Top 100 Michael Shermer Quotes
#1. 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?
Michael Shermer
#2. 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.
Michael Shermer
#3. Anecdotal thinking comes naturally; science requires training.
Michael Shermer
#4. 'Are science and religion compatible?' It's like [asking]: 'Are science and plumbing compatible?' They're just two different things.
Michael Shermer
#5. I just witnessed an event so mysterious that it shook my skepticism.
Michael Shermer
#6. 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.
Michael Shermer
#8. 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
#9. 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.
Michael Shermer
#10. The "hypocrite" is the critic who disguises his own failings by focusing attention on the failings of others.
Michael Shermer
#11. 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.
Michael Shermer
#12. To be a fully functioning moral agent, one cannot passively accept moral principles handed down by fiat. Moral principles require moral reasoning.
Michael Shermer
#13. As a social primate species, we modulate our morals with signals from family, friends and social groups with whom we identify because in our evolutionary past, those attributes helped individuals to survive and reproduce.
Michael Shermer
#14. 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.
Michael Shermer
#15. 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.
Michael Shermer
#16. Either the soul survives death or it does not, and there is no scientific evidence that it does.
Michael Shermer
#17. Providentially, learned habits can be unlearned, especially in the context of moral groups.
Michael Shermer
#18. 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.
Michael Shermer
#19. Dualists hold that body and soul are separate entities and that the soul will continue beyond the existence of the physical body.
Michael Shermer
#20. No such individual would find the Golden Rule surprising in any way because at its base lies the foundation of most human interactions and exchanges and it can be found in countless texts throughout recorded history and from around the world
a testimony to its universality.
Michael Shermer
#21. We are a fluke of nature, a quirk of evolution, a glorious contingency.
Michael Shermer
#22. In order to displace a prevailing theory or paradigm in science, it is not enough to merely point out what it cannot explain; you have to offer a new theory that explains more data, and do so in a testable way.
Michael Shermer
#23. Skepticism is not a position that you stake out ahead of time and stick to no matter what.
Michael Shermer
#24. Being a skeptic just means being rational and empirical: thinking and seeing before believing.
Michael Shermer
#25. Skepticism is not a position; skepticism is an approach to claims, in the same way that science is not a subject but a method.
Michael Shermer
#26. Humans are pattern-seeking story-telling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns, whether they exist or not.
Michael Shermer
#27. 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.
Michael Shermer
#28. People believe in God because we are pattern-seeking, storytelling, mythmaking, religious, moral animals.
Michael Shermer
#29. An uncertain and doubting mind leads to fresh world visions and the possibility of new and ever-changing realities.
Michael Shermer
#30. I'm a skeptic not because I do not want to believe, but because I want to know.
Michael Shermer
#31. 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.
Michael Shermer
#32. 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.
Michael Shermer
#33. Conspiracies are a perennial favorite for television producers because there is always a receptive audience.
Michael Shermer
#34. 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.
Michael Shermer
#35. 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.
Michael Shermer
#36. Machine intelligence of a human nature could be a century away, and immortality is at least a millennium away, if not unattainable altogether.
Michael Shermer
#37. 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.
Michael Shermer
#38. One, I am skeptical of the effectiveness of nutritional supplements.
Michael Shermer
#39. The reason is that in a group, individual errors on either side of the true figure cancel each other out.
Michael Shermer
#40. The principal barrier to a general acceptance of the monist position is that it is counterintuitive.
Michael Shermer
#41. 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.
Michael Shermer
#42. The witch theory of causality, and how it was debunked through science, encapsulates the larger trend in the improvement of humanity through the centuries by the gradual replacement of religious supernaturalism with scientific naturalism.
Michael Shermer
#43. Scientific prayer makes God a celestial lab rat, leading to bad science and worse religion.
Michael Shermer
#44. 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.
Michael Shermer
#45. 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
#46. There is a significant difference between having no belief in a God and believing there is no God ...
Michael Shermer
#47. 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)
Michael Shermer
#48. The components of a philosophy must stand or fall on their own internal consistency or empirical support, regardless of the founder's or followers' personality quirks or moral inconsistencies.
Michael Shermer
#49. 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?
Michael Shermer
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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.
Michael Shermer
#54. Mammals are sentient beings that want to live and are afraid to die. Evolution vouchsafed us all with an instinct to survive, reproduce and flourish.
Michael Shermer
#55. Flawed as they may be, science and the secular Enlightenment values expressed in Western democracies are our best hope for survival.
Michael Shermer
#56. Scientists like Bjorn Lomborg in The Skeptical Environmentalist have, in my opinion, properly nailed environmental extremists for these exaggerated scenarios.
Michael Shermer
#57. 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.
Michael Shermer
#58. Remember always that we are pattern-seeking primates who are especially adept at finding patterns with emotional meaning.
Michael Shermer
#59. Myths are stories that express meaning, morality or motivation. Whether they are true or not is irrelevant.
Michael Shermer
#60. 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.
Michael Shermer
#61. In principle, skeptics are neither closed-minded nor cynical. We are curious but cautious.
Michael Shermer
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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.
Michael Shermer
#65. 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)
Michael Shermer
#66. 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.
Michael Shermer
#67. We're all talking about the same thing, whether it's religious people or New Age spiritual people or Buddhists or scientists. We're all talking about having a sense of awe and wonder at something grander than ourselves.
Michael Shermer
#68. 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
#69. Because of the complexity of the problem, environmental skepticism was once tenable. No longer. It is time to flip from skepticism to activism.
Michael Shermer
#70. 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
#71. False belief that morality can have a unique and objective state - to
Michael Shermer
#72. When alien abductees recount to me their stories, I do not deny that they had a real experience.
Michael Shermer
#73. The whole point of faith, in fact, is to believe regardless of the evidence, which is the very antithesis of science.
Michael Shermer
#74. 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.
Michael Shermer
#75. Darwin matters because evolution matters. Evolution matters because science matters. Science matters because it is the preeminent story of our age, an epic saga about who we are, where we came from and where we are going.
Michael Shermer
#76. 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.
Michael Shermer
#77. In other words, a gun is twenty-two times more likely to be used in a criminal assault, an accidental death or injury, a suicide attempt, or a homicide than it is for self-defense.67
Michael Shermer
#78. In the long run, it is better to understand the way the world really is rather than how we would like it to be.
Michael Shermer
#79. 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.
Michael Shermer
#80. 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
#81. The fate of the paranormal is to become the normal as our horizons of understanding expand.
Michael Shermer
#82. 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
#83. Absolute morality leads logically to absolute intolerance.
Michael Shermer
#84. 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.
Michael Shermer
#85. But because we live in an age of science, we have a preoccupation with corroborating our myths.
Michael Shermer
#86. Skeptics question the validity of a particular claim by calling for evidence to prove or disprove it.
Michael Shermer
#87. 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.
Michael Shermer
#88. 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.
Michael Shermer
#89. 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
#90. Mysteries once thought to be supernatural or paranormal happenings - such as astronomical or meteorological events - are incorporated into science once their causes are understood.
Michael Shermer
#91. 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.
Michael Shermer
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. The almost universal nature of within-group amity and between-group
enmity, wherein the rule-of-thumb heuristic is to trust in-group
members until they prove otherwise to be distrustful, and to distrust
out-group members until they prove otherwise to be trustful.
Michael Shermer
#95. In a free society, skeptics are the watchdogs against irrationalism - the consumer advocates of ideas. Debunking is not simply the divestment of bunk; its utility is in offering a better alternative, along with a lesson on how thinking goes wrong.
Michael Shermer
#96. 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.
Michael Shermer
#97. The belief that all knowledge is culturally determined and therefore lacks certainty is largely the product of an uncertain cultural milieu.
Michael Shermer
#98. 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.
Michael Shermer
#99. The concept of God is generated by a brain designed by evolution to find design in nature (a very recursive idea).
Michael Shermer
#100. Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.
Michael Shermer
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
