Michael Shermer Biography, Age, Teaching, Education, Books, Awards, Skepticism, Competitive cycling, Heavens on earth, Published works
Table of Contents
Michael Shermer Biography
Michael Shermer (Full name; Michael Brant Shermer) is an American science writer, historian of science, founder of The Skeptics Society, and editor-in-chief of its magazine Skeptic, which is largely devoted to investigating pseudoscientific and supernatural claims. The Skeptics Society currently has over 55,000 members.
Shermer engages in debates on topics pertaining to pseudoscience and religion in which he emphasizes scientific skepticism. Shermer is producer and co-host of the 13-hour Fox Family television series Exploring the Unknown which was broadcast in 1999.
From April 2001 to January 2019, he was a monthly contributor to Scientific American magazine with his Skeptic column. He is also a scientific advisor to the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH). Shermer was once a fundamentalist Christian but ceased to believe in the existence of God during his graduate studies.
He accepts the labels agnostic, nontheist, atheist, and others. He has expressed reservations about such labels for his lack of belief in a God, however, as he sees them being used in the service of “pigeonholing”, and prefers to simply be called a skeptic. He also describes himself as an advocate for humanist philosophy as well as the science of morality.
Michael Shermer Age
Michael Shermer is a 65-year-old science writer, historian of science, founder of The Skeptics Society, and editor-in-chief of its magazine Skeptic born on September 8, 1954, in Altadena, California, United States.
Michael Shermer Family.
Michael Shermer’s parents divorced when he was four years old, and later his father remarried, his mother with three children, who became his step-sister and two step-brothers, his father had a woman with whom he had two daughters, his half-sisters. His father died of a heart attack in 1986, and his mother died of brain cancer in 2000.
Michael Shermer Wife
Michael Shermer is married to a native German Jennifer Graf on June 25, 2014. The couples were blessed with a daughter named Devin Ziel Shermer.
Michael Shermer Education
Michael Shermer graduated from Crescenta Valley High School in 1972. He then joined Pepperdine University where he received a degree in bachelor of psychology in 1976. He received his master’s degree in experimental psychology at California State University, Fullerton.
Michael Shermer specialized in Christian theology. In addition to his courses on the Bible, he studied the writings of C.S. Lewis, and he attended chapel twice a week, which was required for all students.
Despite the restrictions imposed on students, such as a ban on dancing and visiting the dorm rooms of the opposite sex, Shermer found the university a good experience, and he accepted its teachings as a valid guide for behavior.
Michael Shermer Graduate studies and change of beliefs
Shermer’s master’s degree in experimental psychology at the California State University, Fullerton, led to many after-class discussions with professors Bayard Brattstrom and Meg White at a local pub—The 301 Club—that went late into the night.
These discussions, along with his studies in cultural anthropology, led him to question his religious beliefs. He abandoned his devout religious views, fueled by what he perceived to be the intolerance generated by the absolute morality he was taught in his religious studies; the hypocrisy in what many believers preached and what they practiced; and his growing awareness of other religious beliefs, and how they were determined by the temporal, geographic, and cultural circumstances in which their adherents were born.
From this, Shermer came to conclude it is “obvious that God was made in our likeness and not the reverse.” By midway through his graduate training, he removed the Christian silver ichthys medallion that he had been wearing around his neck for years.
Michael Shermer completed his MA degree from California State University in psychology in 1978. The final step in Shermer’s abandoning religion came when his college sweetheart, Maureen, was in an automobile accident that broke her back and rendered her paralyzed from the waist down. Shermer relates:
When I saw her at the Long Beach Medical Center ER, the full implications of what this meant for her begin to dawn on me. There, in the ER, day after dreary day, night after sleepless night, I took a knee and bowed my head and asked God to heal Maureen’s broken back.
I prayed with deepest sincerity. I cried out to God to overlook my doubts in the name of Maureen. I willingly suspended all disbelief. At that time and in that place, I was once again a believer. I believed because I wanted to believe that if there was any justice in the universe any at all this sweet, loving, smart, responsible, devoted, caring spirit did not deserve to be in a shattered body.
A just and loving God who had the power to heal would surely heal Maureen. He didn’t. He didn’t, I now believe, not because “God works in mysterious ways” or “He has a special plan for Maureen” the nauseatingly banal comforts believers sometimes offer in such trying and ultimately futile times but because there is no God.
Michael Shermer Competitive cycling
Michael Shermer got a job in writing for a bicycle magazine in Irvine, California. His first assignment, in Cycles Peugeot press conference it featured John Marino, who had just ridden from Los Angeles to New York in 13 days, one hour, and 20 minutes, made a deep impression on him.
Michael Shermer bought a bike and entered the Yoplait Yogurt 50-kilometer race through Griffith Park in Los Angeles the following weekend. His interest grew rapidly, and within a short time, he had completed his first-century ride (100 miles).
Before long he was riding hundreds of miles a week. He began competitive cycling in 1979, and he spent a decade as a professional rider. His best known bicycling is in the very long distance ultramarathon road racing discipline. He is a founding member of the Ultra Cycling Hall of Fame.
During his course in cycling, he worked with the cyler technologists in developing better products for the sport. During his association with Bell Helmets, a bicycle-race sponsor, he advised them on design issues regarding their development of expanded-polystyrene for use in cycling helmets, which would absorb impact far better than the old leather “hairnet” helmets used by bicyclists for decades.
Michael Shermer advised them that if their helmets looked too much like motorcycle helmets, in which polystyrene was already being used, and not like the old hairnet helmets, no serious cyclists or amateur would use them. This suggestion led to their model, the V1 Pro, which looked like a black leather hairnet but functioned on the inside like a motorcycle helmet.
In 1982, he worked with Wayman Spence, whose small supply company, Spenco Medical, adapted the gel technology Spence developed for bedridden patients with pressure sores into cycling gloves and saddles to alleviate the carpal tunnel syndrome and saddle sores suffered by cyclists.
During his long-distance race he helped to found the 3,000-mile nonstop transcontinental bicycle Race Across America (known as “RAAM”, along with Lon Haldeman and John Marino), in which he competed for five times (1982, 1983, 1984, 1985, and 1989), was an assistant race director for six years, and the executive race director for seven years.
His acute medical condition is named for him: “Shermer Neck” is a pain in and extreme weakness of the neck muscles found among long-distance bicyclists. He suffered the condition about 2,000 miles into the 1983 Race Across America.
Michael Shermer embraced on scientific skepticism crystallized during his time as a cyclist, explaining, “I became a skeptic on Saturday, August 6, 1983, on the long climbing road to Loveland Pass, Colorado”, after months of training under the guidance of a “nutritionist” with an unaccredited Ph.D.
After years of practicing acupuncture, chiropractic, massage therapy, negative ions, rolfing, pyramid power, fundamentalist Christianity, and “a host of weird things” (with the exception of drugs) to improve his life and training, he stopped rationalizing the failure of these practices.
Michael Shermer produced several documentary films on cycling. has written on the subject of pervasive doping in competitive cycling and a game-theoretic view of the dynamics driving the problem in several sports. He wrote specifically about r-EPO doping, which he saw as both widespread and well known within the sport, which was later shown to be instrumental in the doping scandal surrounding Lance Armstrong in 2010.
Michael Shermer Net Worth
Michael Shermer is an American science writer, historian of science, founder of The Skeptics Society, and editor-in-chief of its magazine Skeptic who has an estimated net worth of $5 million.
Michael Shermer Heavens on earth
In his most ambitious work yet, Shermer sets out to discover what drives humans’ belief in life after death, focusing on recent scientific attempts to achieve immortality along with utopian attempts to create heaven on earth.
For millennia, religions have concocted numerous manifestations of heaven and the afterlife, and though no one has ever returned from such a place to report what it is really like or that it even exists today science and technology are being used to try to make it happen in our lifetime.
From radical life extension to cryonic suspension to mind uploading, Shermer considers how realistic these attempts are from a proper skeptical perspective. “This book’s theme is one of the greatest practical importance to all of us: does some heaven or afterlife await us after we die? Most Americans and even many atheists believe that the answer is ‘yes.’
If there is no heaven, how can we find purpose in life? Michael Shermer explores these big questions with the delightful, powerful style that made his previous books so successful—but this is his best book.” “Heavens on Earth is absolutely brilliant, filled with profundity, startling facts, and mind-expanding ideas.
Michael Shermer somehow manages to be entertaining and scientifically erudite at the same time. He also brings some of history’s greatest thinkers to life and makes their ideas accessible. This is one of the most fascinating books I’ve read in a long time.”
Michael Shermer Teaching
While he was still cycling Michael Shermer taught Psychology 101 during evenings at Glendale Community College, which is a two-year college. Michael Shermer wanted to teach a four-year course at the university, he decided to earn his Ph.D.
Because Shermer’s interests lay in behaviorism and he did not believe he could make a difference in the world by working in a lab with Skinner boxes, he lost interest in psychology and switched to studying the history of science, he based in a full-length book on his dissertation; the book, titled In Darwin’s Shadow: The Life and Science of Alfred Russel Wallace: A Biographical Study on the Psychology of History, was published in August 2002.
His book of The Borderlands of Science, he rated on several noted scientists for gullibility toward “pseudo” or “borderland” ideas, using a rating version, developed by psychologist Frank Sulloway, of the Big Five model of personality.
Michael Shermer rated Wallace extremely high (99th percentile) on agreeableness/accommodation and argued that this was the key trait in distinguishing Wallace from scientists who give less credence to fringe ideas. He then became an adjunct professor of the history of science at Occidental College, California.
In 2007, he took a position as a senior research fellow at Claremont Graduate University. In 2011, he took a position as an adjunct professor at Chapman University and was later made a Presidential Fellow. At Chapman, he teaches a yearly critical thinking course called Skepticism 101, in which he tries out new ideas on students.
Micheal Shermer Scientific skepticism
In 1992, he founded the Skeptics Society, which began as a hobby in his garage, but eventually grew into a full-time occupation. The Skeptics Society publishes the magazine Skeptic and organizes the Caltech Lecture Series. In 2008, it has over 55,000 members.
Micheal Shermer Published works
Michael Shermer is the author of books that attempt to explain the ubiquity of irrational or poorly substantiated beliefs, including UFOs, Bigfoot, and paranormal claims. In 1997, he wrote Why People Believe Weird Things, which explores a variety of “weird” ideas and groups (including cults), in the tradition of the skeptical writings of Martin Gardner.
A revised and expanded edition was published in 2002. He wrote in the Introduction: So we are left with the legacy of two types of thinking errors: Type 1 Error: believing a falsehood and Type 2 Error: rejecting a truth.
Believers in UFOs, alien abductions, ESP, and psychic phenomena have committed a Type 1 Error in thinking: they are believing a falsehood. … It’s not that these folks are ignorant or uninformed; they are intelligent but misinformed. Their thinking has gone wrong.
Michael Shermer a book of known as In How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science, he explored the psychology behind the belief in God. In its introduction, he wrote “Never in history have so many, and such a high percentage of the population believed in God.
Not only is God not dead as Nietzsche proclaimed, but he has never been more alive.” From April 2001 to January 2019, he wrote the monthly Skeptic column for Scientific American. He has also contributed to Time magazine.
In February 2002, he characterized the position that “God had no part in the process [of the evolution of mankind]” as the “standard scientific theory”. This statement was criticized in January 2006 by the scientist Eugenie Scott, who commented that science makes no claim about God one way or the other.
In May 2002, he and Alex Grobman published their book Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It?, which examined and refuted the Holocaust denial movement. This book recounts meeting various denialists and concludes that free speech is the best way to deal with pseudohistory.
Science Friction: Where the Known Meets the Unknown was released in 2005. His 2006 book Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design marshals point-by-point arguments supporting evolution, sharply criticizing the intelligent design. This book also argues that science cannot invalidate religion and that Christians and conservatives can and should accept evolution.
In June 2006, he expressed skepticism as a regarding the mainstream scientific views on global warming, wrote in “Scientific American” magazine that, in the light of the accumulation of evidence, the position of denying global warming is no longer tenable.
The Mind of The Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Other Tales from Evolutionary Economics were released in 2007. In his reports on the findings of multiple behavioral and biochemical studies that address evolutionary explanations for modern behavior.
It garnered several critical reviews from academics, with skeptic Robert T. Carroll saying: “He has been blinded by his libertarianism and seduced by the allure of evolutionary psychology to explain everything, including ethics and economics.”
In February 2009, he published The History of Science: A Sweeping Visage of Science and its History, a 25-hour audio lecture. In May 2011, he published The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies: How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths.
Prior to his work on science and skepticism, he published his books on cycling and others on child education in the math and science disciplines. These include collaborations with Arthur Benjamin. In January 2015, he published The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity Toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom.
Harriet Hall says of Shermer’s 2018 publication, Heavens on Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia, that “the topics of Heavens on Earth are usually relegated to the spheres of philosophy and religion, but he approaches them through science, looking for evidence — or lack thereof.” She goes on to say that “[s]ome will argue that he goes beyond the science” but that “it will definitely … make the reader think.”
Micheal Shermer Media appearances and lectures
Micheal Shermer appeared as a guest on Donahue in 1994 to respond to Bradley Smith’s and David Cole’s Holocaust denial claims, and in 1995 on The Oprah Winfrey Show to challenge Rosemary Altea’s psychic claims. Michael Shermer made a guest appearance in a 2004 episode of Penn & Teller’s Bullshit!, in which he argued that events in the Bible constitute “mythic storytelling”, rather than events described literally.
His stance was supported by the show’s hosts, who have expressed their own atheism. The episode in question, The Bible: Fact or Fiction?, sought to debunk the notion that the Bible is an empirically reliable historical record. Opposing him and Paul Maier, professor of ancient history at Western Michigan University.
Michael Shermer made several appearances on NBC’s daytime paranormal-themed show The Other Side in 1994 and 1995. After getting to know the show’s producers, he made a formal pitch to their production company for his own skepticism-oriented reality show whose aim would be to present points of view of both believers and skeptics.
His proposals were not fruitful, but several years later, one of the executives of that company went to work for the then-newly formed Fox Family Channel, and impressed with his show treatment, requested he pitches it to the network.
The network picked up the series, Exploring the Unknown, of which he became a producer and cohost. The series, which was budgeted at approximately $200,000 per episode, was viewed by him as a direct extension of the work done at the Skeptics Society and Skeptic magazine, and he enabled him to reach more people.
The equivocal title was chosen so as to not tip off guests or viewers as to the skeptical nature of the show. His Various segments of Exploring the Unknown can be found on his YouTube channel. In 1999, he produced and co-hosted the Fox Family TV series Exploring the Unknown.
He has been a speaker at all three Beyond Belief events from 2006 to 2008. He also spoke at the 2006 TED Conference on “Why people believe strange things”. In 2008, he delivered the commencement speech at Whittier College, which awarded him with an honorary doctorate of Humane Letters.
Michael Shermer is also an occasional guest on Skepticality, the official podcast of Skeptic. He debated Deepak Chopra on multiple occasions, including during their March 2010 appearance on the ABC News program Nightline. He has named Chopra his personal favorite debating partner.
On August 21, 2010, he was honored with an award recognizing his contributions in the skeptical field, from the Independent Investigations Group during its 10th Anniversary Gala.
Micheal Shemer Awards
- Fellow, 2001, Linnean Society of London
- California State University, Fullerton Distinguished Alumni Award, 2002
- NCAS Philip J. Klass Award, October 2006
- Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters, Whittier College, 2008
Micheal Shemer Books
(1985). Sport cycling : a guide to training, racing, and endurance. Chicago: Contemporary Books.
1987). Cycling: Endurance and Speed (Sports performance). ISBN 0-8092-4775-5.
(1989). Teach Your Child Science. ISBN 0-929923-08-1.
(2002) [1997]. Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time (2nd Revision ed.). ISBN 0-8050-7089-3.
(1999). Teach Your Child Math and Mathemagics. ISBN 0-7373-0134-1.
(2001). The Borderlands of Science: Where Sense Meets Nonsense. ISBN 0-19-514326-4.
(2001). How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science. ISBN 0-613-35413-3.
(2002). The Skeptic Encyclopedia of Pseudoscience. ISBN 1-57607-653-9. (editor).
(2002). Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It?. ISBN 0-520-23469-3.
(2002). In Darwin’s Shadow: The Life and Science of Alfred Russel Wallace: A Biographical Study on the Psychology of History. ISBN 0-19-514830-4.
(2004). The Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Gossip, Care, Share, and Follow the Golden Rule. ISBN 0-8050-7520-8.
(2005). Science Friction: Where the Known Meets the Unknown. ISBN 0-8050-7708-1.
(2006). Secrets of Mental Math: The Mathemagician’s Guide to Lightning Calculation and Amazing Math Tricks. ISBN 978-0-307-33840-2.
(2006). Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design. ISBN 978-0-8050-8121-3.
(2007). The Mind of The Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Other Tales from Evolutionary Economics. ISBN 978-0-8050-7832-9.
(2011). The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths. ISBN 978-0-8050-9125-0.
(2015). The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom. ISBN 978-0805096910.
(2016). Skeptic: Viewing the World with a Rational Eye. ISBN 978-1627791380.
(2018). Heavens on Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia. ISBN 978-1627798570.
Micheal Shemer Articles and chapters
“Agnosticism”. Invited contribution in Religions of the World: A Comprehensive Encyclopedia of Beliefs and Practices, edited by J. Gordon Melton. ABC-CLIO. 2010.
“The Chain of Accidents and the Rule of Law: The Role of Contingency and Necessity in Evolution”. Contribution for an edited volume, The Nature of Nature (Bruce L. Gordon, Editor). 2010.
“A noble conception”. Commentary. Nature Physics, 2009, 5, 162-163
“Testing Tenure: Let the Market Decide”. Invited commentary on “Is Tenure Justified?” by Stephen J. Ceci, et al., Behavioral and Brain Sciences, December 2006, Volume 29, No. 6, 584-585.
“Science and Pseudoscience”. Encyclopedia of Philosophy. MacMillan, 2006.
“The Skeptic’s Chaplain: Richard Dawkins as a Fountainhead of Skepticism”. Contribution for an edited volume in tribute to Dawkins, Oxford University Press, 2006.
“Pseudoscience”. Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Ethics. Carl Mitcham (Ed.) Macmillan Reference. In Press, 2004.
“Skepticism”. Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Ethics. Carl Mitcham (Ed.) Macmillan Reference. In Press, 2004.
“Rethinking Stephen Jay Gould: Science and Politics in Evolutionary Theory”. Rethinking Marxism, Winter, 2003.
“How to be Open-Minded Without Your Brains Falling Out”. Journal of Thought. July 2003.
“Agnosticism.” Entry in Religions of the World: A Comprehensive Encyclopedia of Beliefs and Practices. J. Gordon Melton and Martin Baumann, Editors. Denver: ABC-CLIO, Vol. 1: 22-23. 2002.
“This View of Science: Stephen Jay Gould as Historian of Science and Scientific Historian”. Social Studies of Science. September 2002.
“The Crooked Timber of History: History is Complex and Often Chaotic. Can We Use This to Better Understand the Past?” Complexity, Vol. 2, No.6. July/August 1997: 23-29.
“Chaos Theory”. Invited entry in The Encyclopedia of Historiography. D.R. Woolf (Ed.) New York: Garland Publishing. 1996.
“Exorcising Laplace’s Demon: Chaos and Antichaos, History, and Metahistory”. Invited paper for History and Theory. Wesleyan University. Vol. 34, No. 1. 1995. 59-83.
“The Chaos of History: On a Chaotic Model that Represents the Role of Contingency and Necessity in Historical Sequences”. Nonlinear Science. Vol. 2, No. 4. 1993: 1-13.
“Science Defended, Science Defined: The Louisiana Creationism Case”. Science, Technology, & Human Values. SAGE Publications. 16 (4): 517–539.
doi:10.1177/016224399101600405. ISSN 0162-2439.
Shermer, Michael (1990). “Darwin, Freud, and the Myth of the Heroin Science”. Knowledge. SAGE Publications. 11 (3): 280–301. doi:10.1177/107554709001100305. ISSN 0164-0259.
(June 2010). “When ideas have sex”. Scientific American. Vol. 302 no. 6. p. 18. doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0610-32.
(April 2013). “Proof of hallucination: did a neurosurgeon go to heaven?”. Skeptic. Scientific American. Vol. 308 no. 4. p. 67. Retrieved 2015-05-01.
(May 2013). “Gun science: how data can help clarify the gun control debate”. Skeptic. Scientific American. Vol. 308 no. 5. p. 69. Retrieved 2016-02-11.
(February 2018). “Our Actions Don’t Matter in a Cosmic Sense—But That Doesn’t Mean They Don’t Matter”. Scientific American. Vol. 318. p. 1. Retrieved 2018-01-17.
Micheal Shemer Documentary
Out of Body Experiences”
” How to Fake UFO Photographs”
on Spoonbending”
Firewalking Across Hot Coals”
” Tests the Polygraph and Lie Detection”, Parts 1 & 2
“Learns the Art of Con Games”, Parts 1 & 2
Decodes the Bible Code”
“Explores Graphology/Handwriting Analysis”, Parts 1 & 2
“Remote Viewing Experiment”, Parts 1 & 2
Micheal Shemer Television Shows
August 1983 news segment on his bicycling in Race Across America
Unsolved Mysteries, James Van Praagh segment, 1994
The Phil Donahue Show, 1994
Charlie Rose, April 1996
“The Power of Belief”, ABC News, 1998
Politically Incorrect, December 22, 2000
20/20, December 5, 2003
Dennis Miller, May 19 and May 20, 2004
“The Bible: Fact or Fiction?”, Penn & Teller: Bullshit!, 2004
The Question of God: Sigmund Freud & C.S. Lewis, 2004
The Eyes of Nye on “Pseudoscience”, 2005
The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe, October 4, 2006
“Doomsday 2012”, Decoding the Past, 2007
Larry King Live, July 13, 2007, and January 24, 2008
Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, 2008
“Does God Have a Future?”, Nightline, ABC, March 23, 2010
“What Were You Thinking?”, Dateline NBC, April 25, 2010
“Did You See That?”, Dateline NBC, July 16, 2010
The Colbert Report, August 21, 2007
The Colbert Report, July 11, 2011
Paranormal Challenge, Linda Vista Hospital, August 26, 2011
Conspiracy Road Trip: UFOs, BBC Three, 15 October 2012
Stossel, Fox Business Channel, December 13, 2012
The Agenda with Steve Paikin Feb 28, 2013 “The Anti-Science Left”
Merchants of Doubt, 2014 documentary
StarTalk, National Geographic Channel, November 15, 2015
Reasons To Believe, 2017 documentary.
Micheal Shemer Facebook
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