Michael Shermer discusses what it means to be a skeptic today. Topics range from UFOs and alternative medicine to legalized marijuana.

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Why do people see the Virgin Mary on cheese sandwiches or hear demonic lyrics in “Stairway to Heaven”? Using video, images and music, professional skeptic Michael Shermer explores these and other phenomena, including UFOs and alien sightings. He offers cognitive context: In the absence of sound science, incomplete information can combine with the power of suggestion (helping us hear those Satanic lyrics in Led Zeppelin). In fact, he says, humans tend to convince ourselves to believe: We overvalue the “hits” that support our beliefs, and discount the more numerous “misses.”

Rarely does anyone weigh facts
before deciding what to believe

In April 1999, when I was on a lecture tour for my book Why People Believe Weird Things, the psychologist Robert Sternberg attended my presentation at Yale University. His response to the lecture was both enlightening and troubling. It is certainly entertaining to hear about other people’s weird beliefs, Sternberg reflected, because we are confident that we would never be so foolish. But why do smart people fall for such things? Sternberg’s challenge led to a second edition of my book, with a new chapter expounding on my answer to his question: Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons. (continue reading…)

Science helps us understand the essential tension
between orthodoxy and heresy in science

In a 1987 lecture entitled “The Burden of Skepticism,” astronomer Carl Sagan succinctly summarized the delicate compromise between tradition and change: (continue reading…)

An inquiry into the original meaning of the word “skeptic”

Poets often express deep insights into human nature with far less verbiage than scientists. Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man, for example, is filled with pithy observations on the dualistic tensions of the human condition:

Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A Being darkly wise, and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the Stoic’s pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest,
In doubt to deem himself a God, or Beast,
In doubt his mind or body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reasoning but to err.

Pope has packed a lot into this refrain, but the final clause is an important challenge to science: Is all our reasoning for naught, to end only in error? (continue reading…)