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Accepting evolution does not force us to jettison our morals and ethics, and rejecting evolution does not ensure their constancy.

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
Evolution
Accepting
Moral
Jettison
Force
Constancy
Doe
Rejecting
Morals
Ensure
Ethics

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Anecdotal thinking comes naturally science requires training.
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There is a significant difference between having no belief in a God and believing there is no God.
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In the long run, it is better to understand the way the world really is rather than how we would like it to be.
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Remember always that we are pattern-seeking primates who are especially adept at finding patterns with emotional meaning.
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Believing that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator when it is only the wind does not cost much, but believing that a dangerous predator is the wind may cost an animal its life.
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Being a skeptic just means being rational and empirical: thinking and seeing before believing.
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Providentially, learned habits can be unlearned, especially in the context of moral groups.
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Because of the complexity of the problem, environmental skepticism was once tenable. No longer. It is time to flip from skepticism to activism.
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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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Since humans are by nature tribal, the overall goal is to expand the concept of the tribe to include ALL members of the species, in a global free society.
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But because we live in an age of science, we have a preoccupation with corroborating our myths.
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I’m a skeptic not because I do not want to believe, but because I want to know. How can we tell the difference between what we would like to be true and what is actually true? The answer is science.
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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.
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Science is not the affirmation of a set of beliefs but a process of inquiry aimed at building a testable body of knowledge constantly open to rejection or confirmation. In science, knowledge is fluid and certainty fleeting. That is at the heart of its limitations. It is also its greatest strength.
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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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Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.
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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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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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For solving a surprisingly large and varied number of problems, crowds are smarter than individuals.
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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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