Michael Shermer Quotes (24 Quotes)

Human history is highly nonlinear and unpredictable.

Either the soul survives death or it does not, and there is no scientific evidence that it does.

But the power of science lies in open publication, which, with the rise of the Internet, is no longer constrained by the price of paper.

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.

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.

Dualists hold that body and soul are separate entities and that the soul will continue beyond the existence of the physical body.

Machine intelligence of a human nature could be a century away, and immortality is at least a millennium away, if not unattainable altogether.

We know evolution happened because innumerable bits of data from myriad fields of science conjoin to paint a rich portrait of life's pilgrimage.

When alien abductees recount to me their stories, I do not deny that they had a real experience.

Anecdotal thinking comes naturally; science requires training.

For solving a surprisingly large and varied number of problems, crowds are smarter than individuals.

Plato wove historical fact into literary myth.

We should be exploring consciousness at the neural level and higher, where the arrow of causal analysis points up toward such principles as emergence and self-organization.

The actual atoms and molecules that make up my brain and body today are not the same ones that I was born with on September 8, 1954, a half-century ago this month.

Myths are stories that express meaning, morality or motivation. Whether they are true or not is irrelevant.

But because we live in an age of science, we have a preoccupation with corroborating our myths.

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.

But there is only one surefire method of proper pattern recognition, and that is science.

The principal barrier to a general acceptance of the monist position is that it is counterintuitive.

One, I am skeptical of the effectiveness of nutritional supplements.

Scientific prayer makes God a celestial lab rat, leading to bad science and worse religion.

Religious faith depends on a host of social, psychological and emotional factors that have little or nothing to do with probabilities, evidence and logic.

The reason is that in a group, individual errors on either side of the true figure cancel each other out.

We think of our eyes as video cameras and our brains as blank tapes to be filled with sensory inputs.