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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

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Michael Shermer
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: September 8
Historian Of Science
Journalist
Philosopher
Psychologist
Sport Cyclist
Writer
Glendale
California
USA
Michael Brant Shermer
Emotional
Probabilities
Religious
Probability
Faith
Host
Social
Factors
Littles
Psychological
Little
Logic
Nothing
Evidence
Depends

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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.
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Machine intelligence of a human nature could be a century away, and immortality is at least a millennium away, if not unattainable altogether.
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Anecdotal thinking comes naturally science requires training.
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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.
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Science is the best tool ever devised for understanding how the world works.
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The recent medical controversy over whether vaccinations cause autism reveals a habit of human cognition — thinking anecdotally comes naturally, whereas thinking scientifically does not.
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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)
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I just witnessed an event so mysterious that it shook my skepticism.
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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.
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Flawed as they may be, science and the secular Enlightenment values expressed in Western democracies are our best hope for survival.
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Humans are, by nature, pattern-seeking, storytelling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns whether they exist or not.
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Either the soul survives death or it does not, and there is no scientific evidence that it does.
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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.
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Belief is the natural state of things. It is the default option. We just believe. We believe all sorts of things. Belief is natural disbelief, skepticism, science, is not natural.
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Skepticism is not a position that you stake out ahead of time and stick to no matter what.
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We are a fluke of nature, a quirk of evolution, a glorious contingency.
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Human history is highly nonlinear and unpredictable.
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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.
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We do not just blindly concede control to authorities instead we follow the cues provided by our moral communities on how best to behave.
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Scientists like Bjorn Lomborg in The Skeptical Environmentalist have, in my opinion, properly nailed environmental extremists for these exaggerated scenarios.
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