I just witnessed an event so mysterious that it shook my skepticism.

... In a free society, skeptics are the watchdogs against irrationalism - the consumer advocates of ideas. Debunking is not simply the divestment of bunk; its utility is in offering a better alternative, along with a lesson on how thinking goes wrong.

In principle, skeptics are neither closed-minded nor cynical. We are curious but cautious.

But the power of science lies in open publication, which, with the rise of the Internet, is no longer constrained by the price of paper.

The human capacity for self-delusion is boundless, and the effects of belief are overpowering.

What can be more soul shaking than peering through a 100-inch telescope at a distant galaxy, holding a 100-million-year-old fossil or a 500,000-year-old stone tool in one's hand, standing before the immense chasm of space and time that is the Grand Canyon, or listening to a scientist who gazed upon the face of the universe's creation and did not blink?

I’m a skeptic not because I do not want to believe, but because I want to know. How can we tell the difference between what we would like to be true and what is actually true? The answer is science.