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I just witnessed an event so mysterious that it shook my skepticism.

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
Events
Witnessed
Shook
Skepticism
Event
Mysterious

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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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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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People who espouse Intelligent Design believe nature is so complex as to require an intelligent designer-God. Similarly, liberals believe the economy is so complex as to require an intelligent designer-government.
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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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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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But there is only one surefire method of proper pattern recognition, and that is science.
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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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Science is the best tool ever devised for understanding how the world works.
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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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For solving a surprisingly large and varied number of problems, crowds are smarter than individuals.
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Being a skeptic just means being rational and empirical: thinking and seeing before believing.
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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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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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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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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.
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In the past 10,000 years, humans have devised roughly 100,000 religions based on roughly 2,500 gods. So the only difference between myself and the believers is that I am skeptical of 2,500 gods whereas they are skeptical of 2,499 gods. We're only one God away from total agreement.
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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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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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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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Accepting evolution does not force us to jettison our morals and ethics, and rejecting evolution does not ensure their constancy.
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