How and Why We Use, Downplay, or Ignore Evidence
Is free will a known unknowable?
Posted January 13, 2026 | Reviewed by Kaja Perina
This is a review of Truth: What It Is, How To Find It & Why It Still Matters . by Michael Shermer, forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press.
Amidst claims of “ fake news ,” “alternative facts,” misinformation and disinformation, cognitive psychologist Keith Stanovich has identified a “myside bias ” in “every stage of information processing,” including the search for, evaluation and circulation of evidence, and our memory of outcomes.
In Truth , Michael Shermer (the publisher of Skeptic magazine, podcaster, and author of more than a dozen books, including Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational ) makes a compelling case that the scientific method is the best, albeit imperfect, source we have for the critical thinking that is essential to a more just democracy.
Revisiting topics and themes he has addressed throughout his long career , ranging from Japan’s “rape” of Nanking, China, the Holocaust, and UFOs, to the Resurrection of Jesus, the existence of God, and free will , Shermer provides a timely, informative, and accessible primer on testable hypotheses and fallacies of reasoning.
Borrowing from evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker, Schermer distinguishes between a “reality mindset,” and a “mythology mindset,” set in the “remote past, unknowable future, faraway places, remote corridors of power, the microscopic, the cosmic, the counterfactual, the metaphysical.” In the latter realm, facts are often contested and/or impossible to establish. And beliefs serve as tickets of admission to a group, bound together by a moral and/or a political purpose.
Anyone who agrees that objective truth or the closest approximation to it exists, Shermer writes, should seek it out, and brush aside the cognitive biases that impede their reasoning capacities by curbing free speech and open dialogue. Those biases include, for example, echo chamber effects exacerbated by social media ; use of the fallacy of excluded exceptions to generalize from a small sample to the behavior of an entire ethnic, racial or national group; and a predilection for finding the hand of God in eerie coincidences or death premonition dreams .
Citing an avalanche of evidence and contrasting it with “anomaly hunting” and cherry-picking of data, Shermer makes short shrift, as well he should, of doubts expressed about the mass rape, torture and murder of tens or hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians by Japanese soldiers in the 1930s and those who deny that the Nazis exterminated millions of Jews.
By contrast, Shermer also indicates that some “hot button” issues cannot be resolved by a scientific determination of “the truth.” In cases involving abortion, he indicates that neither embryology, medicine, psychology or economics can provide the basis for an evidence-based consensus on whether the rights of the mother or the baby should be primary.
While acknowledging that “the law of large numbers” (the existence of hundreds of billions of galaxies, stars, and planets) suggests that aliens probably are “out there,” Shermer concludes, after an extended assessment of claims about UFOS and visits by extraterrestrials, that “the desire to believe is often stronger than the desire for truth.”
Shermer treats free will and the existence of God as “known unknowables.” He disposes of “first mover” and “intelligent design” arguments made by St. Thomas Aquinas and others as “circular” and the product of “wordplay.” All “scientistic theologies,” he asserts, “are compelling only to those who are ready to believe.”
Surprisingly, perhaps, Shermer expresses a will to believe in free will. Although he writes that “science would seem to support the deterministic position” that we are the cumulative – and still accumulating – product of our biology and environment, Shermer points out that “we feel free” and asserts that each of us can exercise control of our present self to “bring about the outcomes” desired for our future self. And that through “embodied cognition ,” we can set and implement goals to meditate, delay gratification, save for the future, and monitor progress. “The agent of action is you,” he maintains. “Act accordingly.”
That said, Shermer does not, in my judgment, address the fundamental dilemmas inherent in free will. Clearly, we are physically able to act on what we choose by, say, lifting our left arm. But what evidence demonstrates that our choices are not predetermined by biological and environmental inputs?
In the end, Shermer’s claim that objective truth is real, important, and often attainable is vitally important these days. He seems a bit too sanguine, however, about the progress brought to us in no small measure via science, the scientific method, and the use of reason. Does he really believe that poverty will disappear by 2035? And that given a free and fair choice, people have and always will choose democracy over autocracy?
If so, even though Shermer would almost certainly think it pointless, we should say, “from his lips to God’s ears.”
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Glenn C. Altschuler, Ph.D. , is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Emeritus Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.