Michael Shermer Quotes

42 Sourced Quotes

What can be more soul shaking than peering through a 100-inch telescope at a distant galaxy, holding a 100-million-year-old fossil or a 500,000-year-old stone tool in one's hand, standing before the immense chasm of space and time that is the Grand Canyon, or listening to a scientist who gazed upon the face of the universe's creation and did not blink?

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

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

Michael Shermer
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.

Michael Shermer
Accepting evolution does not force us to jettison our morals and ethics, and rejecting evolution does not ensure their constancy.

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

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

Michael Shermer
Evolution is not a religious tenet, to which one swears allegiance or belief as a matter of faith. It is a factual reality of the empirical world. Just as one would not say I believe in gravity, one should not proclaim I believe in evolution.

Michael Shermer
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.

Michael Shermer
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.

Michael Shermer
People believe in God because we are pattern-seeking, storytelling, mythmaking, religious, moral animals.

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

Michael Shermer
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.

Michael Shermer
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.

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

Michael Shermer
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.

Michael Shermer