There's just something about reading Shermer that is unique, classy, inviting, and very educational. He's been plugging away against superstition for decades in his books, sharing top notch research that informs us all about the value of science and how we should use it to think about things. This is the value Shermer exemplifies and is greatly needed in our era. He doesn't berate believers. He wants to understand them better, having been one himself. He doesn't attack the Bible either, just the paranormal basis for it.
He simply talks science. We need to understand science and Shermer is our guide. Science is the antidote to superstition, agency detection, and the flimsy anecdotal evidence for beliefs that modern scientifically literate people do not accept. "70 percent of Americans still do not understand the scientific process defined in the National Science foundation study as grasping probability, the experimental method, and hypothesis testing." (p. 4) So his goal is to share how science works and what it can accomplish. He writes: "What I want to believe based on emotions and what I should believe based on evidence do not always coincide. I'm a skeptic not because I 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 the case? The answer is science." (p. 2)
"Belief systems are powerful, pervasive and enduring," he rightly says. (p. 5) "The brain is a belief engine." "Once beliefs are formed, the brain begins to look for and find confirmatory evidence in support of those beliefs, which adds an emotional boost of further confidence in the beliefs and thereby accelerates the process of reinforcing them, and round and round the process goes in a positive feedback loop of belief confirmation." (p. 5) Full stop. Think about the implications of this. Again: "Once beliefs are formed, the brain begins to look for and find confirmatory evidence in support of those beliefs...."
He's not just interested in why people believe weird things, but why people believe anything at all. His answer:
"We form our beliefs for a wide variety of subjective, personal, emotional, and psychological reasons in the context of environments created by family, friends, colleagues, culture, and society at large; after forming our beliefs we then defend, justify, and rationalize them with a host of intellectual reasons, cogent arguments, and rational explanations. Beliefs come first, explanations for beliefs follow. I call this process belief dependent realism, where our perceptions about reality are dependent on the beliefs that we hold about it. Reality exists independent of human minds, but our understanding of it depends upon the beliefs we hold at any given moment." (p. 5)
Shermer simply talks science to the non-scientific mind and does this very well. You cannot be an informed believer if you have not read this book. This book is the culmination of 30 years of his research and we are all in his debt. It is timely and well written. He makes his points well. I just don't see how anyone can disagree. Shermer is clearly one of the best voices for reason in our world today.
This is Shermer at his best.
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