PREMIER EVENT: MICHAEL SHERMER


Credit: Jeremy Danger

 

 

 

PREMIER EVENT: Michael Shermer

Monday, February 2, 7:30 p.m.

The Moral ARC: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity Toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom


In The Moral Arc, Shermer shows us how science and reason move humanity toward a more just world. This provocative and compelling book has been praised by Jared Diamond, Steven Pinker, and Lawrence M. Krauss as an important work of skepticism, science, and reason, both thrilling and fascinating, which will forever change your view of the history and destiny of humankind. This ambitious and thoroughly researched tome is a remarkably accessible work of scholarship that explains that the fabric of modern morality derives not from religion, but in large part from secular notions of rational empiricism.

The Age of Reason and the Enlightenment led theorists to apply scientific reasoning to the non-scientific disciplines of politics, economics, and moral philosophy. Instead of relying on the woodcuts of dissected bodies in old medical texts, physicians opened bodies themselves to see what was there; instead of divining truth through the authority of an ancient holy book or philosophical treatise, people began to explore the book of nature for themselves through travel and exploration; instead of the supernatural belief in the divine right of kings, people employed a natural belief in the right of democracy.

Learn how abstract reasoning, rationality, empiricism, skepticism--scientific ways of thinking--have profoundly changed the way we perceive morality and, indeed, move us ever closer to a more just world.

Dr. Michael Shermer is the Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine, a monthly columnist for Scientific American, a regular contributor to Time.com, and Presidential Fellow at Chapman University. He is also the author of The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies; The Mind of the Market, on evolutionary economics, and Why Darwin Matters: Evolution and the Case Against Intelligent Design. He has been a college professor since 1979. 

Event date: 
Monday, February 2, 2015 - 7:30pm
Event address: 
1010 El Camino Real
94025-4349 Menlo Park
us