Michael Shermer's framing is that faith, pseudoscience, and superstition aren't bugs — they're byproducts of how the mind evolved. The brain is a pattern detector. It finds regularities, builds models from them, and uses those models to act in ways that help us survive. That machinery gives us two kinds of success: correctly rejecting a falsehood, and correctly believing a truth.
But the same machinery guarantees two kinds of failure, because beliefs have to form even when the data is ambiguous or incomplete. So sometimes we believe a falsehood, and sometimes we reject a truth. You can see the failures everywhere once you look: the "face" on Mars, the Virgin Mary in a grilled cheese, the TV psychic claiming to reach your dead relatives, facilitated communication, recovered "memories" of abuse that never happened. Many of these failures are harmless, which is exactly why they stick around — certainty is soothing, even when it's wrong.
The catch is that no single human can load all of reality into their head and sort truth from error alone. We're sharply limited individually. What's changed is that we can now stand on the shoulders of giants almost for free, and — more importantly — weed out bad ideas quickly and collectively. That's the real engine: not any one person being right, but a culture that prunes wrong ideas faster than it used to.
Science is founded on the conviction that experience, effort, and reason are valid; magic on the belief that hope cannot fail nor desire deceive. — Bronisław Malinowski