Quotes from Michael Shermer

The reason people turn to supernatural explanations is that the mind abhors a vacuum of explanation. Because we do not yet have a fully natural explanation for mind and consciousness, people turn to supernatural explanations to fill the void.

Science operates in the natural, not the supernatural. In fact, I go so far as to state that there is no such thing as the supernatural or the paranormal.

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

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

Humans are, by nature, pattern-seeking, storytelling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns whether they exist or not.

The concept of God is generated by a brain designed by evolution to find design in nature (a very recursive idea).

People believe in God because we are pattern-seeking, storytelling, mythmaking, religious, moral animals.

Are science and religion compatible? It's like, are science and plumbing compatible? They're just two different things.

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

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.

Having a Nobel Prize or being a famous scientist will get you a week to a week and a half, metaphorically speaking, of a hearing for your new idea, but after that, it's going to tank if you don't have the evidence and support for it.

Science is a set of methods designed to describe and interpret observed or inferred phenomenon, past or present, and aimed at building a testable body of knowledge open to rejection or confirmation.

I say you don't need religion, or political ideology, to understand human nature. Science reveals that human nature is greedy and selfish, altruistic and helpful.

Science is not a thing. It's a verb. It's a way of thinking about things. It's a way of looking for natural explanations for all phenomena.

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.

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.

The whole point of faith, in fact, is to believe regardless of the evidence, which is the very antithesis of science.

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

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

Flawed as they may be, science and the secular Enlightenment values expressed in Western democracies are our best hope for survival.

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

When religious believers invoke miracles and acts of creation ex nihilo, that is the end of the search for them, whereas for scientists, the identification of such mysteries is only the beginning. Science picks up where theology leaves off.

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

In principle, skeptics are neither closed-minded nor cynical. We are curious but cautious.