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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.

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
Believe
Designer
People
Complexes
Complex
Intelligent
Design
Espouse
Economy
Similarly
Nature
Liberals
Government
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Providentially, learned habits can be unlearned, especially in the context of moral groups.
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We think of our eyes as video cameras and our brains as blank tapes to be filled with sensory inputs.
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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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Remember always that we are pattern-seeking primates who are especially adept at finding patterns with emotional meaning.
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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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Rationality tied to moral decency is the most powerful joint instrument for good that our planet has ever known.
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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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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.
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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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Skepticism is not a position that you stake out ahead of time and stick to no matter what.
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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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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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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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We're all talking about the same thing, whether it's religious people or New Age spiritual people or Buddhists or scientists. We're all talking about having a sense of awe and wonder at something grander than ourselves.
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For solving a surprisingly large and varied number of problems, crowds are smarter than individuals.
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We know evolution happened because innumerable bits of data from myriad fields of science conjoin to paint a rich portrait of life's pilgrimage.
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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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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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Anecdotal thinking comes naturally science requires training.
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Plato wove historical fact into literary myth.
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