Michael Shermer Quotes

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

Faith, Emotional, Nothing

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

True, Motivation, Whether

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

Age, Science, Live

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

Problems, Number, Large

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

True, Reason, Group

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

Eyes, Brains, Video

Anecdotal thinking comes naturally; science requires training.
Michael Shermer

Science, Thinking, 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.
Michael Shermer

Power, Science, Lies

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

Science, Proper, Pattern

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

Soul, Body, Hold

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

Death, Soul, Either

Human history is highly nonlinear and unpredictable.
Michael Shermer

History, Human, Highly

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.
Michael Shermer

Themselves, Number, Brilliant

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.
Michael Shermer

Life, Single, Together

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

Plato wove historical fact into literary myth.
Michael Shermer

Fact, Historical, Literary

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

Religion, God, Science

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.
Michael Shermer

Today, Brain, Same

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

Acceptance, General, Position

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.
Michael Shermer

Life, Home, Design

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

Life, Science, Rich

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.
Michael Shermer

Level, Principles, Toward

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

Experience, Real, Stories

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Biography

Type: Writer

Born: September 8, 1954

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