The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

by Carl Sagan

In every case the imagined dire consequences of the truth being generally known are exaggerated. And again, we are not wise enough to know which lies, or even which shadings of the facts, can competently serve some higher social purpose—especially in the long run.

However, in the course of looking deeply within ourselves, we may challenge notions that give comfort before the terrors of the world.

supporters of superstition and pseudoscience are human beings with real feelings, who, like the skeptics, are trying to figure out how the world works and what our role in it might be. Their motives are in many cases consonant with science. If their culture has not given them all the tools they need to pursue this great quest, let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us comes fully equipped.

[T]he skeptic might take a clue from cultural anthropology and develop a more sophisticated skepticism by understanding alternative belief systems from the perspective of the people who hold them and by situating these beliefs in their historical, social, and cultural contexts.

at the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes—an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive, and the most ruthlessly skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new.

because the vast majority of ideas are simply wrong,

Being freed from superstition isn’t enough for science to grow. One must also have the idea of interrogating Nature, of doing experiments.

A proclivity for science is embedded deeply within us, in all times, places and cultures.

When, through indifference, inattention, incompetence, or fear of skepticism, we discourage children from science, we are disenfranchising them, taking from them the tools needed to manage their future.

I can’t for the life of me understand. What’s wrong with admitting that we don’t know something? Is our self-esteem so fragile?

But every question is a cry to understand the world.* There is no such thing as a dumb question.

Never forget that native intelligence is widely distributed in our species. Indeed, it is the secret of our success.

entire planet and from all of our history. They allow people long dead to talk inside our heads. Books can accompany us everywhere.

Maxwell’s greatest contribution was his discovery that electricity and magnetism, of all things, join together to become light. The now conventional understanding of the electromagnetic spectrum—running in wavelength from gamma rays to X rays to ultraviolet light to visible light to infrared light to radio waves—is due to Maxwell. So is radio, television, and radar.

This partly esthetic judgment by a nerdish physicist, entirely unknown except to a few other academic scientists, has done more to shape our civilization than any ten recent presidents and prime ministers.

(1) there are no electrical charges in a vacuum;

(2) there are no magnetic monopoles in a vacuum;

(3) a changing magnetic field generates an electrical field; ...

“To few men in the world has such an experience been vouchsafed.”

Nothing is touching anything.

Basic research is where scientists are free to pursue their curiosity and interrogate Nature, not with any short-term practical end in view, but to seek knowledge for its own sake.

that small numbers of people will have so much control over news stories, history books, and deeply affecting images as to work major changes in collective attitudes.

The unprecedented powers that science now makes available must be accompanied by unprecedented levels of ethical focus and concern by the scientific community—

the cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas.

“If society

lets any considerable number of its members grow up as mere children, incapable of being acted on by rational consideration of distant motives, society has itself to blame.”

In the demon-haunted world that we inhabit by virtue of being human, this may be all that stands between us and the enveloping darkness.