Michael Shermer

“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.”

“Mysteries once thought to be supernatural or paranormal happenings - such as astronomical or meteorological events - are incorporated into science once their causes are understood.”

“In the long run, it is better to understand the way the world really is rather than how we would like it to be.”

“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.”

“Human history is highly nonlinear and unpredictable.”

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

“Rather than there being two distinct and unambiguous categories ofconstrained and unconstrained (or tragic and utopian) visions of humannature, I think there is just one vision with a sliding scale. Let’s call this theRealistic Vision. If you believe that human nature is partly constrained inall respects—morally, physically, and intellectually—then you hold aRealistic Vision of human nature.”

“Either the soul survives death or it does not, and there is no scientific evidence that it does.”

“In principle, skeptics are neither closed-minded nor cynical. We are curious but cautious.”

“Plato wove historical fact into literary myth.”

“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.”

“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.”

“We know evolution happened because innumerable bits of data from myriad fields of science conjoin to paint a rich portrait of life's pilgrimage.”

“We do not just blindly concede control to authorities; instead we follow the cues provided by our moral communities on how best to behave.”

“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.”

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

“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.”