NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE (ANS) -- Dr. Michael Shermer is the Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine (www.skeptic.com ), the Executive Director of the Skeptics Society, a monthly columnist for Scientific American, the host of the Skeptics Distinguished Science Lecture Series at Caltech, and Adjunct Professor of Economics at Claremont Graduate University.

Dr. Michael Shermer

Dr. Shermer’s latest book is The Mind of the Market, on evolutionary economics. His last book was Why Darwin Matters: Evolution and the Case Against Intelligent Design, and he is the author of Science Friction: Where the Known Meets the Unknown, about how the mind works and how thinking goes wrong.  

His book The Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Gossip, Share Care, and Follow the Golden Rule, is on the evolutionary origins of morality and how to be good without God. He wrote a biography, In Darwin’s Shadow, about the life and science of the co-discoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace. He also wrote The Borderlands of Science, about what he calls "the fuzzy land between science and pseudoscience," and Denying History, on Holocaust denial and other forms of pseudohistory. His book How We Believe: Science, Skepticism, and the Search for God, presents his theory on the origins of religion and why people believe in God. He is also the author of Why People Believe Weird Things on pseudoscience, superstitions, and other confusions of our time.

According to the late Stephen Jay Gould (from his Foreword to Why People Believe Weird Things): “Michael Shermer, as head of one of America’s leading skeptic organizations, and as a powerful activist and essayist in the service of this operational form of reason, is an important figure in American public life.”

Dr. Shermer received his B.A. in psychology from Pepperdine University, M.A. in experimental psychology from California State University, Fullerton, and his Ph.D. in the history of science from Claremont Graduate University (1991). He was a college professor for 20 years (1979-1998), teaching psychology, evolution, and the history of science at Occidental College (1989-1998), California State University Los Angeles, and Glendale College.

Since his creation of the Skeptics Society, Skeptic magazine, and the Skeptics Distinguished Science Lecture Series at Caltech, he has appeared on such shows as The Colbert Report, 20/20, Dateline, Charlie Rose, Larry King Live, Tom Snyder, Donahue, Oprah, Lezza, Unsolved Mysteries (but, proudly, never Jerry Springer!), and other shows as a skeptic of weird and extraordinary claims, as well as interviews in countless documentaries aired on PBS, A&E, Discovery, The History Channel, The Science Channel, and The Learning Channel. Shermer was the co-host and co-producer of the 13-hour Family Channel television series, Exploring the Unknown.

Dr. Shermer debated Christian author Dinesh D'Souza ("What is So Great About Christianity?") at the NRB Public Policy Luncheon in Nashville, Tennessee, where he was described by moderator Janet Parshall as an "affable Atheist." ASSIST News Chief Correspondent Michael Ireland caught up with Shermer via e-mail and asked him the following questions.

Michael Ireland (MI): You mentioned during the NRB debate with Dinesh D'Souza that you became a Christian believer at one point. How and in what way did that come about?

Michael Shermer (MS): I converted in 1971 while I was in high school, influenced by my Christian friends. From then on my peer group largely consisted of Christians, which reinforced that belief system. I attended Biblestudy classes at a place in La Crescenta called "The Barn" (a home converted to a barn-like open structure which hosted Christian get-togethers). We called ourselves "born again Christians," and openly eschewed any denominational or church affiliation. I wanted to be a college professor (seemed like the best gig ever -- getting paid to learn and teach, with summers off no less!), and I was interested in theology, so I metriculated at Pepperdine University to study theology, where I took courses in the Old Testament, New Testament, the writings of C. S. Lewis, etc. All good stuff, solidly reinforcing what I already believed. I attended chapel twice a week (it was required but I mostly enjoyed it anyway), and I witnessed to nonbelievers -- that is, I told them about Jesus. I absolutely positively really believed that Jesus was the Son of God and Savior of humanity and my personal Savior.

MI: What was it about Christianity that first attracted you to become a believer?

MS: The wine and the women. Okay, seriously, what attracted me the most was that there was a ready-made complete worldview that you could just drop into the brain and that answered most of life's biggest questions. It felt right. It seemed right. Most questions were answered. It was only a matter of reading what the great Christian thinkers, such as C.S. Lewis, had to say on these great questions.

MI: What were the circumstances that surrounded your rejection of Christianity? Was there something specific that turned you against believing? If so, what?

MS: In my junior year at Pepperdine I discovered that to be a university professor you had to have a Ph.D., and to get that in theology you had to master Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, and Latin, and I could barely get through high school Spanish, so I switched majors to psychology, a field I very much enjoyed, and there discovered the ways of science, which I liked even more than theology and philosophy. When I graduated from Pepperdine I was still a Christian, but when I got into a graduate program at California State University, Fullerton I was surrounded by people who were either quiet about their religious beliefs or nonreligious and nonbelievers. In either case, the whole God/religion thing just never came up. It was irrelevant. And so I now had a new cohort, a new peer group, and the self-contained, internally-coherent belief system that is Christianity had not external supporting scaffolding, and without that you become more open to thinking in new and different ways, which I did. Science taught me now to look for natural explanations for natural phenomena, and to eschew supernatural explanations. The study of comparative world religions and mythologies from around the world showed me that other people believed just as passionately as I did that they were right and everyone else was wrong about religious beliefs that are mutually exclusive, which means that they can’t all be right and that perhaps I (e.g., Christianity) was wrong. I also did not like the arrogance of certainty that I saw in myself as a Christian as well as in my fellow Christians, and how intolerant of other peoples’ beliefs we are. Finally, thinking like a scientist made me wonder how to deal with specific Christian claims, such as the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, etc., which in conjunction with my study of other religious beliefs and mythological stories, seemed so obviously the product of human story tellers. The fact that all the central tenets of the Judeo-Christian belief system have antecedents in ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome (floods, Virgin Births, Resurrections, etc.) was an obvious indication that we created God and not vice versa.

MI: Why, now, is Christianity not an option for you as a belief system?

MS: I do not accept the central tenets of Christianity as true—the Virgin Birth and especially the Resurrection. I’m not alone in this skepticism, by the way. This is not an atheism retort, as your fellow Jews don’t believe any of this either, and yet they believe in the same God as you.

MI: What, if anything, would lead you to change your heart and mind about this?

MS: A brand new Bentley Continental GT parked in my driveway with the pink slip in my name and a gift card that read something like: “For Michael Shermer, Love Yahweh.”

MI: What would you say to those who suggest to you that Christianity is not a religion, but a relationship with a person, Jesus Christ?

MS: If Christianity is not a religion, then what is it? A cult? A belief system? The question is too nebulous to be useful. In any case, it is precisely the argument I made when I was a Christian! It’s really just a way of deflecting legitimate criticisms of religion.

MI: How and in what ways do you now describe your current belief system?

MS: I believe in human dignity, love, and intelligence. I believe in liberal democracy and market capitalism. I believe in civil liberties and individual freedoms. I believe that people should be free to believe or disbelieve whatever they want as long as it does not interfere with my equal freedom. I believe that we should do unto others as we would have them do unto us. All the rest is commentary.

MI: How would you respond to the suggestion (from the Bible itself, no less! Ephesians chapter two, verses eight and nine) that salvation is by and from God, and that faith in God and his Son Jesus Christ, is a gift from God himself and that he is the originator of that gift for anyone to receive? In other words that God gives us the power and ability to believe in him? See also John, chapter one, verse 12-13.

MS: I would say, along with 13 million Jews, several hundred million Muslims, and over two billion people of other faiths and nonfaiths, that just because it’s in the Bible does not make it true. The Bible also says that we are suppose to stone to death disobedient children, adulterous wives, and people who work on the Sabbath. Why don’t Christians follow that part of the Bible? Because they would be locked up as criminally insane (or just as criminals) if they tried to put that into practice. Cherry picking the Bible for passages intended to make us feel warm and fuzzy about living forever in the arms of a loving and caring father figure is not the way of enlightened minds.

MI: What would you suggest to help anyone else who has gone, or is going through, a similar experience of what, for want of a better term, could be called "a crisis of faith"?

MS: Embrace it with open arms and an open mind. It is a sign of growing up in the universe, facing reality, and using your mind. A crisis of faith is, in fact, an opportunity to think for oneself.

MI: Your organization and magazine is called Skeptic. Why not Atheist? What, for you, does it take to be a skeptic or an Atheist? Is there a difference in your mind? What are Atheism's major tenets?

MS: We are not an atheist magazine. We are a science magazine. Science is by nature skeptical. We begin with the “null hypothesis,” that is, the assumption that a claim is not true until proven otherwise. Vitamin C cures colds. That’s nice. Prove it. Run some experiments. Compile data for an epidemiological study. That’s how science works. We only deal with religious beliefs when specific claims are made, such as that the universe was created around 6,000 years ago, about a thousand years after the Mexicans domesticated corn. We can test that claim. Does prayer effect healing in sick people? We can test that claim. We have tested that claim. It has failed the test. The null hypothesis has not been rejected. Prayer does not effect healing. As for the God question, if God is a being outside of space and time and not part of the natural world, then science has nothing to say -- there is no experiment to run, no data to gather on the matter. As for atheism, there are no major or even minor tenets. Atheism is simply lacking belief in God, no more and no less. I don’t believe in God, so I’m an atheist. End of story.

** Michael Ireland, Chief Correspondent of ANS, is an international British freelance journalist who was formerly a reporter with a London newspaper and has been a frequent contributor to UCB Europe, a British Christian radio station. Michael's involvement with ASSIST News Service is a sponsored ministry department -- Michael Ireland Media Missionary (MIMM) -- of ACT International at: Artists in Christian Testimony (ACT) International.