Michael Shermer Quotes
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Remember always that we are pattern-seeking primates who are especially adept at finding patterns with emotional meaning.
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Mysteries once thought to be supernatural or paranormal happenings - such as astronomical or meteorological events - are incorporated into science once their causes are understood.
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The recent medical controversy over whether vaccinations cause autism reveals a habit of human cognition — thinking anecdotally comes naturally, whereas thinking scientifically does not.
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Dualists hold that body and soul are separate entities and that the soul will continue beyond the existence of the physical body.
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One, I am skeptical of the effectiveness of nutritional supplements.
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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.
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We are a fluke of nature, a quirk of evolution, a glorious contingency.
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Human history is highly nonlinear and unpredictable.
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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.
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Conspiracies are a perennial favorite for television producers because there is always a receptive audience.
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The reason is that in a group, individual errors on either side of the true figure cancel each other out.
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Religious faith depends on a host of social, psychological and emotional factors that have little or nothing to do with probabilities, evidence and logic.
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Flawed as they may be, science and the secular Enlightenment values expressed in Western democracies are our best hope for survival.
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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.
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Humans are, by nature, pattern-seeking, storytelling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns whether they exist or not.
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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)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The human capacity for self-delusion is boundless, and the effects of belief are overpowering.
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But because we live in an age of science, we have a preoccupation with corroborating our myths.
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Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.
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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.
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Are science and religion compatible? It's like, are science and plumbing compatible? They're just two different things.
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I care what is actually true, even more than what I hope is true.
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To be a fully functioning moral agent, one cannot passively accept moral principles handed down by fiat. Moral principles require moral reasoning.
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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.
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I’m a skeptic not because I do not want to believe, but because I want to know.
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I just witnessed an event so mysterious that it shook my skepticism.
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Skepticism is not a position that you stake out ahead of time and stick to no matter what.
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