Michael Shermer

Ever since college, I have been a libertarian - socially liberal and fiscally conservative. I believe in individual liberty and personal responsibility.

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

Being a skeptic just means being rational and empirical: thinking and seeing before believing.

Skeptics question the validity of a particular claim by calling for evidence to prove or disprove it.

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.

Mysteries once thought to be supernatural or paranormal happenings - such as astronomical or meteorological events - are incorporated into science once their causes are understood.

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.

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

Being deeply knowledgeable on one subject narrows one's focus and increases confidence, but it also blurs dissenting views until they are no longer visible, thereby transforming data collection into bias confirmation and morphing self-deception into self-assurance.

In order to displace a prevailing theory or paradigm in science, it is not enough to merely point out what it cannot explain; you have to offer a new theory that explains more data, and do so in a testable way.

The case for exploiting animals for food, clothing and entertainment often relies on our superior intelligence, language and self-awareness: the rights of the superior being trump those of the inferior.

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.

One of the features of a democracy is the disentanglement of the sacred from the secular because in religiously pluralistic countries, no one can legitimately claim special status by faith membership.

My libertarian beliefs have not always served me well. Like most people who hold strong ideological convictions, I find that, too often, my beliefs trump the scientific facts.

Skepticism is not a position that you stake out ahead of time and stick to no matter what.

I always accepted the libertarian position of minimum regulation in the sale and use of firearms because I placed guns under the beneficial rubric of minimal restrictions on individuals.

In the long run, it is better to understand the way the world really is rather than how we would like it to be.

We do not just blindly concede control to authorities; instead we follow the cues provided by our moral communities on how best to behave.

Providentially, learned habits can be unlearned, especially in the context of moral groups.

Conspiracies are a perennial favorite for television producers because there is always a receptive audience.

You have to know evolution to understand the natural world. And that cannot be a threat to people of faith. There's a serious problem if you are forced by your faith to reject the most well-supported theory in all of science.

A Hubble Space Telescope photograph of the universe evokes far more awe for creation than light streaming through a stained glass window in a cathedral.

The natural inclination in all humans is to posit a force, a spirit, outside of us. That tendency toward superstitious magical thinking is just built into our nature.

In my experience, people are usually fired for reasons having to do with budgetary constraints, incompetence or not fulfilling the terms of a contract.

Tenure in any department is serious business, because it means, essentially, employment for life.

There are checks and balances in science. There's somebody checking the people doing the science, and then there's somebody who checks the checkers and somebody who checks the checker's checkers.

Scientists are skeptics. It's unfortunate that the word 'skeptic' has taken on other connotations in the culture involving nihilism and cynicism. Really, in its pure and original meaning, it's just thoughtful inquiry.

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.

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.

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.

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.

As a social primate species, we modulate our morals with signals from family, friends and social groups with whom we identify because in our evolutionary past, those attributes helped individuals to survive and reproduce.

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

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

Human history is highly nonlinear and unpredictable.

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

Anecdotal thinking comes naturally; science requires training.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Plato wove historical fact into literary myth.

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.

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

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

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