Top 35 Michael Shermer Quotes

I say you don’t need religion, or political ideology, to understand human nature. Science reveals that human nature is greedy and selfish, altruistic and helpful.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Plato wove historical fact into literary myth.

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

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.

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

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

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.

One of the features of a democracy is the disentanglement of the sacred from the secular because in religiously pluralistic countries, no one can legitimately claim special status by faith membership.

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

In my experience, people are usually fired for reasons having to do with budgetary constraints, incompetence or not fulfilling the terms of a contract.

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.

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.

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

You have to know evolution to understand the natural world. And that cannot be a threat to people of faith. There’s a serious problem if you are forced by your faith to reject the most well-supported theory in all of science.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.