorder sometimes cannot distinguish between externally generated real events and internally generated non-real experience thus providing a system in which the rational brain and the spiritual brain are not necessarily in conflict.

Today, the witch theory of causality has fallen into disuse, with the exception of a few isolated pockets in Papua New Guinea, India, Nepal, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Ghana, Gambia, Tanzania, Kenya, or Sierra Leone, where "witches" are still burned to death. A 2002 World Health Organization study, for example, reported that every year more than 500 elderly women in Tanzania alone are killed for being "witches." In Nigeria, children by the thousands are being rounded up and torched as "witches," and in response the Nigerian government arrested a self-styled bishop named Okon Williams, who it accused of killing 110 such children.

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.

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

We know evolution happened not because of transitional fossils such as A. natans but because of the convergence of evidence from such diverse fields as geology, paleontology, biogeography, comparative anatomy and physiology, molecular biology, genetics, and many more.

Spinoza's Conjecture:Belief comes quickly and naturally, skepticism is slow and unnatural, and most people have a low tolerance for ambiguity.
The scientific principle that a claim is untrue unless proven otherwise runs counter to our natural tendency to accept as true that which we can comprehend quickly. Thus it is that we should reward skepticism and disbelief, and champion those willing to change their mind in the teeth of new evidence. Instead, most social institutions-most notably those in religion, politics, and economics-reward belief in the doctrines of the faith or party or ideology, punish those who challenge the authority of the leaders, and discourage uncertainty and especially skepticism.

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.

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.

This fact provides a rebuttal to the argument "What if a young woman aborts a baby who would have gone on to become a doctor and find the cure for cancer?" A rejoinder is, "What if a young woman who would have gone on to become a doctor and find the cure for cancer dies in childbirth?

In science, however, "God did it" is not a testable hypothesis. Inquiring minds want to know how God did it and what forces or mechanisms were at work. "God works in mysterious ways" will not pass peer review. Even such explanations as "belief in God" or "religiosity" must be broken down into their component parts to find possible causal mechanisms for the links between belief and behavior that lead to health, well-being, and longevity.

For Paley, a watch is purposeful and thus must have been created by a being with a purpose. A watch needs a watchmaker, just as a world needs a world-maker - God. Yet both Wallace and Paley might have heeded the lesson from Voltaire's Candide (1759), in which Dr. Pangloss, a professor of "metaphysico-theology-cosmolonigology," through reason, logic, and analogy "proved" that this is the best of all possible worlds: '"Tis demonstrated that things cannot be otherwise; for, since everything is made for an end, everything is necessarily for the best end. Observe that noses were made to wear spectacles; and so we have spectacles. Legs were visibly instituted to be breeched, and we have breeches" (1985, p. 238). The absurdity of this argument was intended on the part of the author, for Voltaire firmly rejected the Panglossian paradigm that all is best in the best of all possible worlds. Nature is not perfectly designed, nor is this the best of all possible worlds. It is simply the world we have, quirky, contingent, and flawed as it may be.

For millennia, religions in general, and Jewish, Christian, and Islamic churches in particular, have had little problem with the forced enslavement of hundreds of millions of people. It was only after the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment that rational arguments were proffered for the abolition of the slave trade, influenced by and citing such secular documents as the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man. After an unconscionably long lag time, religion finally got on board the abolition train and became instrumental in helping to propel it forward.

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.

The Fairness Principle: When contemplating a moral action imagine that you do not know if you will be the moral doer or receiver, and when in doubt err on the side of the other person. This is based on the philosopher John Rawls's concepts of the "veil of ignorance" and the "original position" in which moral actors are ignorant of their position in society when determining rules and laws that affect everyone, because of the self-serving bias in human decision making.

Any preference for my group's interests over yours must be justified by some unbiased, disinterested ethic. Which sounds simple but, given that we're dealing with Humans and not Vulcans, it's sometimes difficult for two parties to agree on basic principles, specially parties who are unable or unwilling to switch points of view. This is the power of ethical reasoning.

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.

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.

There are many sources of spirituality; religion may be the most common, but it is by no means the only. Anything that generates a sense of awe may be a source of spirituality. Science does this in spades.

The first-cause and prime-mover argument, brilliantly proffered by St. Thomas Aquinas in the fourteenth century (and brilliantly refuted by David Hume in the eighteenth century), is easily turned aside with just one more question: Who or what caused and moved God?

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

The evidence from behavior genetics and twin studies indicating that 40
to 50 percent of the variance among people in temperament,
personality, and many political, economic, and social preferences are
accounted for by genetics.

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.

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.

Cities, Barber notes, "collect garbage and collect art rather than collecting votes or collecting allies. They put up buildings and run buses rather than putting up flags and running political parties. They secure the flow of water rather than the flow of arms. They foster education and culture in place of national defense and patriotism. They promote collaboration, not exceptionalism."24

It is evident that most of what we think of as our medieval ancestors' barbaric practices were based on mistaken beliefs about how the laws of nature actually operate. If you - and everyone around you, including ecclesiastical and political authorities - truly believe that witches cause disease, crop failures, sickness, catastrophes, and accidents, then it is not only a rational act to burn witches, it is also a moral duty. This is what Voltaire meant when he wrote that people who believe absurdities are more likely to commit atrocities.

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.

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?

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

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

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.

According to the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness - a statement issued in 2012 by an international group of prominent cognitive neuroscientists, neuropharmacologists, neuroanatomists, and computational neuroscientists - there is a convergence of evidence to show the continuity between humans and nonhuman animals, and that sentience is the common characteristic across species.

The case for exploiting animals for food, clothing and entertainment often relies on our superior intelligence, language and self-awareness: the rights of the superior being trump those of the inferior.

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.

The natural inclination in all humans is to posit a force, a spirit, outside of us. That tendency toward superstitious magical thinking is just built into our nature.

The connection between dopamine and belief was established by experiments conducted by Peter Brugger and his colleague Christine Mohr at the University of Bristol in England. Exploring the neurochemistry of superstition, magical thinking, and belief in the paranormal, Brugger and Mohr found that people with high levels of dopamine are more likely to find significance in coincidences and pick out meaning and patterns where there are none. In one study, for example, they compared twenty self-professed believers in ghosts, gods, spirits, and conspiracies to twenty self-professed skeptics of such claims. They showed all subjects a series of slides consisting of people's faces, some of which were normal while others had their parts scrambled, such as swapping out eyes or ears or noses from different faces. In another experiment, real and scrambled words were flashed. In general, the scientists found that the believers were much more likely than the skeptics to mistakenly assess a scrambled face as real, and to read a scrambled word as normal.
In the second part of the experiment, Brugger and Mohr gave all forty subjects L-dopa, the drug used for Parkinson's disease patients that increases the levels of dopamine in the brain. They then repeated the slide show with the scrambled or real faces and words. The boost of dopamine caused both believers and skeptics to identify scrambled faces and real and jumbled words as normal. This suggests that patternicity may be associated with

From stalking to chastity belts to female genital mutilation, throughout history men have tried to control women's sexuality and reproductive choices. And women have developed several strategies in response: contraception, abortion, clandestine affairs, mariticide (killing one's husband), and infanticide.

Yet basically, libertarians are for freedom and liberty for
individuals, while recognizing that in order to be free we must also be
protected. Your freedom to swing your arms ends at my nose.

As the behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner proved in the laboratory, the human mind seeks relationships between events and often finds them even when they are not present. Slot-machines are based on Skinnerian principles of intermittent reinforcement. The dumb human, like the dumb rat, only needs an occasional payoff to keep pulling the handle. The mind will do the rest.

The Realistic
Vision acknowledges that people vary widely both physically and
intellectually - in large part because of natural inherited differences - and
therefore will rise (or fall) to their natural levels. Therefore governmental
redistribution programs are not only unfair to those from whom the wealth
is confiscated and redistributed, but the allocation of the wealth to those
who did not earn it cannot and will not work to equalize these natural
inequalities.

As the medieval historian Richard Kieckhefer notes, the people of medieval Europe thought of magic as rational for two reasons: first of all, that it could actually work (that its efficacy was shown by evidence recognized within the culture as authentic) and, secondly, that its workings were governed by principles (of theology or of physics) that could be coherently articulated.

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.

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

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.

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

My hope is that whatever it is you decide to believe about whatever subject, you have thought through carefully each of those beliefs and at least tried to make sure that they are your beliefs and not those of your parents. It matters less to me what your specific beliefs are than that you have carefully arrived at your beliefs through reason and evidence and thoughtful reflection.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

It was the Roman Catholic Church that first articulated the witch theory of causality in medieval Europe with the Papal Bull of Innocent VIII in 1484, Summis Desiderantes Affectibus (Desiring with Supreme Ardor), followed two years later with the Catholic clergyman Heinrich Kramer's Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of the Witch). The latter was a how-to manual on finding and prosecuting witches, who, it alleged, were able to copulate with the devil, steal men's penises, wreck ships, ruin crops, eat babies, turn men into frogs, shed no tears, cast no shadow in the sun, have hair that could not be cut, and pretty much anything considered to be "devilish" and "wicked.

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