This book tries to fill in some of the whys in Steven Pinker's book "Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence has Declined". The author starts off by defining morality as the "flourishing and surviving of sentient beings". It's not a perfect definition but in general the listener can latch on to it.

The author does go beyond Pinker's book and tries to fill in more of the reasons why violence has declined by looking at the facts from a morality point of view. Shermer knows it is more profitable to realize that man is the measure of all things and that our values are not etched in stone and aren't externally given to people, but are derived by people.

The continuous contextual approach (inductive) is almost always better than a binary, absolute approach (deductive). Using reason, science and observation can make us understand and appreciate the flourishing and surviving of others who aren't necessarily in our tribal group, be it kin, friend, community, or other self selected but always exclusionary group which divides 'us' from 'them' in some manner and leads to the widening of our moral sphere.

He looks at how our moral sphere is constantly becoming more inclusive. Slavery is the ultimate us against them. The realization of the wrongness of slavery and its abolition was a slow continuous process. For those who derive their values from external sources, the revealed religion sources just get it wrong on slavery. He considers in detail the widening of the moral sphere for less misogynistic attitudes towards women, the slow process of no longer making gays the other and even considers some of the issues in speciesism (the author is a specieist, as I am too, but I understand the issues).

It's hard for me not to fully embrace a book were I admire an author as much as I admire Michael Shermer, I read his articles frequently, I love his debates on the internet, he quotes accurately from Gene Rodenberry and Star Trek, he seems to love the same episodes of Twilight Zone that I do, and he quotes Michio Kaku extensively and other such things that I love too.

But, he doesn't stick to the narrative and falls off the track. For example, I am not sure why he uses Piketty and his "Capital in the 21st Century" to try to refute Piketty's own thesis. Inequalities are real in the world (and within America) and have been getting worse. He seems to think corporations aren't a threat to moral development and represent moral good. For me, corporations are not people, and can be a force of bad. He had a lot of things like that in this book which only gets in the way of his own thesis.

It's a minor thing, but I can't help myself. The author says "Alan Turing is agruably the most important man for the Allied's victory in WW II". Alan Turing is a hero of mine, but I don't think that statement is defensible. Betchley Park was a cooperative, and the Polish Mathematicians (God Bless the Poles!), cracked the enigma code first. For a marvelous audible book on the subject read, "Seizing the Enigma". Also, he states "most people agree that for WW I both sides are to blame". I would strongly recommend Max Hasting's recent book, "Catastrophe 1914" for a refutation of that statement.

I would say, Pinker's book, "Better Angels of our Nature" is my favorite book. It opened my eyes to how the world has improved since the dawn of time and how our moral sphere keeps getting wider (less of us against them and more of us). Most of what is good in Shermer's book is in Pinker's book. I realize Pinker's book is very technical. This book is not. Even though the author does ramble (much like this book review!), this book is a fine substitute for Pinker's book for those who don't love sets of tables, long historical reviews, an author who keeps on his narrative and summaries of scientific papers.

You don't need to want to convert others into atheism to enjoy this book. A theist would not be turned off while listening to this book. The author is fairly non-threatening in his presentation.

I usually don't listen to every word when I'm listening to an Audible book, because sometimes my mind will wonder. This book was different. I listened to every word from the author since he writes simple sentences and reads his own work better than a professional could have and says something I was really interested in, namely how the scientific process works.

Faith, is best thought of as "pretending to know something you don't know". Facts need support beyond "I just believe" and such people who believe such things belong at the child's table not the adult's table. He warns of falling for the trap of 'having faith" that the light will turn on when you turn the light switch on. You really have knowledge in that situation not faith. It's part of the 'word play' of Wittgenstein, but it is a way to confuse the word faith in the non believer.

The author explains what critical reasoning is and shows how it is a foundation to philosophical thought, but at the same time the listener will realize how the Socratic method is the foundation for the scientific process (he doesn't explicitly state this, but as I was listening to every word it became obvious).

Even if you don't want to convert others to be an Atheist, the book is still valuable. It will teach you about critical reasoning and how to learn about your proper place in the universe just a little bit better.

Ever since I was young I was curious about what made people do what they did. I wanted to know why people thought the way they thought, believed what they believed. Not just because I frequently found myself at odds with these thoughts and beliefs but they would always devote so much time and energy to these things, sometimes unknowingly. Sometimes we perform tasks a certain way that makes it more work for us, but since we believe it is the best way to perform said task, we carry on. Somewhere in our brains lies the answer, or so I have always believed.

I suspected that there was always more than personal choice, or freewill at work here, as I accused so many around me of ‘unthinking’ behavior. At my current job for example, I notice that the store will be filled with people, but no one will be at the registers checking out. After a few moments people come up, but all them. Why did everyone choose to stop shopping at that moment? Did they really choose to stop, or did something influence them? The behavior of others perhaps? Also, they will take a product from the same place. There could be five rows of this product, yet everyone will take from the same row. Now, while I am speaking of very small matters I can tie these into larger matters, such as the political or religious beliefs of people and ask the same questions. Which is why Michael Shermer’s book The Believing Brain: From Ghost and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies - How We Construct Our Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths was of interest to me.

 

Michael Shermer is an adjunct professor of psychology and founding publisher of  Skeptic magazine. He is well known to those that debate religion and is sometimes connected to other figures such as Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. Mr. Shermer is very much interested in truth, and most of his writing, lecturing and debating is geared towards that. From my own experience in watching or reading him I would say that his main cause is championing the scientific method in a much boarder application in society. He believes that all human behavior is understandable through deeper research in to the physical brian, more than the ethereal mind.

 

There is a growing understanding among scientists that suggests our physical being, biochemicals and neurology, play a much bigger part in who we are and what we believe, then previously thought. That doesn’t mean that there is a gene that makes you a Christian or an Atheist, just biological parameters that make it more likely you will become either. Once this is coupled with human evolution, which experts say show us the benefits for early man to have religion and an inherit political organization, plus a persons own life time experiences you can then understand why someone ‘chooses’ to believe or not to. Or to hold to one political view over another. There is simply more hardwiring involved in our choices than we are aware of.

 

In The Believing Brain, Shermer addresses this while adding his own research to explain it. He maintains throughout the book that for many of our beliefs, we believe first and then find facts to support it. It hardly goes the other way around. There are two main terms he uses to explain belief, ‘patternicity: the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless data’ and ‘agenticity: the tendency to infuse patterns with meaning, intention, and agency’. In other words, events occur, we witness something, determine it to be something, thus forming a belief and then set out to prove we are right, when we are really operating from false or misunderstood data. 

I am sure many will believe that this book is a direct attack upon religious believers, or believers of any sort, but I would say not. While Shermer identifies myself as a skeptic and something of an Atheist, having once been a practicing Christian, he does not judge believers of any kind. Merely he seeks to explain why he thinks they are prone to believing what they do and why it might be difficult to see the other side a controversial debate, due to feelings of belief. He does this equally with both sides of several examples. There is religion vs. atheism, and conservative vs. liberal, as well as those who hold to popular conspiracy theories, such as alien abductions and those who believed that the attacks on the World Trade Center Towers were carried out by the American government. Why people will claim any of these beliefs their own are due to the same evolutionary and biochemical nature of humanity, more so then us making a real informed choice. Though, this doesn’t rule out such choices.

 

Of course, this doesn’t mean we can’t change our minds, which I feel is the main point behind the whole book. Through the use of the scientific method we can determine if our beliefs hold any water and choose to make a decision based on the results, ignoring our feelings, or the patternicity and agenticity that we fall into. Shermer is making an argument that we are evolving, leaving behind the past useful, but no longer beneficial evolutionary developments that helped shape our view of the world, into a era where we can start shaping our own minds. He does not suggest at any time that there are humans incapable of such a feat, nor does he suggest that there are humans that don’t follow these belief patterns, but he does suggest that taking a scientific approach to what we choose to do will help determine it’s validity rather than basing decisions off gut feelings. 

Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust ... I need another shelf - books about things that make me mad.The greatest thing about where I live is the First Amendment, but people like the idiots that Shermer writes about test my belief in that. Shermer writes a very balance book not just about deniers, but about freedom of speech (and what it is) as well as a step by step nuke bomb level destruction of the deniers. Personally, I would have just stupid people and ended the book. Shermer also discusses the ways of historical research. Very interesting. Good companion book to the work of [a:Deborah E. Lipstadt|30617|Deborah E. Lipstadt|http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1336690697p2/30617.jpg], whose trial was occuring when this book went to press.