- Whether it's the existence of God, UFOs, or the nature of consciousness, we all grapple with mysteries of the universe.

Where some find answers in religious faith, today's guest challenges people to demand answers rooted in science and skepticism.

He's Michael Shermer this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(serene bright orchestral music) Hello, and welcome to "Story in the Public Square," where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from The Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

And my guest this week is the founding publisher of Skeptic Magazine, and the author of a new book, "Truth: What It Is, How to Find It, and Why It Still Matters."

Michael Shermer's joining us today from California.

Michael, thank you so much for being with us.

- (chuckles) Good morning, it's nice to see you.

- You know, I gotta tell you, the book is dazzling, I found myself having to set it down and sort of think about what I just read to really sort of do it justice.

But I wanna start with the title, "Truth."

In 2026, why is a book about truth necessary?

- Well, I addressed that in the first chapter, "Are We Living in a Post-Truth World?

", because that's what you hear, you know, fake news, alternative facts, post-truth, post-modernism, all that stuff, both the left and the right.

And I refute that to begin with because the moment you open your mouth to start an argument that you think we're living in a post-truth world, and "Here's my reasons and arguments for why," you've just lost because you're making reasons and arguments (chuckles) for something that you think is true, which is that we're living in a post-truth world.

So we can't be, people still care about the truth.

What they mean is, the trust in institutions that establish truth, with a small t, whether, you know, scientific institutions like the CDC or NOAA or NASA or government, Congress, the media, a lot of that's taken a hit in the last, I don't know, let's say decade or so, particularly post-COVID, in which people think, "Why should I trust the media when they told me this?

", and it turned out that was wrong, or "Why should I trust the CDC when they told me that?

", and that turned out to be wrong.

So people are tending to be distrustworthy of scientists, politicians, journalists, and so on, and that's what they mean by post-truth.

So one reason to write the book was to say, "No, hang on, these institutions still work.

There's still ways to get at the truth," again, with a small t.

"What you mean is it's been politicized, so let's see if we could take the politics out of it and just get at the ground truth."

- Is it a kind of cynicism that you're describing?

- A little bit of cynicism, really skepticism, I guess, in a way; I mean, it's the name of my magazine, Skeptic.

- Yeah.

- And it's okay to be skeptical, and what happens is, is that when people get lied to or they're deceived or they're just told things that are wrong enough times, they'd become distrustworthy.

So like in my previous book on conspiracy theories it's not irrational to think that there are some conspiracy theories that are true that probably aren't because enough of them are true.

You know, the government really does do things like MKUltra and COINTELPRO and Watergate and Iran-Contra, and, you know, corporations really do cheat the regulatory state to gain a profitable advantage over other companies, that really does happen.

So it's kind of a constructive paranoia, you might say.

And I think in general, for "Truth," that's what happens is people, they start to lose trust in the truth value of these institutions, and that, we need to get back to.

- You know, you have a really prolific career in media, in writing, you've got a very successful podcast now.

What led you to skepticism?

- Oh, well, that goes all the way back to when I was in college, I thought... First of all, I was very religious, I was a born-again Christian at Pepperdine University, then when I went to Cal State Fullerton, where I kind of lost my religiosity, but I was still curious about the paranormal and the supernatural and all that.

And I was training to become a scientist, and, you know, it was clear that these are two different ways of thinking that, you know, scientists need evidence and arguments and so on, and the paranormal, supernatural, ESP, astrology, all this stuff, it seemed to be based on anecdotes, stories; and those aren't enough to provide evidence.

And then I saw skeptics debunking paranormal claims, like The Amazing Randi was on "The Tonight Show" with Johnny Carson showing, you know, how to do psychic surgery, or how Uri Geller bends spoons, you know, using magic tricks- - [Jim] I remember those episodes.

- (chuckles) Yeah.

Yeah, so I though, "You know, what are the chances," you know, I'm 21, 22 years old, "What are the chances that I figured this out?

But these magicians can fool scientists, like maybe it's better to be skeptical."

- You know, so it seems like we're in a moment where it is... I don't know if it's more fashionable, but it's certainly more widely accepted to hear people talking in august places, like the US Congress or on the front page of The New York Times, about things that were once considered sort of, I don't wanna say silly, but not the stuff for The New York Times or "60 Minutes;" I'm talking about UAPs, I'm talking about UFOs.

But we'll come to the specifics of those phenomena, but I'm curious about your overall impression of the public's willingness to engage on these issues without sort of giggling about it as much as maybe they did, you know, 20 years ago.

- Oh, yeah.

So people are not natural critical-thinkers or skeptics, they do go based on anecdotes; "I heard this story of this incredible thing," and, you know, how do I know?

Could be true.

- Yeah.

- And the more outlandish it is, the more difficult it is to fact-check it yourself.

And so, you just accept it as true or false based on what your team believes or your party or your religion or whatever.

The analogy you make in the book is, you know, when the preacher says the church has a parking lot in the back, you can go check yourself if there is one or not; but when the preacher says, you know, that God is three in one and one in three, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, the Trinity and all that, how is anybody supposed to check that, right?

Unitarians don't believe it, Trinitarians do, Buddhists don't believe it, and so on and so forth.

These are religious truths, they're very different, and I think people think, "Well, what do I know?

You know, how do I know NASA's not hiding the alien bodies in Area 51?

I can't go check."

- Right.

- Right?

"But, you know, this guy with the credible credentials, this pilot says he saw something unusual; and, wow, he's a pilot," you know?

So we end up using credentialing and association with institutions as a way of determining what's true because we can't check it ourselves.

So, in the case of UAPs, the moment you hear somebody trotting out credentials like, "Oh, he was a Navy pilot," or, "He was a congressman," or whatever, that means they don't have actual evidence.

And my analogy is, remember the Chinese spy balloon from 2023?

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

So, you know, why does nobody talk about the credentials of the pilot that took pictures of it or shot it down?

Because we don't need the credentials, we can see the balloon.

Everybody can see the balloon, "There it is, and now here's the debris, we shot it down, we have it," okay, we know what happened.

So that's a good clue of how to think about critical claims like that; do we have actual evidence or is it just stories?

- That's a profound insight.

So in my day job, I am among other things, a researcher of disinformation used by nation states.

And one of the things that we have found that they play on, that they trade on is essentially the public's fascination, deep fascination, with esoteric knowledge, information that's only reserved for a privileged few.

And this is at the heart of things like the JFK conspiracy, it's at the heart of the UFO conspiracy, the Knights Templar, we go on down the list, right?

- Mm-hmm.

- I'm curious from your experience, your study, your engagement with these issues, why is the idea of hidden knowledge so fascinating to so many different people?

- Oh, well, 'cause we can't get at it, so we have to trust that somebody has it.

And also it's an explanation for the world that we don't know.

You know, the world seems chaotic and uncontrolled and no one's in charge, and "Well, oh, it's these 12 guys in London called the Illuminati running the world or Trump or Putin or the deep state.

You know, there's something going on that I'm not privy to; but I read this book, so now I have a little touch of the secret knowledge," right?

Then there's an element of proportionality, that is a proportionality bias, the bigger the event, the bigger the cause we think should be to explain it.

So JFK, leader of the free world, most powerful man, famous, attractive, and he's shot down by who?

Lee Harvey Oswald, the lone nut?

That just doesn't seem right.

So it must have been the FBI and the KGB and the CIA and LBJ and the mafia and the Cubans and the Russians," you know, and so on.

Or Princess Diana, you know, cause of death: drunk driving, speeding, no seatbelt, tens of thousands of people die like that every year.

"But princesses are not supposed to die like that; so it must have been MI5 or MI6 or the Royal Family," or, you know, whoever did it.

- [Jim] Yeah.

- And, you know, 9/11, you know, "19 guys with box cutters, you're telling me took down the World Trade Center, really?

Come on, it must have been a big secret, huge plot by the Bush administration and Israel and so on."

So that, you know, people think there must be something big to cause something big; but not necessarily, in a free society, that's how they get away with it.

You know, a lone nut can get away with things in a free society like America, where no one notices you.

- You know, so you write that most people typically confuse beliefs and facts.

- Hmm.

- What's the difference?

- Well, so there... Yeah, I like to say I don't wanna believe things that have to be believed in to be true, (Jim chuckles) if I can avoid it.

Now, I mean, things like, you know, fiat money, it's not really worth anything, but we all agree that it is, and the government says they'll back it, so I kind of have faith or confidence or belief that it's true.

You know, there's some things like that, but I'd rather think, you know, the moon landing really happened, and, you know, the Earth really is round and goes around the sun, and, you know, just the basics of life.

I don't wanna have to accept those because other people believe it, they're actually true.

I quote Philip K. Dick: "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."

(both laughing) The moon really is there whether you look at it or not, that may not be true at the quantum level, but, you know, we don't live in the quantum level, we live at the macro level, so, yeah.

So there, I think the facts matter, evidence matters, we like to say extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

And so, if you have ordinary evidence for an ordinary claim, that's probably fine.

- Yeah.

- You know, you're in a studio on Rhode Island, I can see you there, I'm not there, but I can... You know, it's like, "Okay, it's a reasonable assumption;" but you're not making anything extraordinary if you say, "By the way, during this broadcast, I was abducted by aliens and went off to a Pleiades star cluster and to this planet of the Pleiadians who told us to, you know, stop nuclear proliferation."

I'm like, "Okay, I'm gonna need you to like grab the thing off the dashboard of the alienship and show it to me," right?

(Jim chuckling) "I'm not gonna be able to just take your word that you're there," right?

- Well, so this sort of speaks to the question about how do we actually get from skepticism to truth?

What can people do, how do we actually know that something is true?

- Yeah.

So I define truth, with the small t, truth, not capital T, Truth, like in proof or religious belief, something like that, but truth with a small t, something confirmed to such an extent, it would be reasonable to offer our provisional assent.

That is to say, provisionally, for now, I think, yeah, okay, I'll accept it as true, but that allows me to change my mind tomorrow if the evidence changes.

So this is called Bayesian reasoning, you never assign a zero or a one to anything, it's always like say 0.01% probability or 99% probability of being true, but never one or zero.

So that allows you to say, "Look, based on the evidence we have right now, this is what I think is true; but let's see, we'll gather more evidence and possibly change our mind," update our priors, as we say.

So like, during COVID, it would've been nice if our public officials and scientists said, "You know, we're not too sure about masks, social distancing," whatever, "But this is what we think is true right now, and next week, you know, we may change our mind as new studies come in."

People would go, "Oh, yeah, okay.

Sure, I get that."

You know, but instead they made pronouncements like, "This is it for sure," and then the week later, they're like, "Oh, we were wrong, we changed our mind," and people are like, "Hey, hey, hey, how come?

You told us this."

Now that sounds deceptive, right?

That's why I like the idea of no definitive Truth, with a capital T, so that people are open to changing their minds, which should be a virtue.

- Is that something that political leaders, is that a needle that they can thread?

- I don't know because we're so polarized that it makes you sound like a flip-flopper- - Yeah.

- And a wishy-washy, mamby-pamby weak leader if you're not definitive in the adjectives you use, "100%, we're sure," you know, like, "We're gonna invade this country, it's gonna be over in a week," you know, and then... You have to say that because you're a politician, rather than saying, "Well, I'm not sure if this is the right thing to do, but I'm gonna go ahead and do this."

- Yeah, I've always thought- - People don't like to hear that.

- I've always thought that that was sort of really short-selling the American public.

- I think so.

- Sometimes I'm as cynical as the rest, but sometimes I just think, "Well, what would happen if we actually tried to level with the public about whatever the issue is, it's COVID or something else?"

You, I say this as great praise, you marshal a dizzying array of Western thought from the scientific method to great thinkers about science and cosmology, and it's a tour de force in a lot of respects of the great thinkers from across humanity.

It's all the hallmarks of a liberal education.

And what I wonder is the lack of skepticism that we see sort of an indictment of our educational system today.

- It is, it's a problem, I would like to see critical thinking and skepticism taught in middle school.

I mean, it started early.

You know, I have a 10-year-old, okay, maybe he's a little young at the moment, maybe sixth grade or eighth grade, something like that, just start to teach people, kids, you know, how the world works, how do you know the Earth is round, you know?

- Yeah.

- Could you make the argument?

Most people can't, right?

How do you know that the Earth goes around the sun?

What are the evidence we have for... I mean, basic questions; there are famous studies done showing even Harvard graduates can't explain these basic things.

Another study, you know, "Do you accept Darwin's theory of evolution?"

Almost all college students go, "Yeah, yeah, I do."

"All right, explain it."

Well, they can't, they get it wrong, they go, "Well, the giraffe stretches its neck and the baby giraffes have longer necks."

No, that is not it at all, (Jim chuckles) right?

And so, you know, even like in political issues, like NAFTA, what is, you know, North American Free Trade Agreement?

"Okay, what is it, who's in it?"

"I forgot," right?

They just signal, like, "My tribe likes it," or "My tribe doesn't like it, so I'm for it, I'm against it."

Most of us do this a lot.

And in politics, that's mostly what we do; whatever my party says, I'm going with that, which is why it's so rare when somebody changes parties, almost never happens.

- Right.

So, you know, I'm thinking about, you know, the way particularly young people engage with information today, it's all metered through some social media platform, which I'm sure didn't exist when you started thinking about this stuff.

- (chuckles) No.

(chuckles) - I'm assuming it's made the challenge bigger.

- Oh, it's harder because there's so many sources now.

Yeah, like when I grew up and came of age and started writing my books, you know, I was just doing CNN and PBS and Charlie Rose, I mean just a handful of big networks and radio shows, that's it, you know, the three major news, you know, a couple newspapers, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, LA Times, Washington Post, just a handful; now there's thousands and thousands.

And I like independent journalism, I think this is good, but I also know, 'cause I follow a lot of these guys, they don't have fact-checkers, they don't have editors, and they're cranking out material because they feel they have to because of our attention economy.

This is how the system works; if you're not big and can sell ads for a lot of money, if you're one of the kind of medium-sized guys, you gotta just get a lot of eyeballs on your screen, and that takes just constantly pumping out material.

And there's no way that some lone journalist can fact-check everything, right?

So I have to be careful.

I monitor multiple sources, maybe a dozen different sources a day, including the old school ones, you know, I got the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times right there on my screen, just in case, (Jim chuckles) and I add 'em up and divide by two, right?

But I have, you know, a dozen other sources.

Okay, they're good, it's good to have an alternative voice, but, ah, you know, it takes a lot of work now.

Yeah, it's unfortunate, but that's the world we live in.

- A lot of work and a lot of critical-thinking.

You come back again and again in the book to the scientific method.

What do readers, what does the public need to know about science that maybe they didn't take from their schooling?

- Well, the basic one is your ideas need to be testable; that is, is there a way to find out if it's true or not, to run an experiment or gather some evidence or convince your colleagues?

So the whole system is based on this kind of adversarial collaboration, as it's called; that is, "I have this idea, I need you as my colleague to challenge me; not just tell me what you think I want to hear, but actually what you really believe."

Like, "I have my doubts about your theory, Shermer, here's why."

"Okay, good."

So we go to conferences together, we have phone calls, we publish in peer-reviewed journals, we write books, you know, we meet and talk about these things because you never know.

And this is how it's done in other fields as well, not just science, but, you know, in journalism, you have fact checking and editing.

And, you know, when I write a piece for, you know, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, whatever, it goes through like six different people.

- Yeah.

- And they're like, "Okay, Shermer uses this quote, let's check and see if that person actually said that."

And sometimes I get it wrong, like, "Oh, they didn't actually say that, they said it slightly differently.

I got it wrong, wow."

And so, I think it's irritating, but it's good, you know, "Hey, it's good somebody checked me," right?

- Yeah.

- And in the criminal justice system, you have adversarial lawyers.

So the job of the lawyer is not to find out what actually happened, it's to win the case for their client.

And each side tries to do that so the judge or the jury is the peer-review deciding what actually happened, what is the truth, right?

So, the reason for this is because none of us are omniscient, so we could all be fallible, there is a reality out there, there is a truth to be found, but we're fallible, so none of us could get it right all the time.

So we need each other, we need institutions, systems set up in place, to fact-check each other.

- You know, one of the things that, another theme that you come back to again and again is the persistent power of mythology, storytelling.

Why are myths so powerful for human audiences?

- Hmm.

Well, the theory by anthropologists is that we evolved to be storytelling animals long before writing; I mean, writing only comes online about 3,500 BC, so 5,500 years ago.

So it's relatively new, we couldn't even evolve the ability to write, it's a weird thing to read and write; but we could speak, we could speak for hundreds of thousands of years.

So knowledge transmission through stories is how it was done for a long time.

So we're born naturally to think "What stories I hear is valuable information, so I should accept it as true."

And usually that works, right, when your parents tell you something, yeah, it's probably good to believe your parents, they're the authorities, I'm a kid, what do I know?

You know, and so, we're designed cognitively to hear stories.

So I heard the story about, you know, so-and-so said that the Jews are doing this or, you know, that the Russians are doing that or whatever, "Well, I guess I believe it."

The problem is, is now everybody has a story, and there's billions of us, so the stories may or may not be true.

So we need some kind of method to tell "Which stories should I believe and which should I not believe?"

- And so, one of the myths that sort of persists is the story of Atlantis.

And you do a wonderful job of explaining, you know, what we actually know and what Atlantis actually was.

Would you share some of that with us now?

- Yeah, sure.

Well, I think the lost continent of Atlantis story is persistent because of this dream we have that long, long ago, you know, in a century far, far away, things were much better than they used to be, and then something bad happened in civilization or whatever, capitalism, whatever, your colonialism, whatever your bugbear is, came along and destroyed it.

But we can get back there, there's always this kind of oppression redemption, I call it; like, we can recover and start again and build a new society.

And the problem with that is that, you know, in terms of scientific truth, was there actually an Atlantis or not?

There might be.

You know, where is it?

Well, it's in the Atlantic, it's in the Mediterranean, it's in South Pacific, you know, there's a dozen different places where the continent of Atlantis is alleged to be.

But what if Plato just made it up, the source of this is the philosopher of Plato.

You know, and we do know that people sometimes write stories that aren't true, but carry a deeper truth about some kind of moral homily or warning or whatever.

I mean, is there really a middle earth in J. R. R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings"?

No, there's no middle earth, he just made that up, right?

Well, maybe it's in New Zealand, I'm told.

(both laughing) But, you know, he made it up to deliver a different kind of truth, a kind of a moral homily, right?

So I think much of the biblical stories should be taken this way.

Jonah is swallowed by a great fish, he's taken from one land to this other land where there's these people that need to hear the Word of God, he delivers the message, it changes their lives.

Whether he could literally survive in the belly of a whale or great fish is beside the point, you're missing the point.

- Yeah.

- That's just a made up part, here's the real truth behind the story, right?

Now, most religious people will go along with me on much of this, but now in truth, I'm floating a new idea, what if the resurrection of Jesus was not literally true?

What if it's a mythical truth, like these other stories?

It carries a deeper moral homily about forgiveness and redemption and starting over and being born again and creating the new Heavens on Earth, right?

I find it very ennobling, right?

It's ennobling, it feels great, right?

But a lot of Christians insist that this is one of those empirical truths, it had to literally happen.

So I'm in debates with some religious believers about this.

- You know, and you're not shy about engaging in those debates, and what is the value of sort of engaging from a skeptical perspective with somebody whose convictions are deeply held at that level of religious faith?

- Well, first I used to believe, right, when I was at Pepperdine University, it's a church of Christ school, I was studying theology, I believed it, I was a born-again Christian.

But I don't believe it for... You know, I was young, I studied science and so on, like, yeah, that one's probably not literally true, it's probably more mythical or metaphorically true, which is okay.

But then I got in to study, "Well, why do people believe anything," right?

So the study of the psychology of beliefs is my thing, that's what we do at Skeptic.

We don't just debunk bunk, although there's a lot of bunk that needs debunking, (Jim chuckles) but we're just, "Why would people believe in something that isn't literally true?"

So to me, that's the more interesting question, whether it's literally true or not is one thing, but why people would believe it's true is another interesting thing.

So I enjoy engaging with believers in particular, theists, I debate them a lot, they like me 'cause I'm a nice person, you know, and I acknowledge that they, you know, find deep truths; okay, that's fine.

You know, but if we wanna know what's literally true, well, we're gonna debate it, and that adversarial system is how you determine it, right?

- Yeah.

- So the audience out there listening to us, you know, so-and-so makes a claim that, you know, that there's a creation of the Big Bang, or Jesus was literally resurrected or whatever, and I go, "Well, here's the arguments against it," and they can hear the two sets of arguments.

So in several chapters in my book, I go, "Here's the argument from creationists or theists about why there is a God, or why the universe appears to be fine-tuned for the universe.

Here's what scientists counter with that."

So I just provide 'em both and go, "Here's what I think, but you go ahead and read it and you decide what you think is true."

- You know, we've got literally about a minute left here and I could talk to you all week about this, but I think the question that I left wanting to ask is about artificial intelligence, and sort of how this plays into the world of skepticism, everything from deep-fakes to just... Yeah, my social media is full of stories that as a historian I know are just not true, but they've been generated by AI and they've got really sort of remarkable imagery that goes with them.

And I just wonder, we go back to where we started this conversation about why the truth still matters, if the ability to tell falsehoods convincingly is so powerful now, that truth is under some assault.

- Yeah, I'm a little worried about that.

I'm told by my AI expert friends that there will be a way to embed in the videos or photographs a digital watermark that says "This is fake."

Now I haven't seen this myself, this is not my area, I hope this is true that, you know, if there's a video of Putin saying, "Launch the rockets against the United States," you know, that Trump will go, "Oh, let's see if he actually did that or not."

I hope, (chuckles) because they are very convincing, I know, it's very disturbing.

So, in the last chapter of the book, I call it "My God Gambit," like any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence or far future human or AI would be indistinguishable from God.

So it could be, and some of the AI people actually say this, you say, "Do you believe in God?

", they go, "We're working on it. "

- Oh.

(both laughing) - I was like, "Oh, no."

(chuckles) - That is a place for us to leave this conversation.

Michael Shermer- - Okay.

- The book is "Truth."

Thank you for spending some time with us.

- You're welcome.

- That is all the time we have this week.

But if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find the show on social media or visit salve.edu/pellcenter, where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

And I wanna thank you for spending some time with me this week.

I'm Jim Ludes asking you to join me again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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