Michael Shermer Quotes - Page 4

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. (125)

The question itself [of UFOs] I think is legitimate. It's interesting, it's fascinating. It's mythic in scale and one of the grand questions. It's like the God question or, you know, the meaning-of-life question. It's one of those, on that scale. So you'd have to be made of wood not to be interested and, you know, have they come here? Are they up there?

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)

The concept of God is generated by a brain designed by evolution to find design in nature (a very recursive idea).

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

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.

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

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

Are science and religion compatible? It's like, are science and plumbing compatible? They're just two different things.

Conspiracies are a perennial favorite for television producers because there is always a receptive audience.

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

Skepticism is not a position that you stake out ahead of time and stick to no matter what.

Human history is highly nonlinear and unpredictable.

Providentially, learned habits can be unlearned, especially in the context of moral groups.

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

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.

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.

Plato wove historical fact into literary myth.

Because of the complexity of the problem, environmental skepticism was once tenable. No longer. It is time to flip from skepticism to activism.

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)

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.

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

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

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.

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.