I’m a skeptic not because I do not want to believe, but because I want to know. — Michael Shermer Copy Share Image
The human capacity for self-delusion is boundless, and the effects of belief are overpowering. — Michael Shermer Copy Share Image
Religious faith depends on a host of social, psychological and emotional factors that have little or nothing to do with probabilities, evidence… — Michael Shermer Copy Share Image
“...Spinoza’s Conjecture:“Belief comes quickly and naturally, skepticism is slow and unnatural, and most people have a low tolerance for ambiguity. The scientific… — Michael Shermer Copy Share Image
My libertarian beliefs have not always served me well. Like most people who hold strong ideological convictions, I find that, too often,… — Michael Shermer Copy Share Image
Belief is the natural state of things. It is the default option. We just believe. We believe all sorts of things. Belief… — Michael Shermer Copy Share Image
In science , all conclusions are provisional, subject to new evidence and better arguments, the very antithesis of religious faith. — Michael Shermer Copy Share Image
One of the features of a democracy is the disentanglement of the sacred from the secular because in religiously pluralistic countries, no… — Michael Shermer Copy Share Image
...evolution is not a religious tenet, to which one swears allegiance or belief as a matter of faith.. It is a factual… — Michael Shermer Copy Share Image
Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons. — Michael Shermer Copy Share Image
“Of all the chemical transmitter substances sloshing around in your brain, it appears that dopamine may be the most directly related to… — Michael Shermer Copy Share Image
There is a significant difference between having no belief in a God and believing there is no God. — Michael Shermer Copy Share Image
Science is not the affirmation of a set of beliefs but a process of inquiry aimed at building a testable body of… — Michael Shermer Copy Share Image
“the belief that the government can impose top-down measures to rescue the” — Michael Shermer Copy Share Image
“The postmodernist belief in the relativism of truth, coupled with the clicker culture of mass media, in which attention spans are measured… — Michael Shermer Copy Share Image
The whole point of faith, in fact, is to believe regardless of the evidence, which is the very antithesis of science. — Michael Shermer Copy Share Image
“The connection between dopamine and belief was established by experiments conducted by Peter Brugger and his colleague Christine Mohr at the University… — Michael Shermer Copy Share Image
“...my hope is that whatever it is you decide to believe about whatever subject, you have thought through carefully each of those… — Michael Shermer Copy Share Image
You have to know evolution to understand the natural world. And that cannot be a threat to people of faith. There's a… — Michael Shermer Copy Share Image
I’m a skeptic not because I do not want to believe, but because I want to know. — Michael Shermer Copy Share Image
“According to Dembski, for example, “scientific creationism has prior religious commitments whereas intelligent design does not.” — Michael Shermer Copy Share Image
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… — Michael Shermer Copy Share Image
“Mind is just a word we use to describe neural activity in the brain. No brain, no mind. We know this because if a… — Michael Shermer Copy Share Image
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… — Michael Shermer Copy Share Image
I always accepted the libertarian position of minimum regulation in the sale and use of firearms because I placed guns under the beneficial rubric… — Michael Shermer Copy Share Image
If spirituality is the sense of awe and humility in the face of the creation, what could be more awesome and humbling than the… — Michael Shermer Copy Share Image
We know evolution happened not because of transitional fossils such as A. natans but because of the convergence of evidence from such diverse fields… — Michael Shermer Copy Share Image
“Yet basically, libertarians are for freedom and liberty for individuals, while recognizing that in order to be free we must also be protected. Your… — Michael Shermer Copy Share Image
Scientists like Bjorn Lomborg in The Skeptical Environmentalist have, in my opinion, properly nailed environmental extremists for these exaggerated scenarios. — Michael Shermer Copy Share Image
When religious believers invoke miracles and acts of creation ex nihilo, that is the end of the search for them, whereas for scientists, the… — Michael Shermer Copy Share Image
Darwin matters because evolution matters. Evolution matters because science matters. Science matters because it is the preeminent story of our age, an epic saga… — Michael Shermer Copy Share Image
