Quotes by Michael Shermer

• Religious faith depends on a host of social, psychological and emotional factors that have little or nothing to do with probabilities, evidence and logic.
• Myths are stories that express meaning, morality or motivation. Whether they are true or not is irrelevant.
• When alien abductees recount to me their stories, I do not deny that they had a real experience.
• We think of our eyes as video cameras and our brains as blank tapes to be filled with sensory inputs.
• 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.
• We know evolution happened because innumerable bits of data from myriad fields of science conjoin to paint a rich portrait of life's pilgrimage.
• 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.
• The reason is that in a group, individual errors on either side of the true figure cancel each other out.
• The principal barrier to a general acceptance of the monist position is that it is counterintuitive.
• Scientific prayer makes God a celestial lab rat, leading to bad science and worse religion.
• Plato wove historical fact into literary myth.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Human history is highly nonlinear and unpredictable.
• For solving a surprisingly large and varied number of problems, crowds are smarter than individuals.
• Either the soul survives death or it does not, and there is no scientific evidence that it does.
• Dualists hold that body and soul are separate entities and that the soul will continue beyond the existence of the physical body.
• But there is only one surefire method of proper pattern recognition, and that is science.
• 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.
• But because we live in an age of science, we have a preoccupation with corroborating our myths.
• Anecdotal thinking comes naturally; science requires training.
• One, I am skeptical of the effectiveness of nutritional supplements.