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Skepticism is not a position skepticism is an approach to claims, in the same way that science is not a subject but a method.

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
Subjects
Approach
Position
Science
Way
Skepticism
Claims
Method
Subject

More quotes by Michael Shermer

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We are a fluke of nature, a quirk of evolution, a glorious contingency.
Michael Shermer
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We think of our eyes as video cameras and our brains as blank tapes to be filled with sensory inputs.
Michael Shermer
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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.
Michael Shermer
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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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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 known.
Michael Shermer
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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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Human history is highly nonlinear and unpredictable.
Michael Shermer
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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.
Michael Shermer
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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)
Michael Shermer
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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.
Michael Shermer
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The price of liberty is, in addition to eternal vigilance, eternal patience with the vacuous blather occasionally expressed from behind the shield of free speech.
Michael Shermer
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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.
Michael Shermer
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Science is the best tool ever devised for understanding how the world works.
Michael Shermer
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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.
Michael Shermer
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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.
Michael Shermer
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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.
Michael Shermer
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But because we live in an age of science, we have a preoccupation with corroborating our myths.
Michael Shermer
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If spirituality is the sense of awe and humility in the face of the creation, what could be more awesome and humbling than the deep space discovered by Hubble and the cosmologists, and the deep time discovered by Darwin and the evolutionists.
Michael Shermer
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Are science and religion compatible? It's like, are science and plumbing compatible? They're just two different things.
Michael Shermer
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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.
Michael Shermer